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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.”

Decoding Women's Narratives of Gender and Creativity in 19th-20th century Beadwork of Saurashtra

Decoding Women's Narratives of Gender and Creativity in 19th-20th century Beadwork of Saurashtra

Medha Bhatt
Articles

During the 19th-20th century, Kathi women in Saurashtra, Gujarat used glass beads to create trousseau textiles, generating the unique tradition of beadwork.  As a researcher trained in textile design and belonging to the Kathi community, I use my great-grandmother, Jadiba's beaded bag, inherited as part of my trousseau, as an entry point into her mind, creativity and use of mathematics at the turn of the last century. By exploring her story as well as those of two other women beadwork artists and analysing beadworks, I make a case for folk or vernacular knowledge and creativity embodied in the object.

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Pathologies of Labour: How Work Destroys Health in Urban India

Tanuj Luthra
Articles

While conducting fieldwork with informal doctors in low-income neighbourhoods in Delhi, I noticed that several patients consulted them for what appeared to be work-related ailments. Reflecting on these encounters at the intersection of medicine and labour, I thought about how work consumes both our time and our vitality, and how responses to the effects of work mobilize particular ideas of care and wellbeing. I wondered: if health is socially constructed, in what ways does labour construct it? In this essay, I explore how, across various urban work contexts — from informal sector work to supposedly good jobs in “India Inc.” — people experience and differently articulate a range of symptoms and conditions (such as stress, tension, fatigue, pain, injury, and various infectious diseases) in relation to their labour.

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Activating the Value of Handmade: The Role of Social Enterprises in Transforming India’s Artisan Economy

Activating the Value of Handmade: The Role of Social Enterprises in Transforming India’s Artisan Economy

Priya Krishnamoorthy and Aparna Subramanyam
Interviews

Urmila Mohan interviews Priya Krishnamoorthy, Founder and CEO of 200 Million Artisans, and Aparna Subramanyam, Partner at 200 Million Artisans, an ecosystem enabler reimagining the potential of India’s artisan economy. 200 Million Artisans is a social enterprise catalysing self-reliance and responsible innovation in India’s artisan economy by providing access to knowledge, resources, and networks that empower artisan-producers and impact entrepreneurs.

Just Images

Just Images

Rajgopal Saikumar
Articles

In 2010 a High Court in India found Shabnam and Saleem guilty of conspiring and murdering seven of Shabnam’s family members. They are both currently in death row. If executed, Shabnam will be the first woman to be so killed in independent India. In the decade she’s spent in prison, Shabnam learnt to knit, stitch, and embroider textiles as clothing and bags. Her lawyers documented and presented images of these objects as evidence of reform and a promise of rehabilitation. I am interested in taking the materiality of these objects seriously, and treat them as aesthetic objects. What happens when these photographs enter a legal plea, as evidence of reformation, and a prayer for the commutation of sentence?

Likhai: A journey through the craft of wood carving

Likhai: A journey through the craft of wood carving

Lalita Waldia
Articles

The article unfolds the journey of Likhai, a craft of wood carving in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand from a glorified past to a disappearing craft. Likhai, which was once an integral part of communities, is an amalgamation of diverse cultural influences and represents the land and its people. The article makes the case that it is vital to understand the whole system that revolves around the practice, providing details of the origin of the craft and how it represents the importance of Likhai for the communities. A narrative is thus created that connects the changes in the region with changes that have impacted the craft and the craftspeople. Likhai is no longer part of modern Kumaoni houses but despite this still manages to be in the hearts of people.

2022 Spring Issue - Craft

2022 Spring Issue - Craft

Simashree Bora and Urmila Mohan
Editorials

How are craft production, techniques and skills interwoven into the space of the “everyday” as culture and identity in South and Southeast Asia? How are different understandings of tradition and indigeneity to be incorporated into such a discussion? Our Spring 2022 issue on Craft explores those questions via communities and cultures in India and Indonesia, featuring peoples’ cosmologies and beliefs in different ways. Lira Anindita Utami’s article on gringsing, a sacred double-ikat textile of Bali, and Debapriya Chakrabarti’s article on the infrastructural impact of Durga Puja idol-making in Kolkata deal with more explicitly religious objects. Lalita Waldia’s article on the woodcarving craft of likhai in Uttarakhand, India, and Amira Rahardiani’s study of bamboo weaving development in Central Java, Indonesia, delve, instead, into the complexities of craft as livelihood and heritage.

Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshippers at Indian Archaeological Sites

Color, Graffiti and the Senses: Visitors and Worshippers at Indian Archaeological Sites

Uthara Suvrathan
Photo Essays

This essay examines ancient Buddhist monastic sites, now archaeological/tourist sites, and the ways in which people experience and interact with the past, mediated through material culture. For example, the historic sites of Ajanta and Ellora in India are known for their vibrantly colored paintings, protected in various ways including signs banning the performance of rituals. And yet, we find that visitors respond to these sites in unexpected ways, for instance, by placing gold foil on carvings of the Buddha as a form of veneration and worship. The traces of this interaction, both past and present, can be seen in various kinds of graffiti and in the use of architectural form and light. By observing contemporary practices and the ways visitors develop their own experiences, one can suggest new ways in which heritage can be managed and presented.

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.

The Fruits of the Loom: Cosmopolitanism Through the Eyes of the Commissioner

The Fruits of the Loom: Cosmopolitanism Through the Eyes of the Commissioner

Morgan Spencer
Articles

The author interrogates the idea of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in Colonial textile trade through the eyes of the object’s commissioner by focusing on four different textiles, from Italy, China, and India. Just after the ‘Age of Discovery’, this time period (16-17th c.) helps us situate depictions of cultural ‘othering’ within a historical lens. These textiles act as embodiments of political power and ‘worldliness’, making them early examples of translocal consciousness.

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

Chunrong Zhao
Articles

This think-piece on the theoretical potential of ‘translocality’ helps counter the colonial legacy of cultural essentialism in the analyses and representation of eclectic material cultures. Based on reflections on ‘transculturality’ and the case study of the images of Vajrapani in Gandharan art, the author concludes that translocality, which respects the agencies of local cultures and the complexity of cultural exchanges, is a more productive, heuristic concept in analyzing and representing diverse material cultures.

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Between Temples and Toilets: Sanitation Worship in India

Jacqueline Cieslak
Articles

The author artfully describes the complicated relationships between sanitation, reverence, and political contrivance in contemporary India. She focuses on the phenomenon of ‘The Toilet’ and its objectification as artefact and cultural institution. She argues that officials have not simply recruited religious imagery but that sanitation itself has become an object of worship.

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