Gods in the World - (Religion, Culture, and Public Life) by Aftab S Jassal

About the Book

Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people.

Book Synopsis

In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them--in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities.

Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.

Review Quotes

In the ravishing landscapes of the high Himalayas in northern India, local gods and goddesses are palpably present in everyday life. Aftab Jassal's extraordinary ethnography, at once poetic, penetrating, and sober, reveals the dense textures of interaction between human beings and local deities, especially in contexts of illness and healing, divination, and profound personal insight. Anyone who still thinks of such gods and the possession rituals that enable their presence as no more than functional or instrumental fictions needs urgently to be healed by this compelling and eloquent book.--David Shulman, author of Tamil: A Biography

This critically important, sensitive ethnography illuminates the contested character of Hinduism across castes, deities, gurus, oracles, and regions. Through keen attention to rituals conducted by Dalit gurus, it demonstrates how caste is reproduced by but also challenged and subverted within Hinduism.--Lucinda Ramberg, author of Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion

With the poetic sensibility of an "itinerant ethnographer," Jassal traverses through Uttarakhand's hills and valleys and elegantly shows how humans and gods "make place" for, with, and sometimes against, each other in everyday life. Gods in the World transforms our understanding of divine embodiment in fast-changing and stratified social worlds.--Leela Prasad, author of Poetics of Conduct: Oral Narrative and Moral Being in a South Indian Town

About the Author

Aftab S. Jassal is an assistant professor of anthropology as well as affiliate faculty in the Program for the Study of Religion and the Global Health Program at the University of California, San Diego.