Cow in the Elevator

Tulasi Srinivas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College, author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement, and coeditor of Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia.

"[The Cow in the Elevator] teased me into questioning what Srinivas has so beautifully and chillingly thought through for decades-wonder as an ethical practice." - Dhruv Ramnath (The Citizen) "Srinivas provides a lively lesson in religious originality with applications and implications far beyond Bangalore or India." - Jack David Eller (Reading Religion) "The central contribution of this book is its presentation of wonder as a new category of anthropological inquiry, and its interdisciplinary approach of parsing wonder from the vantage points of ritual and liturgical lives, socioeconomics, and aesthetic and creative spheres.  Srinivas’s deployment of these specific categories by no means limits its readers; on the contrary, the book inspires readers to revisit their own field experiences, and look for the moments of wonder." - Arthi Devarajan (Anthropology News) "Tulasi Srinivas does us a service in identifying important insights arising from her study of ritual practice that will help us to better understand wonder. Hopefully, her work will prompt other scholars to use an anthropological approach to better understand the dynamics of wonder from the perspective of the interlocutors they study." - Steve Derné (Asian Anthropology) "The Cow in the Elevator captures in lovely detail and theory-rich rumination, the evolution and dynamism of Hindu ritualism in modern Bangalore, calling attention to the unstable and creative dimensions of ritual, and the ethical possibilities and challenges it opens up within this rapidly changing city. Scholars of Hinduism and South Asian urbanism will find much to ponder in this book, as will anthropologists interested in ritual theory and practice." - Andrew C. Willford (Pacific Affairs) "I treasure The Cow in the Elevator for its sparkle and its positive news about hope and creativity in often bleak circumstances. Rich in original analytic insights, this book is not a tidy package but a cornucopia from which all kinds of sweet and bitter products may be extracted, tasted, consumed, and transformed: high-powered caloric fuel for interpretive intellectual energies. . . . Daring, insightful, and highly engaging, The Cow in the Elevator offers so much that its capacity to provoke unanswered questions in no way detracts from its invaluable qualities. Certainly, no other book on religion in urban India so effectively conveys the ways that ritual excess works wonders." - Ann Grodzins Gold (American Ethnologist) "In this intriguing and richly-textured book, Tulasi Srinivas immerses us in the world of contemporary Hindu ritual practice in Malleshwaram, a suburb of the South Indian city of Bangalore. . . . The Cow in the Elevator is a deeply insightful work that offers us a glimpse of the creativity and wonder that sustain Hindu ritual life in the concrete jungles of modern, neoliberal India." - Tracy Pintchman (Anthropos) "I found much of value in this book. . . . The writing displays a lively sense of wonder. The autoethnography is deft, and the homage to M. N. Srinivas, as father and anthropologist, very moving." - Soumhya Venkatesan (Anthropological Quarterly) "A stunning and provocative book.… Srinivas's experienced and eloquent prose gives this book a rare combination of provocativeness and accessibility.… The Cow in the Elevator provides an intensely real and nuanced account of urban life in the twenty-first century."  - Deonni Moodie (The Revealer)

• A Note on Translation  xiAcknowledgments  xiiiO Wonderful!  xixIntroduction. Wonder, Creativity, and Ethical Life in Bangalore  1Cranes in the Sky  1Wondering about Wonder  6Modern Fractures  9Of Bangalore's Boomtown Bourgeoisie  13My Guides into Wonder  16Going Forward  311. Adventures in Modern Dwelling  34A Cow in an Elevator  34Grounded Wonder  37And Ungrounded Wonder  39Back to Earth  41Memorialized Cartography  43"Dead-Endu" Ganesha  45Earthen Prayers and Black Money  48Moving Marble  51Building Wonder  56Interlude: Into the Abyss  582. Passionate Journeys: From Aesthetics to Ethics  60The Wandering Gods  60Waiting . . .  65Moral Mobility  69Gliding Swans and Bucking Horses  70The Pain of Cleaving  74And the Angry God  80Full Tension!  84Adjustments  86Life and . . .  91Ethical Wonders  92Interlude. Up in the Skyye  953. In God We Trust: Economies of Wonder and Philosophies of Debt  99A Treasure Trove  99Twinkling Excess  107The Golden Calf  111A Promise of Plenitude  114"Mintingu" and "Minchingu"  119"Cash-a-carda?" Philosophies of Debt  128Soiled Money and the Makings of Distrust  131The Limits of Wonder  1334. Technologies of Wonder  138Animatronic Devi  138Deus Ex Machina  140The New in Bangalore  142The Mythical Garuda-Helicopter  143Drums of Contention  152Capturing Divine Biometrics  157Archiving the Divine  159Technologies of Capture  162FaceTiming God  164Wonder of Wonders  1695. Timeless Imperatives, Obsolescence, and Salvage  172"Times have Changed"  172The Untimeliness of Modernity  175Avelle and Ritu  178Slipping Away  181When Wonder Falls  183Time Lords  187Dripping Time  188The Future, The Past, and the Immortal Present  204Conclusion. A Place for Radical Hope  206Radical Hope  206Amazement in Turmeric  210The Need for Wonder  213Afterword. The Tenacity of Hope  216Notes  219References  247Index  265