Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2018. xvii, 269 pp. (B&W photos.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-7079-6.
The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder, by Tulasi Srinivas, is a theoretically rich addition to the study of Bangalore, one of India’s fastest-changing megacities. Srinivas approaches Bangalore through the microcosm of Hindu ritual within one of the oldest and most Hindu- and Brahmin-dominated neighborhoods, Malleswaram. It is also the family neighborhood of Srinivas, who as the daughter of one of the eminent anthropologists of modern India, M.N. Srinivas, reflects considerably upon her subject position as an insider-outsider within this milieu. The author finds herself at home, but uncannily so, given that she is not properly najuka, or comfortable, with the highly aestheticized bodily comportment expected within this temple milieu.
Srinivas describes the “creative ethic” of ritual practice within temples in Malleswaram, finding even within a comparatively wealthy Hindu stronghold within the city, devotees who are experiencing the disorienting pace of changes in the neoliberal present. The ecological changes caused by the felling of trees in park-like areas, endless dust and noise wrought by construction, traffic jams—and a changing economy resulting in perpetual job-related stress—combine with perpetual shortages of water and power outages that threaten the older fabric of city life.
Srinivas provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of ritual practice that not only speaks to the chaos of daily life, but is, creatively, about “fracturing” this chaos and reenchanting a lifeworld as a means to reflect upon, embody, and create ethically driven lives that surmount the everyday. But, unlike the intellectualist emphasis on rationalized religion in periods of ideological strain, the author emphasizes the sensorial aspects of ritual, more than its coherence in theological terms. The “creative ethic” is actualized in doing, rather than as an intellectual pursuit. Srinivas, however, is also pointing to a critical work that ritual enables, noting the sense of loss that residents experience as their neighborhood changes. This is also generative of ideas of what has been lost, resulting in a virtual landscape that exists in the ritual making she describes. She argues that while much ritualization can evoke the familiar displacements of Western influence within neo-Hindu assertions of identity, the everyday production of wonder within temple ritual exceeds unitary political projects like religious nationalism.
Srinivas is aware that the precarity and chaos experienced in her middle-class neighborhood is of a different scale and type than that experienced in more distressed parts of the city, though her study offers little analysis of the larger structural and ideological fractures that threaten civility elsewhere in the city. Little hints throughout the book suggest religious (Hindu nationalism) and linguistic (Tamil and Kannada) fractures in the city. There are other wounds upon the city landscape that the author points to, such as black money and corruption, as well as religious fundamentalism, that threaten the fabric of urban civility. Srinivas, however, focuses on the wonder that assuages these strains, arguing that ritual is not merely an assertion of pastness, a compulsion to supplant change with the changeless, but, rather, a creative fracturing of reality itself—a critical and creative act in which the devotee is engaged in “ethical experiments.” One is left with the impression that inequities of class, caste, language, and religious fault lines deserve more attention. Srinivas is well aware of tension and wounds in the city but chooses to keep a focus upon the ritual acts themselves, rather than broaden the study historically, sociologically, or geographically.
In the middle chapters of the book, Srinivas argues that the rituals, and, specifically, temple processions, offer a “participatory theatre of emotions” as well as an avenue for “practical piety.” Processions interrupt the temporal displacements of the city, making morality mobile whilst re-inscribing the numinous on the sacred landscape. The emphasis here is on the sensorial wonderment and the rasa/bhava (flavor/moods) that are created within the shared emotive space created through ritual.
While wonderment within ritual is the main analytic, the cathartic dimensions of ritual and the social web it reinforces, is also emphasized, suggesting that the strain and tensions of modern life in Bangalore have fueled and animated the conspicuous and increasingly technologically enhanced rituals. The latter chapters explore excess (e.g., gold and cash garlands) and technologically enhanced forms of wonderment (e.g., helicopters, animatronic goddesses, drums, and lighting) as both part of a theology of “king-like” prosperity, as well as an emerging aesthetic of the sublime that builds upon Hindu theologies, but incorporates the chaos and grandeur of the neoliberal modern into its aesthetic, not solely as a prosperity gospel, but as an excess that indexes a reason beyond human reason, which, Srinivas argues, has always been a part of the temple traditions of South India, though creatively transformed in the new. As she puts it, the new modes of technology within ritual practice “harness the incoherence” and provide new “modes of attention” to it, whilst indexing a beyond that escapes coherence and closure. This, she argues, is not fetishism or textualism, but a modality of everyday ethics. This point lies in tension with another point, which she leaves unresolved: that the wealth and grandeur of the techno-spectacular also plays a role in further criminalizing the poor whilst tightening the middle-class nexus of wealth, status, and spirituality. Srivinas is non-judgmental on this front, sympathetic to her priest interlocutors and high-caste devotees, but also wary of this tightening nexus within urban India, in particular, and its relationship to Hindu nationalist politics.
Towards the end of the book, Srinivas explores the archive, following Derrida, to record the divine through digital photography, film, and the Internet. Here the temporal loop of the archive, in which the evidentiary base retroactively provides the illusory place of imagined origins is described. But, the archon-like quality of the archive (i.e., power) and the supplements (i.e. displacements) that necessarily support it, are left largely unexamined, leaving the reader to ponder its longer-term effects. This notwithstanding, 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
Cornell University, Ithaca, USA