Everyday Eschatology

My ongoing book project is Everyday Eschatology: Societal Redemption in South Asia. It is an ethnographic analysis of how members of the Brahma Kumaris and the Gayatri Pariwar attempt to re-center religion in everyday life as a means of fulfilling the world-building charters of their parent organizations.

The Brahma Kumaris and the Gayatri Pariwar are two Hindu sects that have gained international traction since their beginnings in the 1930s. Both organizations envision and prepare for an imminent transition into a new Golden Age through self-care regimens that imbue Hindu ascetic practices and rituals with the authority of modern rational science. Rather than retreat from society, these groups continue to engage their surrounding communities in attempts to act as custodians of societal welfare. Through ethnographic accounts of these institutions’ activities in the Hindi belt of North India, I argue for renewed attention to the non-temple spaces where members of international religious organizations respond to a world understood to be on the brink of collapse.

Decades have passed since the deaths of their charismatic founders, so the Brahma Kumaris and the Gayatri Pariwar are no longer “new” religious movements. Despite their grand millenarian projects, members live their everyday lives according to relatively mundane ritual practices and social service initiatives. This ordinariness is not dissonant or detrimental to their eschatological programs; rather, it is the very condition for the wide appeal of both groups within contemporary Indian society. In particular, the educational and ritual offerings of both organizations, made widely accessible through a range of multimedia and material goods, afford people ready opportunities to integrate group teachings and practices into their lifestyles. To assess just how the “ordinary” serves as a vehicle for the “extraordinary” within the Gayatri Pariwar and the Brahma Kumaris is the task of “Everyday Eschatology.”

Maps

During the course of my doctoral fieldwork, I began to reflect on how I and my research subjects were inhabiting a city and country much larger than we are. This led me to build a series of maps anchored to several fieldwork experiences, initially as a note-taking aid.

Although these maps are a work in progress, I invite you to explore several of the places where I conducted fieldwork in 2019-2020.

Mozoomdar at Sea

Two ongoing interests of mine are the history of religious reform in India and digital humanities scholarship. This project has been an attempt to combine the two. What follows is a chronicle of Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, a nineteenth-century Bengali religious reformer and one of the first Indians to command an audience in the United States of America. In July 1893, he set sail to take part in the World’s Parliament of Religions. This digital exhibit, based on the letters that Mozoomdar wrote to his wife Saudamini during his travels at sea, offers a seldom-possible intimate look at the life and times of an underappreciated historical religious figure.