Browsing by Author "Prasad, Leela"

In this project, I reassess fundamental assumptions about tradition, classicality, and authenticity by exploring how artists of various Indian dance forms construct and engage these terms in the retelling of the history of their dance styles. To explore the nuances in the negotiation of terminology in the creation of oral histories, as well as to showcase the dancing itself, I have chosen to look at both dance and narrative in multiple formats of video and text. This paper serves both to survey the ethnographic process of making the film as well as to further explore the theoretical possibilities that were evoked in the many narrations in the film. I will eventually suggest that the formulations of classicality and authenticity in relation to text and temple point to the importance of concept of public memory in the creation of a dynamically constituted tradition rooted in foundational texts such as the Nāṭya Śāstra and living traditions connected to dance lineages and teachers.

Within the academic study of Hinduism, there is a tendency to misrepresent Indian religion by portraying it as entirely Advaita Vedānta, the monistic ideology commonly associated with Śaṅkara. By looking at reasons for Advaita Vedānta’s popularity as well as the history of Vaiṣṇavism, this paper will challenge claims that Hinduism is best represented by Advaita Vedānta. Ultimately, what I find is that Hinduism is better used as a broad category for the varieties of diverse Indian religious expression, rather than as a single unified ideology that defines itself in terms of Advaita Vedānta.

This dissertation explores the phenomenon of “religious doubt”, which has emerged in recent years as a pervasive concern in American Muslim communities and discourses. The dissertation takes a two-pronged approach: an analysis of American Muslim public discourses, and an ethnographic analysis of Muslims in Boston. Firstly, I analyze how the growing sense of a “crisis of faith”—and a framing of people’s ambivalence, uncertainty, and doctrinal dissent as a problem of “doubt”—can be traced to the convergence of American secularity and Muslim discursive constructions of “faith”. Secondly, through the narratives, reflections, and exchanges of my ethnographic interlocutors, I examine how faith and doubt are experienced and navigated by individuals. Through my attention to lived experience, I argue that there is a far more ambiguous relationship than has been generally assumed between two distinct senses or dimensions of “faith”: on the one hand, people’s mental conviction in authoritative doctrines; and on the other hand, a more general sense of religious commitment, as a moral-devotional relationship and aspiration. Standard assumptions about religion typically operate with a deeply intellectualist and reified model of religion that presumes a thoroughly heteronomous subject. Such models assume a linear movement in religious subjects, from mental conviction in the foundational claims of a religion, to assent in the myriad doctrines and precepts presumably demanded by the religion, to a commitment to live faithfully in accordance with these doctrines and precepts. What my ethnography ultimately highlights, however, is that people live out their sense of faith in a far more complex and messy fashion, such that their moral and devotional commitments to Islam do not so neatly line up with doctrinal affirmation in the way these linear models of religion assume. Finally, I argue that what is central to people’s navigation of faith is personal experience and experiential knowledge, which serve as the inescapable prism through which conviction, judgment, knowledge, and commitment are shaped.

The following dissertation addresses the origins, development, and contemporary living religious world of the Hindu deity Bhairava. An ambivalent deity associated both with antinomian and orthoprax Hinduism, his example is unusual, even unique. Particularly important in the sacred Hindu city of Vārāṇasī, Uttar Pradesh, India, he fulfills a range of roles and appears in a spectrum of forms that is difficult to reconcile or analyze. This dissertation looks at who Bhairava is and where he comes from; how he functions both centrally and at peripheries; and how his ongoing, polythetic body of living religious practice can be understood as constructively potent and relevant.

By addressing Purāṇic textual materials, contemporary iconography, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Vārāṇasī, this dissertation presents a vibrant image of Bhairava, his identity, his interpretation, and his roles. The result of this investigation is a view of Bhairava as a specialized figure, connected to and maintaining tension between disparate Hindu constructs. It is this ability to eke out a position in a middle, while remaining present at and relevant to conceptual and physical peripheries, that makes Bhairava so compelling, and so important.

This dissertation studies religion, sociality, and gender in contemporary India by exploring devotional intimacies and everyday life in the shadows of the regional pilgrimage temple of Rani Bhatiyani, a Hindu goddess, in rural Rajasthan. Informed by scholarship on lived religion, it examines aspects of rural life that have hitherto been unrecognized as important to religious sphere within Hindu studies. Through ethnographic research, this study brings into attention issues of self-decoration, gossip, and walking practices into attention. And in doing so, it moves away from the heavy focus Hindu studies has placed on religious institutions, narrative and worship practices, and rituals in understanding goddess veneration in particular and Hinduism in general.

