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Podcast: New Books in Indian Religions
Episode: Gil Ben-Herut and Jon Keune, "Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers" (Routledge, 2019)
Description: Gil Ben-Herut and Jon Keune's book Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers (Routledge, 2019) explores the key motif of the religious Other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent. The primary aim of this book is to reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta's or devotee's Other and unmask processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book considers the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact--as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic--while critically engaging with extant sc...