Browsing by Subject "Hinduism"

Nearly half a century ago, acclaimed jazz musician Alice Coltrane (1937-2007), marital partner of saxophonist John Coltrane, began disseminating Hindu (Vedanta) teachings and jazz-inflected bhajans (songs of praise) in her predominately Black, though multiracial, spiritual community in Southern California. Despite all her accomplishments–becoming the first African American guru, authoring two revelatory sacred texts, composing fifteen devotional albums (many on major record labels), and founding and directing a Vedantic center and quasi-monastic community for over thirty years–the highly acclaimed Alice Coltrane is overlooked by scholars of religion, especially of Asian religions. Similarly, Cleveland-born, Princeton graduate Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950-2005)–who initiated hundreds of disciples across North America, Africa and Eastern Europe into a Hindu religious tradition (Gaudiya Vaishnavism), authored nineteen books, and acted as a consultant to several world leaders–has also passed away hardly noticed. Since at least the 1960s, Black Americans have made lifelong religious commitments to Vedantic teachings and South Asian religious practices such as performing kirtans and bhajans. Despite this, their presence and contributions remain virtually invisible to scholars. My dissertation seeks to disclose Black Americans’ presence and influence in Hinduism since the 1960s as well as raise an urgent ethical and theoretical question for the study of religion: Can a Hindu be Black?

Through intellectual and aesthetic artifacts, literary publications, and twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Black Americans across several U.S. Hindu communities, my doctoral research illustrates Black Americans’ participation in Hinduism since the 1960s through the charismatic leaders Alice “Swamini Turiyasangitananda” Coltrane, John “Bhakti Tirtha Swami” Favors, Clarissa “Krsnanandini Devi Dasi” Jones, and a successive generation of Black practitioners. Thus, my study answers the above question affirmatively; yet, building on recent scholarship on the racialization of religion and genealogies of religion, my study also provokes an indispensable examination of race, ethnicity, and geography in academic constructions of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism,’ assessing how theory and discourse have, at times, foreclosed the possibility of a Black Hindu.

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.

My dissertation interrogates the figure of the priestly charlatan in colonial India. It begins in a theoretical register by arguing that the unmasking of charlatans serves as a metonym for the secularizing procedures of modernity. Tales of charlatans' exposure by secularist skeptics promise a disenchanted world freed from the ill-gotten influence of sham divines; such tales evacuate the immanent frame of charismatic god-men, thereby allowing the extension and consolidation of secular power. I trace the trope of charlatanic exposure, beginning with Enlightenment anxieties about "priestcraft," continuing on to nineteenth century criticisms of religion, and then making a lateral move to colonial India. I suggest that by the 1830s it had become difficult for many English critics to extricate the problem of priestly imposture from the broader problematic of empire and, more specifically, from the specter of the "crafty brahmin." I track the cultural crosscurrents that conjoined English and Indian anticlericalisms, not only to insist on the centrality of colonial thinkers to the constitution of modernity, but also to reconsider modernity's putative secularity. The "anticlerical modernity" that I identify brings religious and secular skeptics together in a shared war on sacerdotal charisma, best observed at the interstices of empire.

The dissertation disperses the intellectual lineage of the "imposture theory of religion" by rerouting it through colonial India. The imposture theory, or the notion that religion is but a ruse concocted by crafty priests to dupe gullible masses, was central to the emergence of secular modernity and its mistrust of religion. Closely associated with the English and French Enlightenments, it was also pervasive in British polemics against Indian religions. My dissertation demonstrates how in its colonial redeployment the imposture theory came to abut Indic imaginaries of religious illusion, ranging from folkloric spoofs of gurus' authority to philosophical debates about the ontological status of "maya." Starting from religious controversies of the colonial era, my interrogation of Indic illusion extends from the ninth century philosopher Shankaracharya to the sixteenth century saint Vallabhacharya to the twentieth century guru Osho. Its focus, however, is on three nineteenth century religious reformers: Karsandas Mulji, Dayanand Saraswati, and H.P Blavatsky. Through archival research, textual analysis (in Hindi, Gujarati, and English), and theoretical inquiry, I insinuate these three colonial thinkers into the history of the imposture theory of religion. In doing so, my aim is to contribute to scholarship on the genealogy of religion, particularly in colonial contexts.

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.

“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.

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.