Sweetening and Intensification

<p><b>Explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship myth and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.</b></p><p>This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions-namely sweetening and intensification. <i>Sweetening</i> is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies the standardization of religious narratives and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists <i>intensification</i> which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous visceral and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs often in response to new circumstances and challenges. This volume emphasizes an inclusive approach by bringing these two currents into sustained conversation. As Hindu traditions are increasingly expanding into new settings including but not limited to new diaspora and new media contexts the long-established yet ever changing scale of sweet/neutral/spicy unfolds in new ways as well. The essays in this volume delineate these developments across diverse Hindu geographic linguistic ethnic and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Indeed the volume's multidisciplinary approach shows how these processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations (re)interpretations and (re)constructions of Hindu deities practices narratives and symbols.</p>