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Comprehending Indian Devotional Religion: Cow Love, Cowboys, and the Religiohistorical Imagination

Unfortunately for those of us in the humanities who study religion, the aspect of our subject that usually seems most important to us can also be the most incomprehensible. The irrational core of human thought and behavior by which we are fascinated-deep and alluringalso contains the seeds of a monster, which can emerge scarred and entangled in the snares of academic discourse. Coming to the academy in search of critical understanding, we look about for ways to describe, interpret, and explain. Like novice cowboys riding the academic range, we try to herd the elusive beasts we see into sociological, psychological, or anthropological corrals. But the lassos of these disciplines too often miss their mark, or are too heavy for us, at least, to throw, or else we finally become alarmed at what those limited confines are doing to our animal's sublime personality: for to most of us who choose to study religion, the mythic beast we recognize in others' confrontations with the ultimately unfathomable is much less a monster than a sacred cow. To contain our precious animals we may then try to build our own corrals, airy and dignified. But since dimensions for the sacred elude reasonable consensus, the firm structures that do get erected may be