The Afterlives of the Bhagavad Gītā: Readings in Translation, by Dorothy M. Figueira. New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. vi + 378 pp., £75 (hb). ISBN 9780198873488 (hb).

The sacred geography of India has long captivated scholars, who have emphasized its mythologization and demonstrated how this landscape connects places to deities, saints and heroes, creating a network that links locations and people through pilgrimage. This paper explores a rarely investigated typology of sacred places, the tapobhūmi. Tapobhūmi, the ground (bhūmi) of spiritual power (tapas), refers to a place where someone has performed ascetic practices (tapasyā) to such an extent that the accumulated spiritual power has been transmitted to the area. These places continue to attract ascetics, who, by practising there, are believed to further increase the tapas of the area. India is dotted with numerous sites recognized as tapobhūmis, which can sometimes evolve into pilgrimage destinations, preserving the memory of renowned ascetics who once practised there. By linking the concept of tapobhūmi to that of guphā (cave) as places for ascetic practice, this paper analyses various forms of tapobhūmi. Using visual examples from central and northern India along with ethnographic data, it illustrates how tapobhūmis embody a human rather than a divine or deified endeavour, forming a parallel sacred geography that is primarily transmitted within ascetic circles and operates according to individual or sampradāyic agendas.

Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in Indian Society, edited by Dhaneswar Bhoi and Hugo Gorringe. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. xxvi + 340 pp., £109.99 (hb), £39.99 (pb). ISBN 9783031306549 (hb); 9783031306570 (pb); 9783031306556 (ebook).

The pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwaja Mu‘inuddin Chishti in Ajmer, India has been one of the most popular acts of devotion in South Asian Islam for more than five hundred years. Beginning with the reign of Akbar, the pilgrimage to the shrine of Khwaja Mu‘inuddin Chishti became one of the most important expressions of imperial piety and munificence in the Mughal period. Although Akbar’s pilgrimages have been the subject of several scholarly works, Shah Jahan’s pilgrimages and patronage have received far less attention. This study addresses that lacuna. In addition to addressing the public and political benefit that the emperor gained from his presence at Ajmer, this study uniquely examines his personal and spiritual motivations for his patronage based on artistic, architectural and epigraphic evidence. With new insights drawn from the masnavi inscribed on his mosque at Ajmer, I conclude that there is a penitential aspect to Shah Jahan’s pilgrimages to Ajmer beyond the public image of a pious padshah.

This study introduces a largely undocumented collection of architectural and sculptural fragments from a village neighbouring Muṇḍeśvarī hill in Kaimūr District, southwest Bihar. It concentrates on a remarkable set of miniature, monolithic Valabhī shrines (North Indian temple types with barrel roofs and rectangular plans) from the second half of the sixth century. These shrine sculptures are architecturally sophisticated and host a varied cast of deities, including multiple images of Lakulīśa, making them an important new find for studies of Nāgara temple architecture and Pāśupata Śaivism during late-Gupta and Maukhari periods. The designs of their upper storeys are of particular significance for questions surrounding the genesis of North Indian temple architecture, for they represent the earliest known shrines with surviving ‘multi-aedicular’ (containing multiple miniature shrine images or ‘aedicules’) superstructures. This paper dates the shrines through architectural analysis and examines the impact that they have on our understanding of the origins and development of early Nāgara temple design, before investigating their iconographic programmes, patronage and purpose.

Vedic Roots, Epic Trunks, Purāṇic Foliage: Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas. DICSEP Publications, vol. 7, edited by Ivan Andrijanić and Sven Sellmer. New Delhi: Dev Publishers & Distributors, in co-operation with the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2023. xxiv + 404 pp., £36,99 (hb). ISBN 9789394852761 (hb).

Multi-Religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces and Contestation, edited by Mark P. Whittaker, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake and Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. xvii + 265 pp., £31.99 (pb). ISBN 9781003029229 (ebook); 9786242050171 (pb).

This article presents an empirical study of the ancient ritual of serpent worship in Kerala. The veneration of serpents holds immense significance in Kerala, as they are considered demigods and are particularly revered in the region. With the help of ethnographic fieldwork and of previously published research, the article delves into the profound importance of serpent worship in Kerala, and analyses the myths and beliefs that reveal the real characters of serpents as givers of prosperity and as gods capable of bringing destruction through naga dosham (the serpent curse). It underlines the distinct caste-related factors determining the ritualistic premises of the cult, while analysing the dynamics of the upper-caste Namboodiris and lower-caste Pulluvans towards their shared veneration for serpent deities. The article also seeks to highlight the pivotal role played by the Pulluvans as the ritual specialists for sarpathullal and pulluvan pattu, ceremonies performed to appease the serpent gods.

This article looks into early modern Vaishnav literary accounts and their representation of the little kingdom of Mallabhum or Bishnupur (the capital), in the southwestern forested region of Bengal. From the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, Bishnupur emerged as the main centre of the resurgent Gaudiya Vaishnav devotional tradition, formulated by the Goswamis at Vrindavan. The article studies the account of the introduction and embracement of Gaudiya Vaishnavism by the ruler of Bishnupur, Bir Hambir, as narrativized in several seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Bengali Vaishnav hagiographies. It particularly explores the various political and ideological connotations of the plotline of the bandit raja and his act of ‘book theft’ in the context of the obscure kingdom situated in the peripheries. The article goes on to address the question of reception by considering how the hagiographical image of Bir Hambir as a bhakt raja continued to sustain and inform other Vaishnav narratives of the kingdom. It particularly considers the local narrative of Madanamohanabandanā, where by the late eighteenth century the figure of Bir Hambir had become synonymous with the kingdom’s heyday. The article thus charts the myriad representations of a little kingdom in early modern Bengal through a study of Bengali Vaishnav narratives.

The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya, by Steven E. Lindquist. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2023. xii + 336 pp., $99 (hb), $34.95 (pb). ISBN 9781438495620 (hb), 9781438495644 (pb).