This panel intervenes in the historiography of Hindu traditions by treating “archive” not as a bounded institutional repository but as a distributed field of authorization that includes liturgical performance, consecrated material forms, vernacular poetics, and embodied charisma. Across four case studies, the papers track how religious pasts are rendered legible and credible through practices that make memory operable: processional reenactment, tactile engagement with burial shrines, the versification of ephemeral women’s devotional speech, and the curation of realized personhood as evidentiary form. By centering the techniques through which religious communities stabilize and reactivate the past, the panel reframes religious history as an ongoing process of mediation, one that continually negotiates the relation between presence and absence, text and performance, institutional custody and vernacular transmission. The panel thus offers an analytic vocabulary for explaining how Hindu histories are produced across ritual practice, sacred materiality, poetic traditions, and embodied religious authority.
During the annual nativity festival of Rāmānuja (11th century) at his temple in Sriperumbudur, his tirumēṉi (sacred body), the metallic image conceived to embody his presence, is adorned in various ways and mounted on metallic vehicles (vāhanams). One such procession is called Veḷḷaiccāṟṟu (White Adornment), in which the ascetic mounts a golden horse, adorned in white garments. The festivities enact the hagiography of Rāmānuja fleeing a zealous Śaiva monarchs’ persecution. Upon returning to the temple, he is given a ritual shower, during which the 120-year-old monk's body is described in a near-erotic manner.
This paper examines the enactment of hagiographies in temple festivities. Its primary questions include how festive visual and material cultures enact hagiography; which hermeneutic tools are available to a participant expected to co-create hagiographic memory; and how we can understand the relationship between textual and festive narrations of history in the Hindu Traditions.
This paper examines samadhis—Indian burial sites—as active sites of memory-making at the Radha Damodar temple in Vrindavan, India. Focusing on the samadhi of Rupa Goswami, a central saint and theologian of the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, the study highlights how this site embodies a complex interplay of place, history, memory, and materiality. Despite the Goswami’s significance, scholarly attention to his samadhi has been limited. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how bhaktas enact remembrance through ritual performances that re-present the saint’s past presence. Practices such as touching, praying, sitting, rolling, and recitation, though common in Hindu temple contexts, acquire distinctive meaning in relation to the goswami’s samadhi. Drawing on the concepts of rasa and bhava, the ethnographic study interprets these acts as modalities of memory-making, showing how the past is continually reproduced and authorized through the materiality of the site.
Reconstructing the histories of Hindu religious traditions requires navigating a central tension between static, institutional archives and the spontaneous religious expressions they attempt to capture and document. This paper examines the evolution of the fagvā, a prayer uttered by female devotees of the Svāmīnārāyaṇa Saṃpradāya that was later codified into verse. I first engage with questions of loss and preservation through versification to argue that it functioned as a deliberate technology of both preservation and pedagogy. Through ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how the fagvā transcends its textual boundaries through contemporary ritual performance which allows the fagvā to operate as an embodied archive, one which connects and collapses historical time. This paper seeks to reframe the boundaries of the Hindu archive, demonstrating how religious histories are dynamically sustained through the intersection of institutional memory and lived practice.
This paper examines shifting religious authority in nineteenth-century Gujarat, where Hindu and Jain reformers used "print-rationality" to critique traditional institutions like the hereditary Hindu Gãdi and Jain yatis. Amidst this upheaval, a radical counter-narrative emerged centering on the Satpurush (realized being). The recognition of Pragji Bhakta (Hindu) and Shrimad Rajchandra (Jain) as living guides challenged existing power structures. To legitimize these figures against institutional opposition, their communities curated a "Soteriological Archive of the Body." Physical austerity, meditative postures, and lived virtues became sovereign proof of sanctity. This archive provided an alternative to both failing traditional offices and the “rationalism” of colonial-era religious reformers (Sudharaks). By prioritizing the experiential realization of the present guide (pratyakṣ) over absent authorities (parokṣ) and strict rationalism, these movements established the realized body as the ultimate historical and soteriological archive.
| Amy Allocco, Elon University | aallocco@elon.edu | View |