This dissertation examines the construction of gendered legal subjects in the influential legal works of the eleventh century Ḥanafī jurist, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sarakhsī (d. 483 A.H./1090 C.E.). In particular, I explore how gendered subjects are imagined in legal matters pertaining to sexual desire. Through a close reading of several legal cases, I argue that gendered subjects in his legal work al-Mabsūṭ are constructed through an ontological framework that conceptualizes men as active and desiring and women as passive and desirable. This binary construal of gendered nature serves as a hermeneutical given in al-Sarakhsī’s legal argumentation and is produced through a phallocentric epistemology. Al-Sarakhsī’s discussions of desire and sexuality are mediated through the experience of the male body. While the dissertation endeavors to show the centrality of the active/passive binary in al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, it also highlights the dissonances and fissures in the text’s construction of gendered subjects of desire. By tracing the intricacies of al-Sarakhsī’s legal reasoning, I note moments in which the text makes contradictory claims about gender and desire, as well as moments in which al-Sarakhsī must contend with realities that seemingly run up against his ontological framework. These moments in the text draw our attention to al-Sarakhsī’s active attempt at maintaining the coherence of the gendered ontology. I thus argue that the gendered ontology in al-Sarakhsī’s text is a legal fiction that both reflects his assumptions about gendered nature but is also constructed to rationalize legal precedence.

“Mountain at a Center of the World” examines the pilgrimage site of Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, in Sri Lanka, explaining its worldwide significance across multiple religious traditions over the past millennium. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as many historical sources, including original translations of Sinhala and Tamil texts, I present a history of the Peak that argues its multi-religious fame is due to its physical landscape—including prominent relief, visibility from sea, verdant woods, watershed, and wildlife. As these natural elements recur in past and present storytelling about the Peak, I suggest that the mountain helped structure human history by making its own myth.

Using a methodology that refashions geological theories of stratigraphy and crystallization for reading sources in the humanities, the Peak’s polytemporal multi-religious accounts are presented in a layered comparative perspective. The natural environment is the common denominator for tracking similarities and divergences across traditions, showing the Peak translated into Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian stories, with rhetorical ends ranging from political rule to spiritual attainment. As both commonalities and conflict exist in this landed history, I propose that religious pluralism at the Peak is best understood like the mountain’s ecology, describing environments that are cooperative, if not always harmonious. In turn, pilgrimage practices and ecological concerns meet in conservation projects at the Peak, where religious messages may be productively used for environmental ends if they recognize full pluralities—including all multi-religious actors sharing the pilgrimage, as well as other assemblages of living and nonliving forces shaping the planet

Digital media prevail, determine, and shape contemporary lives and experiences, serving as an all-encompassing cultural system. Shaping modes of production and reception, digital media’s publics are networked to the media’s content and to each other in unique ways. Contemporary religions writ large, and Hinduism in specific, cannot escape the dominant digital culture and must negotiate their participation in it. Hindu devotion utilizes and permeates digital networks in various forms, and the number of websites and mobile applications offering Hindu content and services is constantly increasing. This study tells the story of a growing population of Hindu devotees who live and work as part of global digital and cultural networks, wishing to adjust their religious praxis to their larger lifestyle by incorporating digital technologies and networks into their devotion. Through the case studies discussed here, devotees can be in the presence of their chosen deity, visit temples digitally, order devotional items to be delivered globally, perform domestic rituals with priests they book online, and be in an intimate relationship with their guru. Vedic Vaani, Where’s My Pandit, and iBhakti are Hindu startups led by young entrepreneurs who wish to facilitate Hindu devotion for a networked public, of which they are part. Shree Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai and Sri Nage Sai Temple in Coimbatore showcase Hindu temples’ utilization of digitally networked media through two very different journeys. Lastly, Sadhguru and his Isha Foundation master various digital platforms, forming and maintaining an intimate guru-disciple relationship in digital means.

Focusing on the emerging landscape of digital Hinduism, the aim of this project is to explore how devotion is dispersed, re-situated, reinterpreted, and made public via digitally networked media, and to unveil the intricate web of disparate-but-interrelated actors, which promote the use and assimilation of digital media to Hindu devotion. In order to apprehend the various apparatuses, histories, and cultures that are entangled in this process, this project draws together interdisciplinary theoretical tools and online and offline ethnographic experiences. Tracing digital Hindu networks, and considering Hinduism in itself as a network of networks, this project highlights the ways in which digital Hinduism is integrated into a Hindu Wide Web, which connects Hindu authorities, publics, commercial entities, new technologies, and the divine. Reflecting on the specificities of the digital cultural system in which we operate, this study examines how core notions of Hindu devotion shift with and through digital media, suggesting that digital networks do not stand in the way of devotion. There is no attempt to replace traditional devotional practice, but, nonetheless, contemporary technoculture generates new ways to fulfill Hindu devotion, shifting the core notions on which it is based. In that, this study emphasizes the need to rethink—in the digital age—fundamental ideas such as intimacy, agency, presence, authority, and authenticity as critical to understanding our contemporary networked mode of being in the world.

