MEDIEVAL HINDUISM IN THE MODERN HIMALAYA

Hinduism, as is well known, has taken a multitude of shapes and forms. Some Hindu “little traditions” have remained obscure or under-studied to this day on account of their regional remoteness.

One such offshoot is the influential cult of Mahasu, which has existed since medieval times in a part of the western Himalaya. The deity at the core of the cult takes the form of four primary Mahasus with territorial influence, installed in various far-flung temples. Their geographical centre is the village of Hanol, and the larger territory is integrated to the Mahasu politico-religious system by a peripatetic deity with loyal followers across a considerable domain.

Mahasu remains influential in the region, its ritual practices having remained quite distinct despite social change. An anthropological survey was conducted in its terrain during British times, but Lokesh Ohri’s book is the first to offer a detailed framework, a fine-grained history, and an analytically nuanced understanding of one of the rarest branches of Hindu worship.

This book will seem invaluable to those seeking to understand the anthropology of religion and the diversity of Hindu belief and practice.

“A fascinating piece of work. I have learned a lot and feel honoured, almost initiated, to have had such a knowledgeable guide to the Mahasus, their realm and the devta ka kaam”
JOHN KEAY, author of The Great Arc

“A fascinating book about a fascinating topic. Mahasu Devta was — and in many respects still is — the most powerful local deity in the Western Himalayas. The history of his cult tells us a great deal about Himalayan culture and religion, about relations between Paharis, the colonial regime, and about how the hills have changed in the course of modernisation . . . Lokesh Ohri tells this story with verve and style”
WILLIAM S. SAX, author of Mountain Goddess

LOKESH OHRI is an anthropologist and activist who has worked for several years in the Himalaya. He was a doctoral fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany and has worked on political rituals, heritage and resource use in the mountains.
He is currently working on an extensive documentation of the river Ganges from source to mouth.

PAPERBACK/ RS 795/ FOR SALE IN SOUTH ASIA ONLY

Comments

Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly. REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay” brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK FROM THE REVIEWS Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ﬀ ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . . Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...

Permanent Black

Search This Blog