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Books by Tulasi Srinivas
Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY press 2023), 2023
A meditation on Wonder in South Asian religion and society. Introduction to an edited volume titl... more A meditation on Wonder in South Asian religion and society. Introduction to an edited volume titled "Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY press 2023).
Worlds Within Worlds: The City, Publics of Belonging and Religious Pluralism.” In Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism. Eds. Steets, Silke, Berking, Helmuth. and Schwenk, Jochem. London: Bloomsbury. 2018.
Recherche, Jan 1, 2012
Livre: Curried cultures globalization, food, and south asia (hardback) RAY Krishnendu, SRINIVAS T... more Livre: Curried cultures globalization, food, and south asia (hardback) RAY Krishnendu, SRINIVAS Tulasi.
Papers by Tulasi Srinivas
Toward a Riparian Theo-Ecology: A Meditation on Hinduism and Climate Change , 2025
Space and Culture, 2002
Until the 1970s, the focus of the Hindu home was the puja room, or domestic shrine, but during th... more Until the 1970s, the focus of the Hindu home was the puja room, or domestic shrine, but during the past 20 years, the focus has shifted to the bathroom. Bathrooms are now the showplaces of the Hindu home where conspicuous consumption and display are the norm, whereas the puja rooms have become increasingly smaller and private. The article discusses the dynamics of this shift in the significance of domestic spaces and the underlying changes in attitudes toward purity and pollution, cleanliness and hygiene, sacredness and secularity, and the categories of public and private that these changes imply. Exploring such changes problematizes the underlying cultural changes, the phenomena of secularization and commodification, and the changes in attitudes and values among the Hindu middle classes.
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2010
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 24, 2002
Journal of social and economic development, 2004
Tradition in Transition: Globalisation, Priests, and Ritual Innovation in Neighbourhood Temples i... more Tradition in Transition: Globalisation, Priests, and Ritual Innovation in Neighbourhood Temples in Bangalore Tulasi Srinivas* Abstract This paper focuses upon the nature and function of ritual in neighbourhood temples in Bangalore city in South India. The paper examines how ...
Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY press 2023), 2023
A meditation on Wonder in South Asian religion and society. Introduction to an edited volume titl... more A meditation on Wonder in South Asian religion and society. Introduction to an edited volume titled "Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics" (SUNY press 2023).
Worlds Within Worlds: The City, Publics of Belonging and Religious Pluralism.” In Religious Pluralism and the City: Inquiries into Postsecular Urbanism. Eds. Steets, Silke, Berking, Helmuth. and Schwenk, Jochem. London: Bloomsbury. 2018.
Recherche, Jan 1, 2012
Livre: Curried cultures globalization, food, and south asia (hardback) RAY Krishnendu, SRINIVAS T... more Livre: Curried cultures globalization, food, and south asia (hardback) RAY Krishnendu, SRINIVAS Tulasi.
Toward a Riparian Theo-Ecology: A Meditation on Hinduism and Climate Change , 2025
Space and Culture, 2002
Until the 1970s, the focus of the Hindu home was the puja room, or domestic shrine, but during th... more Until the 1970s, the focus of the Hindu home was the puja room, or domestic shrine, but during the past 20 years, the focus has shifted to the bathroom. Bathrooms are now the showplaces of the Hindu home where conspicuous consumption and display are the norm, whereas the puja rooms have become increasingly smaller and private. The article discusses the dynamics of this shift in the significance of domestic spaces and the underlying changes in attitudes toward purity and pollution, cleanliness and hygiene, sacredness and secularity, and the categories of public and private that these changes imply. Exploring such changes problematizes the underlying cultural changes, the phenomena of secularization and commodification, and the changes in attitudes and values among the Hindu middle classes.
Columbia University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2010
Oxford University Press eBooks, Oct 24, 2002
Journal of social and economic development, 2004
Tradition in Transition: Globalisation, Priests, and Ritual Innovation in Neighbourhood Temples i... more Tradition in Transition: Globalisation, Priests, and Ritual Innovation in Neighbourhood Temples in Bangalore Tulasi Srinivas* Abstract This paper focuses upon the nature and function of ritual in neighbourhood temples in Bangalore city in South India. The paper examines how ...
University of California Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2019
Routledge Handbook of Body Studies, 2012
Critical Themes in Indian Sociology, 2019
In the Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and Pandavas, become embroi... more In the Hindu epic, the Mahābhārata, two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and Pandavas, become embroiled in a prolonged and tangled political battle over the rightful rulership of the kingdom of north central India. That conflict eventually culminates in a great war in which political (and familial) loyalties are challenged, old resentments and debts resurface, all types of stratagems are deployed, much blood is shed, and many lives are lost. Long before the war erupts, though, the members of each side of the Kuru clan take every opportunity to turn to the revered teacher and elder Bhishma Pitamaha, for enlightened instruction on the meaning and application of dharma.
Tracing change in the Indian city through Hindu temple publics, this embedded ethnography seeks t... more Tracing change in the Indian city through Hindu temple publics, this embedded ethnography seeks to interrogate complex relationship between tradition and neo-ness in the wake of the changes that neo-liberal economics and globalization has brought to Bangalore, Karnataka.
Through rituals and rhythms and the performed affect-rasa and bhava-that is deployed and engaged among priests, devotees and others in the public realm of the temple during the festival of Kanu Pandigai, Srinivas explores the nature of moral subjectivity in a South Asian neo-liberal urban context that builds towards a theoretical scaffolding for cultural sustainability.
A review of The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder by Andrew Willford, Cornell Univer... more A review of The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder by Andrew Willford, Cornell University
Any Western anthropologist working in India has, at times, been dumbstruck by the creative and sp... more Any Western anthropologist working in India has, at times, been dumbstruck by the creative and spontaneous moments of encounter between traditional religious life and the realities of a modern global economy. I, for one, will certainly never forget hearing the sacred Sanskrit hymn Venkatachalapati Suprabhatam as a ring tone on a mobile phone, or seeing a traditional Brahmin priest, top-knotted and bare-chested in a cotton veshti lower garment and ritual poonal string slung over his shoulder, pull an ATM card from his belt while seated upon his moped. It is in the spirit of these moments of surprise and curiosity that Tulasi Srinivas explores modern Hinduism in The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Situating her work in the middle-class Bangalore suburb of Malleshwaram, a neighborhood transformed over the last twenty years as the epicenter of India's booming information technology industry, Srinivas chronicles life in and around two traditional Hindu temples, describing how orthodox Brahmin priests, who live according to austere, ritually-prescribed tenets, have found ways to engage creatively – and even enjoy – new technologies, vocabularies, and global perspectives in the work of Hindu temple ritual. If one will permit the proverbial " spoiler alerts, " prospective readers will be gifted with brilliant descriptions of animatronic goddess statues, the immersion of Ganesha images during the festival of Visarjan using construction vehicles, abhishekams (ritual anointing) of temples via helicopter, and the ubiquity of mobile phone cameras as a way of capturing ritually-heightened moments during Hindu puja (and yes, there is a delightful ethnographic vignette about a cow in an elevator). Srinivas approaches these snapshots of modern Indian religious life through the experiential dimension of wonder, and relates wonder to modes of traditional ritual culture, as well as emergent, neoliberal means of
The Journal of Asian Studies, Jan 1, 2011
Anthropology News, Jan 1, 2005