Brill's Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous People of South Asia (original) (raw)

Bill's Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous Peoples of South Asia: General Introduction

General Intoduction to Brill's Encyclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous Peoples of South Asias e , 2021

In this intriduction I present an overall picture of the situation of the indigenous peoples of South Asia paying heed to the important regional variations in religions, cultures and the politics of indigeneity. Special attention is paid to the formation of indigenous consciousness and its reations to the dominant. Religion often serves to regenerate resistnce to assimilation and exploitation.

Recent Textbooks on Religions in South Asia

In the span of seven years, Routledge has provided us with four introductory guides to the study of South Asian religions with very similar sounding titles, all addressing an undergraduate audience.

Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers

Routledge, 2019

(PDF contains a preview of the book from Routledge's website, including the TOC and Introduction.) This book explores the key motif of the religious other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent unmasks processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The contributing authors reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta’s or devotee’s other. Considering the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact—as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic—the book critically engages with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and traces when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asia’s devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religions and Asian Religions.