Religious Journeys in India

Andrea Marion Pinkney is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions at McGill University. John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He is the coeditor (with Gary Storhoff) of many books, including The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature; American Buddhism as a Way of Life; Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century; and Buddhism and American Cinema, all published by SUNY Press. He is also the author of Tibet on Fire: Buddhism, Protest, and the Rhetoric of Self-Immolation.

"The strengths of this book are its broad cross-cultural and interdisciplinary purview, its theoretical sophistication, its questioning of conventional understandings of pilgrimage, and a credible index … Religious Journeys in India is recommended for both undergraduate and graduate courses in religious pilgrimage, religious tourism, theories of religion, and transnational flows of spiritual traditions." — Nova Religio"Given the breadth of theme, chapters from this book will be of interest to a wide variety of scholars of South Asia." — Reading Religion"It's rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars' engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide." — John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: New Motivations for Religious Travel in IndiaAndrea Marion Pinkney and John Whalen-BridgePart I. Constructing Community Spaces 1. Making Sacred Islamic Space in Contemporary IndiaCarla Bellamy2. Remaking Thai Buddhism through International Pilgrimage to South AsiaJoanna Cook3. Augmenting Pilgrimages: A Religious Theme Park in Shegaon, India Kiran A. ShindePart II. Pilgrimage as Paradox 4. Appropriating Ayodhya on "Valor Day": Hindu Nationalism and Pilgrimage as PoliticsDibyesh Anand5. Bihar as Christian Anti-Pilgrimage Site: Missions, Evangelism, and Religious GeographyRobbie Goh6. Seeking the Self in a Land of Strangers: New Religiosity and the Spiritual Marketplace of RishikeshAlex Norman7. Proxy Pilgrimage: Seeing Tibet in Dharamsala, IndiaJohn Whalen-BridgePart III. Reversals and Revisions 8. The Power of the "Little Hajj": Memory, Ritual, and Pilgrimage in South Indian IslamAfsar Mohammad9. What Are Sikhs Doing at "Historical Gurdwaras" If They’re Not on Pilgrimage? Saints, Dust, and Memorial Presence at Sikh Religious Places Andrea Marion Pinkney 10. "Reverse Pilgrimage": Performance, Manipuri Identity, and the RanganiketanCultural Arts TroupeRodney Sebastian11. Imagined Place: Missionary Women’s Journeys in Southern IndiaRoberta WollonsContributorsIndex