My dissertation project is titled, “Rediscovering the Center: Religious Striving in Two Hindu-Adjacent Institutions.” 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-adjacent religious movments 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 of both organizations lead relatively ordinary lives. Yet the everyday reforms they adopt and encourage in order to grapple with the insecurities of the present are the very practices which make these organizations so popular in India today. Key to this study are acts of “centering,” explored in four themes within five chapters that show how devotees use place, travel, material goods, and even health crises to orient themselves and their neighbors toward lifestyles suitable for the new ages they anticipate. An illumination of two understudied groups and their civic engagements, “Rediscovering the Center” provides insight into how contemporary religious communities strive for answers to the questions “what now?” and “what next?”

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.

Follow Mozoomdar on his voyage from Kolkata to Chicago by clicking the link below.

During the course of my dissertation 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.

(Please note that these maps cannot be viewed on mobile devices at this time.)