New Directions in the Study of South Asian Religions

This paper examines how the colonial classroom reconfigured the Rāmāyaṇa as an educational “textbook” (pāṭhya pustaka) in nineteenth-century Bengal. I argue that the religious neutrality clause in East India Company educational policy, implemented through institutions such as the Calcutta Schoolbook Society, introduced a new pedagogical framework that separated the moral from the religious. Within this framework, epic narratives were adapted to extract universalizable ethical lessons while bracketing divine explanatory structures. Focusing on textbook retellings of Sītā’s life, the paper shows how authors in the second half of the nineteenth century such as Nilmani Basak and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar reworked miraculous elements—particularly Sītā’s divine disappearance into the earth—into narratives of feminine resilience and female suffering. These adaptations reveal how colonial educational discourse transformed divine exegesis into moral criticism, producing a new interpretive grammar through which the Rāmāyaṇa would later be morally evaluated in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with animal caregivers in Kolkata, India, to examine how religious and cosmological frameworks function as resources for meaning-making in the everyday work of caring for street dogs, and how intimate relationships with dogs are actively reconfiguring those frameworks. Moving between the institutional and the intimate—from a municipal public health official who grounds Kolkata's non-lethal dog management policies in Hindu cosmological belief to caregivers who improvise with concepts of moksha, karma, transmigration, and ahimsa in the face of daily encounters with animal suffering and death—the paper argues that South Asian religious concepts are living and capacious, being actively remade through interspecies contact. These concepts do not travel alone or stay fixed: Hindu frameworks intersect with Jainism, Islam, and with transnational animal-welfare cosmologies such as the "rainbow bridge"—a vision of a peaceful animal afterlife traceable to a poem by Scottish artist Edna Clyne-Rekhy—all of them absorbed into and reshaped by the same encounters. Engaging with scholarship on Hindu animal ethics, ordinary ethics, and immanent ethics, the paper contributes to conversations in the anthropology of religion about what gives concepts life through practice, and what the study of human-animal relations reveals about the elasticity of religious traditions.

This paper proposes a new framework for considering divine embodiment through the figure of Jagannath, tracing the deity’s pilgrimage from Odisha to the Hindu diaspora of the San Francisco Bay Area. Rather than privileging the god’s "original" wooden mūrti and temple in Puri, this dissertation research focuses on the experiences of Bay Area devotees. Employing ethnography along with art history and material culture studies, the paper argues that Jagannath’s seemingly all-encompassing body exists as a network of more particular material bodies, an overlapping series of avatāras manifested across mūrtis, home shrines, and even souvenir images and artist re-creations. Each one, however unofficial, authentically establishes the deity's presence while expanding his body to encompass the experiences of ever-new devotees, as well as the material realities of their time and place. Jagannath offers a new model for the old material biographies: an expanded body that can be traced across various materialities.

Jahangir’s memoirs record numerous strange and seemingly marginal episodes: the unusual cry of a dying antelope, the creation of a temporary garden from soldiers’ flower-laden turbans, and a numerological coincidence linking a written date to its Hijri equivalent. Why are such oddities preserved alongside accounts of imperial governance and conquests? This paper argues that these episodes are not marginal but central to Jahangir’s self-representation and religiosity. Drawing on Travis Zadeh’s work on wondrous narratives and scholarship on enchantment, I read these passages as moments of textual witnessing that validate and interpret extraordinary experience. Through translation and analysis of three accounts, I show how Jahangir frames strangeness through corroboration, aesthetic intervention in nature, and numerological knowledge. These accounts reveal a Mughal religious sensibility grounded not primarily in scriptural discourse or imperial ideology, but in affect, perception, and aesthetic engagement with a world understood to be meaningful, enchanted, and full of signs.

Aniconism in India has been studied primarily through the lens of early Buddhism and, comparatively, through Islam and ancient Israelite religion. Yet within Hinduism, a largely unexamined tradition of aniconic worship persists across Tamil Nadu, where deities are venerated as formless presences in empty shrines, without a liṅga or mūrti. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted during a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship, this paper documents numerous aniconic shrines across the region and proposes a framework for understanding Hindu aniconism grounded in South Indian theologies of space (ākāśa), emptiness (śūnya), and formlessness (arūpa, niṣkala). Building on Richard Davis’s 2017 study of Śaiva aniconism (perhaps the most recent scholarly treatment of this topic), the paper argues that Hindu aniconism demands attention as a living tradition rather than an ancient artifact, and that its study opens a genuinely new direction for the field of South Asian religions.