In India today, many groups and individuals are reviving or redefining well-known forms of piety, particularly in public religious contexts. In doing so, they are invoking a combination of traditional and modern sources of authority, and are responding to a notion of what constitutes authentic religion that was formulated during the colonial and immediately post-colonial periods by Western-educated Indians who were seeking to define Hinduism in terms congenial to Protestant Christian ideas of religion. In some respects, this response echoes those ideas (especially in advocating a socially useful form of religion, and in recognizing discrete religious communities defined by their adherence to textually codified doctrine), but in other ways, especially in recent decades, these changes have been marked by an unapologetic return to the primacy of such "popular" forms of piety as pilgrimage and shrine worship, to belief in the efficacy of ritual (which modernist movements dismissed as "magic"), and the embrace of low-status deities by an emerging middle class. This reformulation of religious practice can go hand-in-hand with the forging of new social identities or socio-political ideals. The papers in this panel will describe four examples of such developments.

Joanne P. Waghorne, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In contemporary Chennai (Madras), groups of devotees, often neighbors or colleagues, actively form associations to renovate or build temples in this rapidly-expanding commercial city in South India. The process of renovation in the oldest inner-city neighborhoods included many different types of temples, but the goddesses receives special attention. Here within the city many old "seats" of feminine power, the shakti pitha, are being renovated—or more accurately, "gentrified." These are the very Goddesses (the Amman, "mother," who reigns alone without male consort) that once supposedly defined "village" as opposed to "urban" religion. I will argue that, in rebuilding temples for the "Mother," groups not easily understood as ethnic or caste, take birth as a new kind of community—one whose identity is constantly constructed within the public space of these temples. I see these groups as an emerging "middle-class," an identity they take for themselves. The Goddess that they re-define exemplifies their emerging common values: a growing consciousness of pubic welfare (a common concern for wealth and well-being). No longer apologetic about "magic" but concerned about sanitation and tidiness, the new "middle-class" Goddess temples house life-affirming nagas, sacred trees, trident-carrying guardians, all in a comfortable, clean home-life environment. Gone are royal metaphors and palatial proportions. Unlike Jurgen Habermas’s description of the rise of the bourgeois class in Britain and Europe, a "middle class" in India is developing not outside but within religious life. The temple in this context functions as an emerging "bourgeois public sphere."

Philip Lutgendorf, University of Iowa

The cult of the divine monkey-hero Hanuman has grown steadily during the past two centuries, expanding beyond his well-known role as sidekick and helper to Lord Rama, the principal hero of the Ramayana. Temples to this (so-called) "minor" and "folk" deity have proliferated throughout much of India, especially in urban areas, and a substantial popular literature has emerged. A significant portion of this literature deals with the "tantric" propitiation of this deity in order to obtain tangible benefits—a notion that may surprise scholars who consider Hanuman, based on his epic role, to be a "Vaishnava" deity who principally epitomizes devotional service and self-surrender. Using Hindi-language sources, the present paper examines this popular literature of empowerment to determine what it says both about the religious meanings of Hanuman and the religious needs of his modern, and especially middle-class, devotees.

Timothy Lubin, Washington and Lee University

Over two decades, a holy man from eastern Maharashtra (Marathwada) has made it his mission to reestablish the archaic, multi-fire Vedic sacrificial system as an important element in public religious life in India. Drawing his inspiration from Dayananda Saraswati’s idealized and abstract vision of Veda as the original and pure piety, this "saint," Ranganath Selukar Maharaj, innovates in his attempt to revive the full Vedic shrauta sacrificial cult (minus the animal victims) as a vehicle for unifying and reempowering Hindus—religiously, socially, and politically—whose culture and society has been weakened by centuries of "foreign" rule. Simultaneously evoking Vedantic renunciant ideals, Maharashtrian regional bhakti traditions, and nationalist heroism (citing Selukar’s participation in the movement to liberate Marathwada from the Muslim state of Hyderabad in the late ‘forties), his movement has been effective in attracting support from a range of social groups through the annual multi-week Vedic festivals he organizes. While his revival of priestly ritual vividly affirms the value of traditional piety, he argues that the ritual is essentially scientific and rational, and will have salutary effects on Hindu society, the Indian state, and the natural environment. This combined appeal to prestigious, pan-Indian traditional authority, regional sympathies, and scientistic rationalism, all articulated both in preaching and in print, and dramatized by spectacular public acts of piety, seems calculated to persuade the educated and professional middle castes (a sort of middle class) while repackaging archaic Brahmanical ritual in a way that appeals also to an illiterate, rural clientele.

Jacob N. Kinnard, Northwestern University