PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Emilia Bachrach is Assistant Professor of Religion and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Oberlin College. Her research focuses on how people's interpretations of religious texts inform and are informed by intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and by changing class, regional, and gender identities in contemporary western India. She also works with oral and written texts in early modern and modern languages, including Braj Bhasha, Gujarati, and Hindi.
Bachrach sensitively guides the reader into the contemporary life of the Pushtimarg's varta traditions with the vibrance of the satsang gatherings she portrays. While never losing her analytical distance, she insinuates herself into the performances of these texts so the reader cannot fail to gauge the emotional tenor of what these stories mean to their devotees. The boundary between text and auditor in the satsang dissolves in the act of reading and commenting, an embodied improvisation that transforms the vartas into a living canon. * Tony K. Stewart, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities, Emeritus, Vanderbilt University * A charmingly disarming question-Can one offer pizza to God/Krishna?-opens this rich 'ethnography of reading' that focuses on contemporary middle-class women devotees of the Pushtimarg sect. Though this tradition is perhaps better known to outsiders for its opulent ritual art, Bachrach details how intense interaction with a large corpus of 17th century hagiography-transmitted and debated through oral performance, print media, and (now) websites and social media platforms-continues to inform and inflect its often cosmopolitan adherents' daily lives, family relationships, and experiences of both devotion and agency. * Philip Lutgendorf, Professor Emeritus of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies, University of Iowa * Picture a group of Gujarati women on a Thursday afternoon reading a 17th-century hagiography of a Hindu Pushtimarg follower that leads to their discussion of whether or not they can offer pizza to Krishna, and you will grasp what Emilia Bachrach notably characterizes as a 'performative canon' of engaged responses that distinctively shape a relevant continuity with tradition. Devotional reading is a primary religious mode, in which devotees' lively discussions make the past palpable, the present morally actionable, and the future expansive for the Pushtimarg community. Bachrach's illuminating analysis is essential to understanding lived religion in India and comparatively. * Karen Pechilis, Professor of History of Religions, Drew University *
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