Overview

In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever-present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them-in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities. Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender together with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.

Full Product Details

Author:   Aftab S. Jassal
Publisher:   Columbia University Press
Imprint:   Columbia University Press
Volume:   52
ISBN:  

9780231214971

ISBN 10:   0231214979
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   05 November 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Note on Transliteration Prelude: The Healing Room Introduction: Textures of Divine Presence 1. Making “Dev-bhumi,” the Land of the Gods 2. Affliction and Healing 3. Political Divinities in the Village Square 4. Undoing Love: Ghost Affliction and Patrilocal Marriage 5. Out of Place: Lives of Oracles and Priests 6. Playing in the Rain: Scenes from a Himalayan Pilgrimage Epilogue: Beyond Belief Indian-Language Words with Diacritics Notes Bibliography Index

Reviews

With the poetic sensibility of an ""itinerant ethnographer,"" Jassal traverses through Uttarakhand’s hills and valleys and elegantly shows how humans and gods “make place” for, with, and sometimes against, each other in everyday life. Gods in the World transforms our understanding of divine embodiment in fast-changing and stratified social worlds. -- Leela Prasad, author of <i>Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town</i> This critically important, sensitive ethnography illuminates the contested character of Hinduism across castes, deities, gurus, oracles, and regions. Through keen attention to rituals conducted by Dalit gurus, it demonstrates how caste is reproduced by but also challenged and subverted within Hinduism. -- Lucinda Ramberg, author of <i>Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion</i> In the ravishing landscapes of the high Himalayas in northern India, local gods and goddesses are palpably present in everyday life. Aftab Jassal's extraordinary ethnography, at once poetic, penetrating, and sober, reveals the dense textures of interaction between human beings and local deities, especially in contexts of illness and healing, divination, and profound personal insight. Anyone who still thinks of such gods and the possession rituals that enable their presence as no more than functional or instrumental fictions needs urgently to be healed by this compelling and eloquent book. -- David Shulman, author of <i>Tamil: A Biography</i>

"With the poetic sensibility of an ""itinerant ethnographer,"" Jassal traverses through Uttarakhand’s hills and valleys and elegantly shows how humans and gods “make place” for, with, and sometimes against, each other in everyday life. Gods in the World transforms our understanding of divine embodiment in fast-changing and stratified social worlds. -- Leela Prasad, author of <i>Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town</i> This critically important sensitive ethnography illuminates the contested character of Hinduism across castes, deities, gurus, oracles, and regions. Through keen attention to rituals conducted by Dalit gurus, it demonstrates how caste is reproduced by but also challenged and subverted within Hinduism. -- Lucinda Ramberg, author of <i>Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion</i> In the ravishing landscapes of the high Himalayas in northern India, local gods and goddesses are palpably present in everyday life. Aftab Jassal's extraordinary ethnography, at once poetic, penetrating, and sober, reveals the dense textures of interaction between human beings and local deities, especially in contexts of illness and healing, divination, and profound personal insight. Anyone who still thinks of such gods, and the possession rituals which enable their presence, as no more than functional or instrumental fictions needs urgently to be healed by this compelling and eloquent book. -- David Shulman, author of <i>Tamil: A Biography</i>"

Author Information

Aftab S. Jassal is an assistant professor of anthropology as well as affiliate faculty in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego.

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