Over the past century, religious actors drawing on Hindu traditions have developed new institutions, publics, and transnational networks that further complicate conventional understandings of “Hinduism” as a stable or bounded category. This panel examines how contemporary Hindu movements negotiate changing political, economic, and media landscapes shaped by Hindu nationalism, global wellness markets, and expanding digital publics. The papers highlight the distinctive styles of religiosity through which new Hindu formations operate, exploring how religious actors mobilize aesthetic practices, cosmological frameworks, and media strategies to make Hindu worlds meaningful in the present. Case studies include caste-marked Hindu museums that aestheticize Hindutva politics; millennialist movements such as the Brahma Kumaris and Gayatri Pariwar; astrological practice in the World Teacher Trust as a form of lived religion; and global wellness figures connected to ISKCON who translate Hindu traditions into marketable forms of spiritual expertise. Together, the panel illuminates how contemporary Hindu movements bridge everyday life, cosmic imagination, and public culture.
This paper focuses on the emergent aesthetic and political formation of the “caste-Hindu Museum” in the current moment of authoritarian capitalism in India. I examine two sites which have imagined themselves as museums: a) the Gobardhan Museum in the largest cow-shelter in Delhi, run by Hindutva activists and b) the museum of the Akhil Bharatiya Agarwal Sammelan (a nationwide association of baniyas) within a temple compound in the “holy” site of Agroha in Haryana. The Gobardhan Museum contains cow-dung artefacts made by a young “entrepreneur and cow-dung artist” while the Agarwal Museum memorializes “notable baniya men” in Indian history and politics. Through an ethnographic inquiry and visual analysis, I explore what Kajri Jain calls the “sensible infrastructure” of a “Hindu India” and the meanings and motivations behind the museumization of the “sacred cow” and baniya caste pride, and the stakes of naming and creating them as museums.
This paper examines astrology as a form of lived religion within a transnational spiritual organization called the World Teacher Trust, a movement rooted in the esoteric teachings of the early twentieth-century yogi Master C.V.V. and institutionalized by Ekkirala Krishnamacharya in the 1970s. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in India and in online study networks, including participant observation in astrology classes, English mantra recitation, and study groups, the paper explores how practitioners translate planetary principles into ethical discipline and everyday practice. Within this community, astrology functions not simply as a predictive technique but also as a primary cosmological framework through which individuals interpret karma, cultivate self-regulation, and orient their actions within a wider cosmic order. While planetary cycles sometimes become linked to narratives of cultural or national destiny, the movement’s emphasis on celestial relationality and flux also produces a cosmology that complicates fixed notions of identity and belonging.
For over a century, elite and middle-class audiences in the United States and elsewhere have engaged with Hindu traditions, but today new frontiers of Hindu religiosity are increasingly negotiated through digital platforms, podcasts, and motivational media. This paper examines the work of prominent wellness figures including Jay Shetty, Shubh Vilas, and Gaur Gopal—public personalities whose teachings draw on their connections to the Vaiṣṇava tradition of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). While they invoke secular wellness idioms, their teachings subtly extend one form of modern institutional Hinduism into new global publics. The paper analyzes how they navigate tensions between representing a specific devotional lineage and cultivating a marketable brand of corporatized spirituality. In doing so, their public personas reconfigure power relations that have long structured the figure of the “Oriental monk,” mobilizing global wellness discourses and persistent tropes of “virtual Orientalism” to position Hindu traditions as sources of universal wisdom and spiritual expertise.
| Drew Thomases | drewthomases@gmail.com | View |