While there has been much speculation among sociologists on what the rise of religious disaffiliation means in the long-term for American religiosity, and if it can be considered a valid measure of broader secularization, the issue of if and how explicitly atheist communities are normalizing irreligion in the United States has received little attention. Adopting an inductive approach and drawing on one year of exploratory ethnographic research within one atheist community in North Carolina's Triangle Region, including extensive participant-observation as well as nineteen in-depth interviews, I examine in what ways individuals within this community have experienced and interpreted stigma because of their atheistic views, how they have conceptualized and constructed their atheist identity, and how both of these things influence their motivations for seeking and affiliating with atheist organizations and communities. On all these measures I found great diversity among my interlocutors along with a popular desire to shift the focus of atheist organizations, within their own community and in the public sphere, in a positive and value-affirming direction. I consider how these findings might reflect broader trends in how atheism is conceived of and enacted in the contemporary United States and where organized atheism might be heading in the years to come.

The use of codified sacred utterances, formulas or hymns called “mantras” is widespread in India. By and large, scholarship over the last few decades studies and explains mantras by resorting to Indian sources from over a millennium ago, and by applying such frameworks especially related to language as speech-act theory, semiotics, structuralism, etc. This research aims to understand mantra, and the visionary experience of mantra, from the perspectives of practitioners engaged in “mantra-sadhana (personal mantra practice).”

The main fieldwork for this project was conducted at three communities established around “gurus (spiritual teachers)” regarded by their followers as seers, i.e., authoritative sources with visionary experience, especially of deities. The Goddess, in the forms of Kali and Lalita Tripurasundari, is the primary deity at all three locations, and these practitioners may be called tantric or Hindu. Vedic sources (practitioners and texts) have also informed this research as they are a part of the history and context of the informants. Adopting an immersive anthropology and becoming a co-practitioner helped erase boundaries to get under the skin of mantra-practice. Fieldwork shows how the experience of mantras unravels around phenomena, seers, deities, intentionality and results. Practitioners find themselves seers mediating new mantras and practices, shaping tradition. Thus, practitioners are the primary sources of this research.

This dissertation is structured in three phases: preparation (Chapters One and Two), fieldwork (Chapters Three, Four and Five) and conclusions (Chapter Six). Chapter One discusses the groundwork including a literature review and methodological plan— a step as crucial as the research itself. Chapter Two reviews two seers in recent times who have become role-models for contemporary mantra practitioners in Andhra-Telangana. Ethnographic chapters Three, Four and Five delve into the visionary experience and poetics of mantra-practice at three locations. Chapter Six analyses the fieldwork findings across all three locations to arrive at a number of conclusions.

Chapter Three takes place in Devipuram, Anakapalle, where a temple in the shape of a three-dimensional “Sriyantra (aniconic Goddess form)” was established by the seer AmritanandaNatha Sarasvati. Chapter Four connects with the community surrounding the seer Swami Siddheswarananda Bharati whose primary location is the Svayam Siddha Kali Pitham in Guntur where the (image of the) deity manifested in front of a group of people. Chapter Five enters the experience of mantras at Nachiketa Tapovan ashram near Kodgal with Paramahamsa Swami Sivananda Puri and her guru, Swami Nachiketananda.

Across these three locations, which I find akin to “mandalas (groups, circles of influence, chapters),” practitioners describe their experiences including visions of deities and mantras, and how mantras transformed them and brought desired and unexpected results. More significantly, practitioners share their processes of practice, doubts, interpretations and insights into the nature of mantras and deities. Practitioners who begin “mantra-sadhana (mantra-practice)” motivated by some goal are encouraged by phenomena and results, but they develop attachment to deities, and continue absorbed in sadhana. Practitioners care to discriminate between what is imagined and what actually occurred, but they also consider imagination crucial to progress. Deities are sound-forms and powerful other-worldly friends existing both outside and within the practitioner’s (not only material) body. We learn about mantras received from deities, seen and heard mantras, hidden mantras, lost mantras, dormant mantras, mantras given silently, mantras done unconsciously, and even the “no”-mantra.

Chapter 6, Understanding Mantras Again is an exploration of the fundamental themes of this research and a conceptual analysis of the fieldwork, keeping the mantra-methodologies and insights of practitioners in mind—what are mantras and how do they work in practice, what is visionary experience in mantra-practice, what are deities and how do they relate to mantras, and other questions. I conclude with a list of the primary sources of this research— practitioners.