The co-edited project includes contributions from 13 authors on changing practices in India and beyond. Amy Allocco also contributed a chapter to the collection and co-authored the book’s Introduction.
Amy Allocco, professor of religious studies and director of the Multifaith Scholars program, has co-edited a new scholarly volume titled “Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices” with Xenia Zeiler of the University of Helsinki, Finland. The book brings together 13 chapters from an international roster of scholars located in Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America, offering fresh perspectives on two trends that are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.
“Sweetening” refers to the softening of deities’ iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists “intensification,” the insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges.
Individual chapters trace these currents across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Allocco’s own chapter, “Insistence, Persistence, and Resistance in Tamil Hindu Rituals to Call the Dead,” theorizes from a 2019 ritual performed for a deceased man named Ganapathy to consider how ancestors make their desires known through possession performances and demand particular offerings and practices—including alcohol, crematory ash/grave soil, and tongue-piercing—and argue that the dead’s steadfast refusal to be satisfied by anything but fierce practices and materials signals a deliberate resistance to the sweetening trends visible in many contemporary Tamil ritual contexts. Director of Elon’s Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society, Brian Pennington, contributed a chapter on local deities in the Indian Himalayas.
Allocco and Zeiler’s collaboration evolved over several years. In 2019, Allocco delivered a lecture titled “Ritual Relationships with the Dead in South Indian Hinduism” at the University of Helsinki at Zeiler’s invitation. During her time in Finland, they began conceiving a joint project focused on the categories of sweetening and intensification in contemporary Hinduism. The next year, the pair applied for and were awarded a Collaborative International Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion to begin a research project that would bring these two currents into sustained conversation.
They then convened a double panel under the title “Intensification vs. Sweetening? New Patterns in Contemporary Representation and Practice” at the 49th Annual Conference on South Asia in 2021. The two sessions brought together a diverse complement of scholars from Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States to consider this dialectic from different methodological, regional, and disciplinary perspectives. Allocco and seven other scholars presented papers across the two panels and the ensuing discussion helped to develop the theoretical framework for the planned publication. The resulting book highlights how sweetening and intensification processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.
Allocco and Zeiler were recently invited to participate in the New Books Network podcast on Indian Religions about their new book. The episode, hosted by Raj Balkaran, will be available here.