Abstract
Tulasi Srinivas, ed. 2023. Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. xiv + 352 pp. Illustrations, index. $99 (hardback—ISBN: 9781438495286).
The book examines ways of thinking about wonder in the context of religions of South Asia, with a focus on India. Drawing on her previous work (Srinivas 2018) on the evocation of adbhuta or wondrous experiences in Hindu temple rituals, Tulasi Srinivas, the book’s editor, invites scholars from multiple disciplines to pursue wonder beyond European philosophical genealogies. As Srinivas highlights in the Introduction, instead of offering a single definition of wonder, the chapters provide a range of ways to examine what wonder is and does: as affect, experience, cultural category, technique of self-cultivation and sociopolitical tool. The volume shows us the multifaceted possibilities of wonder to transform worlds and selves.
The book is divided into three sections titled ‘Histories’, ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘Ethics’. The first chapter by Ann Grodzins Gold gives us a rich ‘ethnographic panorama’ (p. 21) of pilgrimage and healing stories from Rajasthan, capturing multiple aspects of wonder—‘curiosity’ (pp. 24–27) about religious and ostensibly secular sites; ‘compassion and connection’ (pp. 27–29, 38–39) cutting across religious, caste and human/non-human boundaries; ‘creativity’ (pp. 29–38) in terms of frameworks that render the extraordinary somewhat explicable and ‘communication’ (p. 40) of these experiences. In the next chapter, William Elison examines presentations of the Hindu deity Ganesha in 19th–20th-century American popular fiction, while the following chapter by Mary Hancock analyses images of India in American Protestant discourses, locating wonder in the context of radical Otherness. Where Elison brings wonder in dialogue with ‘the weird’ (p. 47), Hancock invites us to consider ‘horrific wonder’ (p. 81). Both trace the ways in which Americans—fictional heroes and Protestant missionaries—reimagined themselves through their encounters with India, showing us the politics of wonder. The section demonstrates the ways in which wonder can be recalibrated through dissonant experiences and discourses in Gold’s chapter: as Elison’s ‘shocking encounter with [aesthetic] form’ (p. 76; parenthesis mine) and as a conceptual and affective tool cutting across ‘religio-moral’ (p. 98) contexts in Hancock’s work.
The next section, ‘Aesthetics’, brings our attention to varied modes of producing wonder and its effects. The section extends experiences of wonder beyond extraordinary encounters to long-lasting forms of relatedness, including hierarchical social orders, pointing to the limits of wonder. Jazmin Graves Eyssallenne pursues wonder in the context of possession or ‘spirit embodiment’ (p. 106) among Sidi Sufis in Gujarat and Mumbai, focusing on the performance of dhammal or goma (ecstatic music and dance). The next chapter by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath studies a Kuchipudi dance drama performance of Ardhanareeswara. The two chapters present an interesting contrast. The former shows how devotional techniques from Sufi, Hindu and East African cosmologies intersect in dhammal to facilitate and encapsulate wondrous embodiment, foregrounding the multiple meanings characterising it. The latter compels us to consider the intimate relation between caste and wonder, highlighting the ways in which the ‘Sanskritisation’ of Kuchipudi (drawing on M. N. Srinivas 1956 and Uttara Asha Coorlawala 2004; pp. 135–39) fixes certain meanings to the dance forms, enabling wonder. The next two chapters by Aniruddhan Vasudevan and Amy L. Allocco revolve around the deity, Angalamman, tracing the relational possibilities opened by wonder beyond the festival dedicated to the goddess. Vasudevan turns our attention to transgender women devotees who fashion ethical relationships with others, including their neighbours and the goddess, through discourses of astonishment, partaking of a ‘moral economy’ (p. 148) of wonder. In Allocco’s chapter, we see the boundaries between purity/pollution and life/death collapse during the ritual of Mayana Kollai at the cremation ground. The affective charge of wonder lasts well beyond the ritual, reshaping everyday relations with the goddess and one’s self. The last chapter in this section by Amanda Lucia takes us to the spectacular displays and performativity of religiosity at the Kumbh Mela. However, as politics, power and wealth combine, the production of wonder needs ever newer creations, even as these threaten to implode the distinction between ‘spontaneous’ and ‘manufactured’ wonder (p. 215).
The last section, titled ‘Ethics’, begins with Quinn A. Clark’s ethnographic study of Sufi saint shrines in Lucknow. Clark analyses the ways in which money continuously shifts from being a mere commodity signifying corruption and greed, into a wondrous object embodying the abundance of barakah or divine blessing in a religious economy. Hanna H. Kim, in the next chapter, lays out three ethnographic vignettes from the BAPS Swaminarayan organisation in India, through which she traces the ‘ethics of sociality’ or ways of knowing and being with oneself and others, based on wondrous devotional experiences. The last chapter by Jacob Copeman and Koonal Duggal examines the spectacular production of ‘wonder effects’ and ‘wondertraps’, by the guru, Dr Saint Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insan, such that the astonishment generated among the devotees seizes them in ‘predatory’ and ‘seductive’ ways (pp. 275–76). Yet, such production would not be possible without the devotional labour of devotees themselves. The three chapters compel the reader to think about the ways in which wonder cuts through the normative, even as it reinforces the latter in some contexts.
The diversity of topics within the volume is both a strength and a challenge. While the book widens the horizon of wonder to encapsulate multiple affects, experiences, practices and discourses, it is precisely such breadth that may also be challenging for the reader to assimilate. One of the aims of the book, as Srinivas lays out in the Introduction and the Conclusion, is to destabilise the ‘singularity, universality, and totality of the Eurocentric understanding of wonder’ (p. 9). But insofar as wonder continues to be associated with notions of ineffable mysteriousness, alterity and awe, it raises the question of how far, and if, the concept has travelled from its European philosophical–theological genealogies, in furthering the aim of decolonising the concept. Nonetheless, the book is an important and welcome contribution to approaching wonder as an analytic for anthropological studies on religion in India, and South Asia more broadly. Inviting us to marvel at the extraordinary, the rapturous and the mysterious, the chapters also root wonder in various sociopolitical and historical discourses and practices. By foregrounding how wonder is evoked, produced and captured, the book makes it both amenable to, and a tool of, anthropological enquiry. The volume provides us with a fresh perspective to understand contemporary South Asian religiosities as to their creativity, ethics, politics and the possibilities of individual and collective transformations.