II – Existing Scholarship on Bhakti: Casting Bhakti as Religion
Attempts to make sense of bhakti tend to impose Western categories of interpretation. Often bhakti is collapsed with religion1 or mysticism. This mis-identification has resulted in a distorted understanding of the Bhakti tradition. It is in order, at this point, to look at the scholarship more closely. Bhakti as Protestant Religion? : A Sociological Reading We owe the casting of Bhakti as religion or as part of religion of ‘Hinduism,’ to the colonial period.…