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This book is the story of how in six different locations indentured workers from India were able to design Hindu communities for themselves, and how those communities continue to thrive in those postcolonial societies. In the colonial era, the recruitment of workers had many of the features of the earlier slave trade. As the late nineteenth century wore on, however, the colonial regimes in these places lost interest in governing and the workers were largely left to design a culture for themselves. In each location, the Hindu majority among the Indians developed a style of worship that linked their memories of home with the opportunities available in their new social environment. This was the first large‐scale diaspora of Hindus from the Indian subcontinent, and because they did not have religious specialists with them, they had to create a sense of community for themselves and then determine the ritual forms they would use to sustain that community. Because of the energy needed to initiate and sustain this kind of religious community, the Hindus in these locations are unusually proud of their religious traditions and have taught these new traditions to succeeding generations as authoritative traditions. When the author and his family lived among them in 1995–96 and in 2000, the Hindus in these societies eagerly assisted with the field work and showed great pride in what they considered their new homeland.

This book provides an overview of Bengali goddess worship or Shakti. The book identifies three major forms of goddess worship, and examines each through its myths, folklore, songs, rituals, sacred texts, and practitioners. Drawing on years of fieldwork and extensive research, the book paints a portrait of this religious tradition.

A thematically organized, annotated anthology of translations from the Sanskrit, Tamil, and Maharashtri Prakrit devotional poetry of the South Indian Srivaisnava philosopher, sectarian preceptor (Acarya), and saint‐poet Venkatanatha or Venkatesha, also known as Vedantadesika (c. 1268‐1369). The poems collected in this volume, composed out of devotion (bhakti) for one particular Hindu god, Vishnu Devanayaka, the “Lord of Gods” at Tiruvahindrapuram, form a microcosm of the saint‐poet's work. They encompass major themes of Vedantadesika's devotional poetics, from the play of divine absence and presence in the world of religious emotions; the “telescoping” of time past and future in the eternal “present” of the poem; love, human vulnerability and the impassible perfected body of god; to the devotional experience of a “beauty that saves” and to the paradoxical coexistence of asymmetry and intimacy of lover and beloved at the heart of the divine‐human encounter. Moreover, these poems form more than a thematic microcosm, but also embrace all three of the poet's working languages—forming a linguistic one as well. Each translated poem forms a chapter in itself, has its own individual short afterword, along with detailed linguistic and thematic notes and commentary. The volume concludes, for comparative reasons, with a translation of Tirumankaiyalvar's luminous cycle of verses for Devanayaka from the Periyatirumoli. As much an argument as an anthology, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian studies, comparative religion, and Indian literatures.

This book is a historical study of the largest pilgrimage festival in the world, the Kumbh Mela. Focusing on the festival in a key northern Indian political town, Allahabad, the book traces the historical changes in the nature of the mela from the 1700s onward, with particular reference to the influence of British colonialism and the growth of Indian nationalism in the region. It charts the early nationalists' active construction of religion as a sphere of sovereignty, and the attendant changes to religious and social practices at the mela. Further, the book traces the links between the religious community that the mela fostered and the spread of nationalism in the early twentieth century. It also follows and analyzes debates about the role of religion – so often described as modernity's other – in the creation of notions of citizenship and civil society in the late colonial and postcolonial Indian nation.

With the great processions of the gods, images splendidly adorned in jewelry and flower garlands, who move out of the temples and through the streets of the community, Hindu temple festivals have been the most dramatic manifestations of public religiosity in southern India over many centuries up to the present day. They are occasions when ritual, dance, music, and the ephemeral arts of adornment all work to focus the collective devotion of the community onto Siva and the other deities. The Mahotsavavidhi of the eminent Saiva preceptor Aghorasiva, completed in 1157 c.e., provides detailed step‐by‐step guidance for a Hindu priest conducting such a nine‐day festival in medieval India. This annotated rendering of Aghorasiva's twelfth‐century work is the first extensive translation of a medieval work on Hindu temple festivals into a European language. It opens a window into the early development and underlying religious meanings of the Hindu temple festival. A priest himself, Aghorasiva wrote for other priests, and his work is a technical manual. In this translation, detailed notes explain the underlying practices that Aghorasiva takes for granted. A lengthy introduction situates the text in its historical setting of the Chola period, and addresses key topics of the text.

