All tagged hinduism

Book Review: Mapping the Complexities and Adaptability of Devotional Practices

Book Review: Mapping the Complexities and Adaptability of Devotional Practices

Lalita Waldia
Reviews

Lalita Waldia, Project Coordinator, People For Himalayan Development, Himachal Pradesh, India, reviews the book "Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism" by Urmila Mohan that explores the profound connection between material culture and religious devotion within the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The book delves into various elements of ISKCON’s practices, focusing on how clothing, body marks, japa beads, and other material artifacts are integral to the religious lives of its followers. The central thesis of Mohan’s work is that these material objects are not mere accessories but play a crucial role in expressing and cultivating devotion, encapsulated in the concept of “efficacious intimacy.”

Body, Goddess and Healing: The Tattoos of a Goddess

Body, Goddess and Healing: The Tattoos of a Goddess

Maheshvari Naidu
Articles

The author explores the affective and physical ‘territorialisation’ of the body during measles, and how vernacular Tamil beliefs consider this a visit from the Goddess called Mariammen. She traces the interruption (and disruption) into the devotee’s life through the material presence of measles as the immaterial, yet tangible existential presence of her anger splayed ferociously out across the body. The healing instance of measles, invokes and provokes a bodyscape of heat and cooling to match the temperament of the goddess. The essay deconstructs the poly-semiotics of healing as a kind of purging and takes an under-the-skin look at the materiality of both body and goddess in this context.

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Of Kiwi Fruit and Kewpie Dolls: The Wonder of Modern Alankara in Bangalore

Tulasi Srinivas
Photo Essays

The daily aesthetic ornamentation of the deity known as alaṅkāra is an everyday feature of temple ritual. This colorful ornamentation, traditionally of flower garlands and fruit offerings, is synchronized to daily and festival calendars, with spectacular alaṅkāra offered during festivals. Alaṅkāra offers the temple priests scope for creativity, yet it is carefully controlled and codified according to liturgical texts, for it is thought to how God is revealed. Speaking to new practices of alaṅkāra in temples in Bangalore through the usage of new materials such as Kiwi fruit and Kewpie dolls the author suggest a new understanding of modernity and Hindu aesthetics, not only expanding devotees’ understandings of divinity, but inviting devotees to feel adbhutha or wonder.

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Garlands for Gods in Southeast India

Leah Comeau
Photo Essays, Peer Reviewed

This is a study of flowers and garlands in Tamil South India as they travel through temples and markets and are grown, sold, and bought by a variety of communities. Various threads of sensory engagements, including colors, fragrances, and the clamor of the market and festive temple grounds, all accumulate into a sense of community aesthetics and sensational forms, from which a devotee might draw to participate.

Sri Krishnan Temple: Doing and Making Sense of a Shared Multi-sensorial, Multi-religious Space in Singapore

Sri Krishnan Temple: Doing and Making Sense of a Shared Multi-sensorial, Multi-religious Space in Singapore

James Mah
Articles, Peer Reviewed

Singapore is renowned for being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious haven, home to a plethora of religious communities that live in putative harmony because they tolerate and respect each other’s differences. This paper tries to modulate such a narrative, through an original study of the shared multi-sensorial, multi-religious space at the Sri Krishnan Temple in Singapore. It is argued that sameness, not difference, reigns there and that this is possible because Hinduism, or for that matter, lived religion, is mediated through the senses.

Intimacy 2.0: Guru-Disciple Relationship in a Networked World

Intimacy 2.0: Guru-Disciple Relationship in a Networked World

Yael Lazar
Articles

Digitally networked media has influenced the possibility and nature of an intimate guru-disciple relationship in the 21st century. This article examines the case of Sadhguru and the Isha Foundation in light of both the tradition from which they emerge and the larger technoculture in which they operate. The author Yael Lazar argues for a new form of intimacy that might be different from the tradition but not necessarily less intimate or real.