Surely one reason for the ongoing but mistakenly benign and otherworldly cliché of India as a land of “spirituality” is…
Le mal des fleurs
India
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…
Crossing and conversion: Conclusion
Religious identity is a deeply political fact that takes different shapes in different political configurations. Conversions are therefore suspect and…
Duplicitous Dalits
Drawing on ethnographic and archival research between 2007 and 2010, I show how debates about conversion and Dalit materiality, tracing…
The “woman question” as symptomatic of imperialism
I want to bring the arguments of Farris and Scott into conversation with two other recent publications in order to…
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…
Secularism and Hindutva histories
In response to the question “Is this all there is?” I turn to ruptures and fields of contestation to reflect…
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…
Scholar or retailer of import goods? Reza Aslan, his guru, and his critics
![By Ken Wieland [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://ssrc-static.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/12155304/Ahilya_Ghat_by_the_Ganges_Varanasi-e1494618784878.jpg)
“I came to Varanasi India to do a show about Hinduism, about karma, reincarnation, the caste system, and a little…