The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City PDF

Author: Deonnie Moodie

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190885262

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"Middle-class Hindus have worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ - the most famous Hindu temple in Kolkata - over the past long century. Rather than being rejected with the onslaught of European modernity, the temple became a facet through which Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities' and their nation's"--

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City PDF

Author: Deonnie Moodie (spécialiste des religions)

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 9780190059125

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Présentation de l'éditeur : "Kalighat is said to be the oldest and most potent Hindu pilgrimage site in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). It is home to the dark goddess Kali in her ferocious form and attracts thousands of worshipers a day, many sacrificing goats at her feet. In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Deonnie Moodie examines the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kalighat over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend continued and even strengthened in the wake of India's economic liberalization in the 1990s. Kalighat is a superb example of the ways Hindus work to modernize India while also Indianizing modernity through Hinduism's material forms. Moodie explores both middle-class efforts to modernize Kalighat and the lower class's resistance to those efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples' lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City is the first scholarly work to juxtapose and analyze processes of historiographical, institutional, and physical modernization of a Hindu temple"

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City PDF

Author: Deonnie Moodie

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780190885298

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"Middle-class Hindus have worked to modernize Kālīghāṭ - the most famous Hindu temple in Kolkata - over the past long century. Rather than being rejected with the onslaught of European modernity, the temple became a facet through which Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as their cities' and their nation's"--

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City

The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City PDF

Author: Deonnie Moodie

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-11-06

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0190885289

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Kalighat is said to be the oldest and most potent Hindu pilgrimage site in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). It is home to the dark goddess Kali in her ferocious form and attracts thousands of worshipers a day, many sacrificing goats at her feet. In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Deonnie Moodie examines the ways middle-class authors, judges, and activists have worked to modernize Kalighat over the past long century. Rather than being rejected or becoming obsolete with the arrival of British colonialism and its accompanying iconoclastic Protestant ideals, the temple became a medium through which middle-class Hindus could produce and publicize their modernity, as well as the modernity of their city and nation. That trend continued and even strengthened in the wake of India's economic liberalization in the 1990s. Kalighat is a superb example of the ways Hindus work to modernize India while also Indianizing modernity through Hinduism's material forms. Moodie explores both middle-class efforts to modernize Kalighat and the lower class's resistance to those efforts. Conflict between class groups throws into high relief the various roles the temple plays in peoples' lives, and explains why the modernizers have struggled to bring their plans to fruition. The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City is the first scholarly work to juxtapose and analyze processes of historiographical, institutional, and physical modernization of a Hindu temple.

Diaspora of the Gods

Diaspora of the Gods PDF

Author: Joanne Punzo Waghorne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-09-16

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 019028885X

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Many Hindus today are urban middle-class people with religious values similar to those of their professional counterparts in America and Europe. Just as modern professionals continue to build new churches, synagogues, and now mosques, Hindus are erecting temples to their gods wherever their work and their lives take them. Despite the perceived exoticism of Hindu worship, the daily life-style of these avid temple patrons differs little from their suburban neighbors. Joanne Waghorne leads her readers on a journey through this new middle-class Hindu diaspora, focusing on their efforts to build and support places of worship. She seeks to trace the changing religious sensibilities of the middle classes as written on their temples and on the faces of their gods. She offers detailed comparisons of temples in Chennai (formerly Madras), London, and Washington, D.C., and interviews temple priests, devotees, and patrons. In the process, she illuminates the interrelationships between ritual worship and religious edifices, the rise of the modern world economy, and the ascendancy of the great middle class. The result is a comprehensive portrait of Hinduism as lived today by so many both in India and throughout the world. Lavishly illustrated with professional photographs by Dick Waghorne, this book will appeal to art historians as well as urban anthropologists, scholars of religion, and those interested in diaspora, transnationalism, and trends in contemporary religion. It should be especially appealing for course use because it introduces the modern Hinduism practiced by the friends and neighbors of students in the U.S. and Britain.

