Who Are the Enemies of the Bhaktas? Testimony About "Saktas" and "Others" from Kabir, The Ramanandis, Tulsidas, And Hariram Vyas (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION It is becoming clear that religious identities that have hardened in modern times cannot be projected back unproblematically onto the past. Current perceptions of religious demarcations, especially the dichotomy between Hinduism and Islam, do not hold good for the premodern or even early modern period (Alam 1989; Gilmartin and Lawrence 2000; Mittal 2003; Khan 2004). Rather than postulating a binary, newer scholarly approaches conceive of a continuum of religious expression with porous religious boundaries. At a popular level it seems that formal adherence to a great religion was less important than what inspired and what worked.