Shared Devotion, Shared Food
Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India
Jon Keune
Reviews and Awards
"Through a detailed study of commensality practices, Keune offers a brilliant historical analysis of the relationship between bhakti traditions and the reality of caste hierarchies." -- Anantanand Rambachan, Professor of Religion, Saint Olaf College
"This gem of a book explores the relationship between inclusive religious imagery and the hard realities of social hierarchy. In a tour de force of textual analysis, Jon Keune critically and meticulously compares multiple versions of stories about Eknath, a 16th-century bhakti saint, in plays and movies as well as in traditional texts. Using the narratives as a prism, Keune examines an astonishingly broad spectrum of topics: from the social significance of sharing food to the modern intellectual history of Eknath's region, trends in scholarship on bhakti, and even the very notion of equality itself." -- Anne Feldhaus, Professor Emerita, Arizona State University
"Keune brings insight and humor to this study of how sharing food across religious spaces in sacred biographies and devotional texts reveals important considerations about social equality and caste, which he evocatively calls 'the bhakti-caste question'. Spanning archives, literature, manuscripts, visual culture, and ethnography, Keune delves deeply into the possible ethics of devotionalism in India over several centuries, and this book should be of interest to anyone who cares about the politics of power at the intersections of religion, food, and society." -- Christian Lee Novetzke, author of The Quotidian Revolution and Professor of South Asia Studies, Comparative Religion, and Global Studies, University of Washington