Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds

“To be accounted for, objects have to enter accounts.” – Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds (SUNY Press, 2020; Open Access: https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8716). Articulates an indigenous Indian theory of the agency of materiality—the ability of materials to have an effect on both humans and deities—through performative and ethnographic analyses of a range of materials. These include:  ornamentation and tattoos that protect and make a woman auspicious, tattoos believed to follow her to the afterlife;  female guising worn by men (saris, ornaments, breasts, and braids) that has the potential to transform aggressive masculinity; ritual materiality of turmeric, flowers, food items, and other offerings that helps to create two very different goddesses; changing architecture of goddess shrines that subtly changes the goddesses themselves and their worship; and finally, twelve-to-fifteen-foottall cement Ravanas (antagonist of the Ramayana) that materially perform an alternative ideologies and theologies to those that of Rama temples and dominant textual traditions. The book expands our understanding of material agency as well as the parameters of “what counts” in the study of religion. 

Introduction

The Maladasari cement devotee at base of Tirumala footpath up to pilgrimage temple of Sri Venkateshvara (Andhra Pradesh) is one site of material agency. (Photographs taken 2010.) Here, human devotees respond to the material image by prostrating next to it or otherwise showing devotion.

Chapter 1:Agency of Ornaments: Identity, Protection, and Auspiciousness

Powered By EmbedPress

Chapter 2: Saris and Turmeric: Performativity of the Material Guise in Gangamma Traditions, Tirupati

Chapter 3: Material Abundance and Material Excess: Creating and Serving Two Goddesses

Varalakshmi Puja

Gangamma Jatara

Chapter 4: Expanding Shrines, Changing Architecture: From Protector to Protected Goddesses

Nalla Pochamma Temple, Tarnaka, Secunderabad: 2014, 2016, 2025

Maisamma-Lakshmi Temple, New Santosh Nagar, Hyderabad

Bhagya Laxmi Temple, Hyderabad

Chapter 5: Standing  in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains

Powered By EmbedPress

Afterword