As a result of the discovery of similarities between Sanskrit and the classical languages of Europe, scholars hypothesized the existence of an early “proto-Indo-European” people who spoke the language from which the other Indo-European speakers evolved. The solution to this Indo-European homeland problem has been one of the most consuming intellectual projects of the last two centuries. At first it was assumed that India was the original home of all the Indo-Europeans. Soon, however, Western scholars were contending that the Vedic culture of ancient India must have been the by-product of an invasion or migration of “Indo-Aryans” from outside the subcontinent. Over the years, Indian scholars have raised many arguments against this European reconstruction of their nation’s history, yet Western scholars have generally been unaware or dismissive of these voices from India itself. Edwin Bryant offers a comprehensive examination of this ongoing debate, presenting all of the relevant philological, archaeological, linguistic, and historiographical data, and showing how they have been interpreted both to support the theory of Aryan migrations and to contest it. Bringing to the fore those hitherto marginalized voices that argue against the external origin of the Indo-Aryans, he shows how Indian scholars have questioned the very logic, assumptions, and methods upon which the theory is based and have used the same data to arrive at very different conclusions. By exposing the whole endeavor to criticism from scholars who do not share the same intellectual history as their European peers, Bryant’s work newly complicates the Indo-European homeland quest. At the same time it recognizes the extent to which both sides of the debate have been driven by political, racial, religious, and nationalistic agendas.

While the “standard” version of the Rāmāyana is a 14th-century Sanskrit text by Valmiki, the diversity and adaptability of this narrative are extraordinary. Many regions and languages have their own versions of the tale that they consider authoritative. In addition, the basic tale of the Rāmāyana is continually adapted to new contexts, forms, and media. It is, in one form or another, read, recited, sung, danced, and acted. Yet the vast majority of scholarship on the Rāmāyana has dealt exclusively with the textual editions, and mainly with Valmiki's Sanskrit version. This book examines the epic in its myriad contexts throughout South and Southeast Asia. It explores the role the narrative plays in societies as varied as India, Indonesia, Thailand, and Cambodia. The essays also expand the understanding of the “text” to include non-verbal renditions of the epic, with particular attention to the complex ways such retellings change the way the narrative deals with gender.

This book illuminates the present success of traditional doctors by examining the ways that siddha medical practitioners in Tamil south India have won the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient’s physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community. This work illuminates the lives, vocations, and aspirations of these traditional doctors, documenting the challenges they face in the modern world. It demonstrates that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities; conceptions of history, secrecy, and loss; and utopian promise. Drawing from ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, this book presents a study of a traditional system of knowledge that serves the medical needs of millions of Indians. It is more than a local study, however, analyzing the political and religious dimensions of medical discourse and authority in our modern world.

The role of women and ideas of gender are fundamental components of all religious traditions. Tantric traditions in particular offer a unique perspective on women's participation in religious traditions since they frequently incorporate worship of Goddesses, along with ordinary women as participants in religious rites. This book examines the representations of women within Tantra using a case study of a selection of Hindu Tantric texts from the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries in Northeast India. Arguing for a nuanced perspective of women in Tantra, this book presents evidence for women's enhanced status in some traditions of Tantra, with women in the roles of guru and initiate. This book also addresses images of women within the Tantric rite of sexual union, arguing for multiple versions and motivations for this notorious practice. Especially this book addresses issues of discourse and speech, women's speech and speech about women, suggesting the imbrication of women's bodies within ideas of women's speech. This book examines a number of Tantric texts that have so far not been translated into Western languages. One appendix delineates the historical context for fifteenth through eighteenth century in the Northeast region of India and also surveys images of women found across a wide range of Tantric texts. The second appendix gives a chapter by chapter synopsis of the primary text used for this study, the Bṭhannīla Tantra, “The Great Blue Tantra,” a long and so far untranslated Tantric text.