The Brahmins at the Turn of the Common Era: Rethinking Chronology, Motivations, and External Influences
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s)
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
The sordid research process behind the Lallā-Vākyāni, the first major English translation of poetry attributed to the fourteenth-century saint Lal Ded, reveals strategies employed by George Grierson, Lionel Barnett, and Mukund Ram Shastri to recast Lal Ded and the cultural heritage of Kashmir as exclusively Hindu. Contradicting the earliest depicti...
From Neither/Nor to Both/And: Reconfiguring the Life and Legacy of Shirdi Sai Baba in Hagiography
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
The paper focuses on two hagiographic texts about the Indian saint Shirdi Sai Baba: G. R. Dabholkar’s Śrī Sāī Satcarita (1930) in Marathi and B. V. Narasimhaswami’s four-volume Life of Sai Baba (1955–69) in English. A comparative study of these texts highlights a notable shift in the saint’s life story. Whereas Dabholkar describes a saint who is “n...
Spiritual Heroes, Miracle Tales, and Rāmsnehī Foundations: Constructing Hagiographies of a Rajasthani Sant
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
In 1982, a Rāmsnehī sant named Vintiram wrote a Hindi prose biography of his lineage’s founder, Rāmcaraṇ of Shahpura (1720–98), quoting liberally from previous hagiographical verse. Although the late verse narratives showcase miracles, the earliest presents a believable story about a sant from a mercantile caste attracting initial followers among p...
Introduction to Special Issue: Making a Hindu Saint
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
Agradās and Rām Rasik Bhakti Community: The Politics of Remembrance and the Authority of the Hindu Saint
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
The paper examines the memory and hagiography of the important but little-researched late sixteenth-century bhakti saint Agradās. After introducing this influential Vaiṣṇava devotional poet and the Rām rasik tradition he is said to have founded, the paper explores the political realities and motivations behind the molding of Agradās’s hagiography i...
Vernacularizing Jñāndev: Hagiography and the Process of Vernacularization
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
The process of vernacularization involves more than literary language, but also invokes social ethics and an investment in the idioms of everyday life. Vernacularization can reach beyond texts to enact its force upon biographies as well, altering the ethics and quotidian memory of sacred figures. The paper examines how texts and biographical memory...
The Other Trinity: Saurashtra Histories of Carnatic Music
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
The paper examines the place of Veṅkaṭaramaṇa Bhāgavatar (1781–1874), Kavi Veṅkaṭasūri (1818–90), and Nāyakī Svāmikaḷ (1843–1914)—three nineteenth-century figures—in the Saurashtra reimagining of the history of the South Indian music tradition. Worshiped as the mummūrti, these three poet/saint/musicians are regarded by the Saurashtra community of M...
Toward an Anthropology of Exchange in Tamil Nadu
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
This article is an attempt to present the cultural conceptions of exchange that appear in studies of medieval South Indian redistributive processes and the anthropology of Tamil caste, kinship, and marital transactions. As such it does not engage theological understandings of gifts to and from South Indian deities. The approach is sociological, and...
Gifting Knowledge for Long Life
Published in International Journal of Hindu Studies
During nonemergency appointments at traditional sites of āyurvedic healthcare in Kerala, South India, classically trained Brāhmaṇa physicians and their patients seldom exchange anything of substance (whether medicinal or monetary). The physician-patient interface instead routinely involves an exchange of knowledge. Interactions between physicians a...
