Religion And Modernity In The Himalaya

Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era. Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.

Religion has long been a powerful cultural, social, and political force in the Himalaya. Increased economic and cultural flows, growth in tourism, and new forms of governance and media, however, have brought significant changes to the religious traditions of the region in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book presents detailed case studies of lived religion in the Himalaya in this context of rapid change to offer intra-regional perspectives on the ways in which lived religions are being re-configured or re-imagined. Based on original fieldwork, this book documents understudied forms of religion in the region and presents unique perspectives on the phenomenon and experience of religion, discussing why, when, and where practices, discourses, and the category of religion itself, are engaged by varying communities in the region. It yields fruitful insights into both the religious traditions and lived human experiences of Himalayan peoples in the modern era. Presenting new research and perspectives on the Himalayan region, this book should be of interest to students and scholars of South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and Modernity.

A rare look at the history of Himalayan peasant society and the relationship between culture and environment in the Himalayas. Himalayan Histories, by one of India’s most reputed historians of the Himalaya, is essential for a more complete understanding of Indian history. Because Indian historians have mainly studied riverine belts and life in the plains, sophisticated mountain histories are relatively rare. In this book, Chetan Singh identifies essential aspects of the material, mental, and spiritual world of western Himalayan peasant society. Human enterprise and mountainous terrain long existed in a precarious balance, occasionally disrupted by natural adversity, in this large and difficult region. Small peasant communities lived in scattered environmental niches and tenaciously extracted from their harsh surroundings a rudimentary but sustainable livelihood. These communities were integral constituents of larger political economies that asserted themselves through institutions of hegemonic control, the state being one such institution. This laboriously created life-world was enlivened by myth, folklore, legend, and religious tradition. When colonial rule was established in the region during the nineteenth century, it transformed the peasants’ relationship with their natural surroundings. While old political allegiances were weakened, resilient customary hierarchies retained their influence through religio-cultural practices. Chetan Singh, former Professor of History at Himachal Pradesh University, Shimla, has been researching and writing on the history and culture of the western Himalaya for more than two decades. He was Director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla from 2013 to 2016. His books include Natural Premises: Ecology and Peasant Life in the Western Himalaya, 1800–1950 and Region and Empire: Panjab in the Seventeenth Century.

Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whose vitality reveals itself in her devotees' rapidly changing encounters with local and far from local players, powers, and ideas. These include invading royal forces, colonial forms of knowledge, and more recently the onslaught of modernity, capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Hadimba has provided her worshipers with discursive, ritual, and ideological arenas within which they reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and sometimes resist these changing realities, and she herself has been transformed in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and textual materials gathered in the region from 2009 to 2017, The Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess is rich with myths and tales, accounts of dramatic rituals and festivals, and descriptions of everyday life in the celebrated but remote Kullu Valley. The book employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Hadimba from the ground up, or rather, from the center out, portraying the goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The result is an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses, lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field of religion and ecology.

The Vacuum created by the earlier authors by not touching several important areas on this subject have been properly bridged by these authors of the twelve papers included in the book. Seven of them centre around Budhism, one on the interrelationship of B

"Religion is commonly imagined as a timeless component of human inheritance, but in the Western Himalayas the community of Himachal Pradesh discovered their religion only after India became an independent secular state. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival work, Becoming Religious in a Secular Age narrates their discovery and the ways it transformed their relations to their pasts, to themselves, and to others. And as Mark Elmore demonstrates, Himachali religion offers a unique opportunity to reimagine relations between religion and secularity more generally. Tracing the emergence of religion as a widely accepted category, Elmore shows that modern secularity is not so much the eradication of religion as the very condition for its emergence. To become modern ethical subjects is to become religious, and this book creatively augments our understanding of both religion and modernity"--Provided by publisher.