Rediscovering the Hindu Temple

Rediscovering the Hindu Temple PDF

Author: Vinayak Bharne

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-09-18

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1443867349

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This volume examines the multifarious dimensions that constitute the workings of the Hindu temple as an architectural and urban built form. Eleven chapters reflect on Hindu temples from multiple standpoints - tracing their elusive evolution from wayside shrines as well as canonization into classical objects; questioning the role of treatises containing their building rules; analyzing their prescribed proportions and orders; examining their presence in, and as, larger sacred habitats and ritua...

Bringing Krishna Back to India

Bringing Krishna Back to India PDF

Author: Claire C. Robison

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0197656455

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Bringing Krishna Back to India examines the place of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), in Mumbai, India's business and entertainment capital, where ISKCON draws Indians from diverse regional and religious backgrounds and devotees adopt a conservative religious identity amidst a neoliberal urban context. By inhabiting a Hindu revivalist role, ISKCON educates Hindus and Jains into a new vision of their own traditions and promotes greater religiosity in Indian public life. This contradicts notions that societies are moving towards secularism and highlights how new religious identities are fashioned amidst industrialized urban spaces, such as college campuses, corporate wellness retreats, and Bollywood celebrity events.

Power, Piety, and People

Power, Piety, and People PDF

Author: Michael Dumper

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-07-14

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0231545665

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Conflicts in cities that have particular religious significance often become intense, protracted, and violent. Why are holy cities so frequently contested, and how can these conflicts be mediated and resolved? In Power, Piety, and People, Michael Dumper explores the causes and consequences of contemporary conflicts in holy cities. He explains how common features of holy cities, such as powerful and autonomous religious hierarchies, income from religious endowments, the presence of sacred sites, and the performance of ritual activities that affect other communities, can combine to create tension. Power, Piety, and People offers five case studies of important disputes, beginning with Jerusalem, often seen as the paradigmatic example of a holy city in conflict. Dumper also discusses Córdoba, where the Islamic history of its Mosque-Cathedral poses challenges to the control exercised by the Roman Catholic Church; Banaras, where competing Muslim and Hindu claims to sacred sites threaten the fragile equilibrium that exists in the city; Lhasa, where the Communist Party of China severely restricts the ancient practice of Tibetan Buddhism; and George Town in Malaysia, a rare example of a city with many different religious communities whose leaders have successfully managed intergroup conflicts. Applying the lessons drawn from these cities to a broader global urban landscape, this book offers scholars and policy makers new insights into a pervasive category of conflict that often appears intractable.

Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism

Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism PDF

Author: EMILIA. BACHRACH

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-16

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0197648592

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Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. This book considers religious reading through a study of the Pushtimarg, a Hindu community whose devotional practices and community identity have developed in close relationship with Vārtā Sāhitya (Chronicle Literature), a genre of Hindi prose hagiography written during the 17th century. Through hagiographies that narrate the relationships between the deity Krishna and the Pushtimarg's early leaders and their disciples, these hagiographies provide community history, theology, vicarious epiphany, and models of devotion. While steeped in the social world of early-modern north India, these texts have continued to be immensely popular among generations of modern devotees, whose techniques of reading and exegesis allow them to maintain the narratives as primary guides for devotional living in Gujarat-the western state of India where the Pushtimarg thrives today. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with close readings of Hindi and Gujarati texts, the book examines how members of the community engage with the hagiographies through recitation and dialogue in temples and homes, through commentary and translation in print publications and on the Internet, and even through debates in courts of law. The book argues that these acts of reading inform and are informed by both intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and also by politically potent disputes over matters such as temple governance. By studying the texts themselves, as well as the social contexts of their reading, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism provides a distinct example of how changing class, regional, and gender identities continue to shape interpretations of a scriptural canon, and how, in turn, these interpretations influence ongoing projects of self and community fashioning.