Through religion, caste engages with ideas rooted in race as well as class and gender to disempower in ways that…
Interrogating caste privilege from within
Hinduism
US Indo-Caribbeans becoming visible through Hinduism
The unique history of Indo-Caribbean migration to the United States allows us to rethink who counts as Asian American and…
Sonic controversy: “Hinduistic music” in Pakistan
I argue that shifting assumptions about “authentic Islam” have catalyzed the scandalization of mystical music in Pakistan. The emergence of…
The Cow in the Elevator: An introduction
In January 2009 I found myself helping three priests lure a reluctant cow into an elevator in the city of…
Duplicitous Dalits
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research between 2007 and 2010, I show how debates about conversion and Dalit materiality, tracing…
Conversion marriages: Rethinking categories of religion in colonial India’s courtrooms
Conversion marriages, which always involved litigants who had exchanged their religious self-designations, perpetually mixed up personal law codes and created…
Comparison and classification in American religious history
The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and, even more spectacularly, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 reveal the power of the…
India in the American imagination: Historicizing the politics of representation
Continuing to reinforce the centrality of white Protestant capitalist culture to American identity sometimes requires Americans to turn their hostile…
Constructing Indian religion in Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu
Michael Altman’s contribution to our historical understandings of American ideas about foreign religions is to note the ways in which…
Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu—An introduction
In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu, rather than looking for people doing religion, I looked for people using religion. The variety of…