Gods on Earth (The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre)

This book is a detailed anthropological and historical study of Ayodhya, a Hindu pilgrimage centre in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Based on intensive fieldwork and archive research, it considers the values and identities of the pilgrim groups and of the religious specialists who receive them, and how these have changed over time. The author focuses in particular on the Ramanandi monks and the Brahman priests, the two most important groups of specialists at the shrine. He argues that, contrary to the `Orientalist' perspective of much of the literature on Hinduism, which stresses the unchanging nature of the religion grounded in sacred texts, the religious experience and values of both pilgrims and specialists are constantly changing as a result of large-scale political and economic processes, in particular the impact of British rule. Dr van der Veer thus makes a major contribution to our understanding of Hinduism as a truly historical phenomenon.