This dissertation explores the interrelated processes of religious community formation, changing state regulation, and literary production in early modern India by focusing on two figures of the Caitanya lineage: Mahipati Taharabadkar (1715-1790) and his predecessor Uddhav Cidghan (d. 1690). While the community of Vitthal devotees (Varkaris) came to hold a prominent and strategic place in devotional histories of the Deccan, I demonstrate that several 17th-century facets of ascetic practice and sectarian identification that Mahipati inherited were obscured in his celebrated 18th-century hagiographies, especially the Bhaktavijaya (1762, Victory of Devotees). First, I highlight the lineage’s Mahanubhav connections through a study of Marathi and Persian documentary archives. The Mahanubhavs had a crucial and fraught social presence till they were deemed criminal in 1782-83 (Chapter I). I then focus on Uddhav’s Bhaktamālikā (A Garland of Devotees) to explore the lineage’s Dasanami milieu (Chapter II-III). Uddhav tethers the lineage to a trans-regional, multi-linguistic, and supra-sectarian community that Mahipati later expands on and transvalues. Diffused forms of state support that Mahipati’s family benefited from, and his access to scribal, courtly, performative, and Ramdasi networks, I demonstrate, enabled him to achieve a large-scale reconfiguration of the lineage’s social history (Chapter IV). In doing so, he excludes the Mahanubhavs and introduces a paradigm that becomes definitive for the Varkaris: the devotee and his or her family are presented as the loci for experiencing devotion.