I am an ethnographer of healing and religion in South Asia. My dissertation project is an investigation of care products, a term I use to describe a subset of goods, services, and service projects offered by three Hindu institutions in Mathura, India. My research will determine for which reasons, by which means, and in which ways Indians incorporate these care products into their lives. To this end, I work between Religion and Medical Anthropology.
Yajña with Gayatri parijans. Shaulana, India. Summer 2017.
I am currently investigating several products and services offered by three Hindu institutions in Mathura that participate in what has been called India’s religious market. The conjunction of liberal economic reforms with new technologies of manufacture, distribution, and advertising has facilitated what Lise McKean (1996) terms “divine enterprise” and Meera Nanda (2011) calls the “god market.” Both scholars warn that a capitalistic economic ideology has made popular Hinduism into a matter of consumer culture and allowed powerful people and institutions to twist religion to suit fiscal and political ends. Yet I reject their conclusion that the logic of capitalism is the only way to characterize the relationships between contemporary North Indians and the products and practices offered by Hindu institutions.
Instead, I pursue a multi-scalar ethnography of care products, one subset of the goods and services that several such institutions offer, with an eye to determining for which reasons, by which means, and in which ways Indians incorporate them into their lives. I attempt to answer the following questions: How do the care products promoted by Hindu institutions work, and how are they made to work, for contemporary Indians? If commodified Hindu goods and services are significant in excess of their consumption, what configurations of Indian life do they impact, and how? In answering these questions, I attempt to do more than identify the growing reach of so-called global markets or the insidious intentions of religious entrepreneurs; instead, I evaluate how one facet of commodified religion continues to reshape the relationships between Indians, popular Hinduism, and the state.
McKean, Lise. 1996. Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nanda, Meera. 2011. The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Mozoomdar at Sea
Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, 1893. Public Domain Image.
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.
