Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices

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Amy L. Allocco (Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program, Elon University) Xenia Zeiler (Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Helsinki)

Sweetening and Intensification

Currents Shaping Hindu Practices

Amy L. Allocco (Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program, Elon University), Xenia Zeiler (Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Helsinki)

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English

State University of New York Press
01 October 2025

Oriental & Indian philosophy; Hindu life & practice; Ethnic studies; Social & cultural anthropology

Series: SUNY series in Hindu Studies

Explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.

This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions—namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists intensification, which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges. This volume emphasizes an inclusive approach by bringing these two currents into sustained conversation. As Hindu traditions are increasingly expanding into new settings, including but not limited to new diaspora and new media contexts, the long-established yet ever changing scale of sweet/neutral/spicy unfolds in new ways, as well. The essays in this volume delineate these developments across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Indeed, the volume's multidisciplinary approach shows how these processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.

Edited by: Amy L. Allocco (Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program Elon University), Xenia Zeiler (Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Helsinki)
Imprint: State University of New York Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9798855804058
Series: SUNY series in Hindu Studies
Pages: 354
Publication Date: 01 October 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Amy L. Allocco is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Multifaith Scholars Program at Elon University in North Carolina. She is the coeditor, with Brian K. Pennington, of Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion, also published by SUNY Press. Xenia Zeiler is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the editor of Digital Hinduism and the coeditor of several volumes on digital culture and religion in Asia and beyond.

Reviews for Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices

""This volume is distinguished not just by its geographical and linguistic diversity but also by its variety of disciplinary approaches—textual, historical, literary, visual, and anthropological. All of the chapters take pains to showcase Hinduism's lived and living traditions as they adapt and change. Further, they expand how we understand the sweetening/intensification dialectic within the context of several current impulses, including globalization and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India."" — Archana Venkatesan, University of California, Davis ""The driving theme of this book opens into fascinating twists and turns in the study of Hindu traditions while poking important holes in scholarly assumptions. Against the backdrop of long-observed processes of Sanskritization, or sweetening, we find these processes to be far from inevitable or unidirectional. Through this collection's vivid explorations of how deities, rituals, and traditions sweeten and intensify over time and space, we find a new appreciation for the dynamism of Hindu traditions."" — Corinne G. Dempsey, Nazareth University