The divine jurisdiction of Goludev, Lord of Justice (nyāy kā devtā) extends through the central Himalayan region of Kumaon. The deity's distinctive shrines are festooned with proliferating paper sheets bearing written petitions (sometimes on formal rupee-stamped paper) and also with massive, gleaming clusters of metal bells offered in thanks by those whose appeals were fulfilled. Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment portrays the complex of narratives and practices revolving primarily around Goludev as the Lord of Justice in Kumaon (and to a lesser extent a few other deities who are related to him or are, like him, also considered gods of justice). In conversation with this ethnographic context, Aditya Malik offers extended, personal, often lyrically written meditations on the meaning of justice in relation to the dense and often harsh constructions in which everyday lives are embedded.

Linking all that Goludev represents to larger questions about the human condition, Malik draws on his own experience; on phenomenological thought, particularly that of Heidigger as explicated by Macann; and on the shimmering insights offered in fragments of poetry and prose by such figures as Rilke, Bly, Stevens, Borges, and his uncle Keshav Malik. The theme of finding possibility threads through the book, with the thinking of teacher Werner Erhard cited in the acknowledgements and the book's first footnote. In a later footnote, Malik explains that the “book pursues a framework of simultaneity; that is past, present and future in the same dimension of the present moment” (p. 247). This helped explain jumps between years and tenses that I sometimes found disorienting. The occasional shift into what appeared to be unedited fieldnotes filled with seemingly tangential details, I realized, is perhaps a literary strategy intended to evoke the indeterminacy, density, and multistranded complexity of the unfolding everyday. The self, Malik argues, bears the capacity to move between “different genres of being-in-the-world” (p. xix), even as we are subject to multiple sources of agency from both human and nonhuman forces. Unexpected events can shake us free of our habitual frameworks. As we seek meaning—and justice in the widest sense of well-being—our very language, Malik argues, generates interpretive contexts that can blur a distinction between secular and divine forms of justice.

In the book's first chapter, Malik recounts his initial transformative encounter with the mountainous region of Kumaon and introduces the reader to the book's major themes. With suspenseful pacing, he also narrates three cataclysmic episodes of disruption to everyday life that he and close family members experienced while he was working on the book. A reader leaves this chapter viscerally reminded of how incomprehensible precarity extends around everyday life everywhere, and not just for those in Kumaon who make appeals at Goludev's shrine.

In characterizing this regional deity, Malik reproduces translated narratives from locally printed chapbooks and from ritual specialists. These recount suffering and redemption in Goludev's own life, the establishment of his regional temples, and accounts of his power manifest in colonial and more recent times. Further narratives of the people who seek Goludev's intervention are presented through examples of some of the many hundreds of written petitions (manauti, fariyād) to Goludev that Malik encountered in the deity's temples. Written in Hindi, in English, and in mixtures of both languages, each petition offers a window into a person's yearning for altered circumstances and for justice in resolutely difficult situations: taken as a whole, Malik argues, these letters may be viewed as an archive illuminating the plurality of everyday desires in contemporary India.

In addition to appealing to Goludev through formal writing, the deity is summoned into presence through incantations and dancing at jāgar nightly vigils where other related deities of justice might also manifest through a dancer's body. After offering an extended analytic discussion of theories about the phenomenon of possession that has been a recurring theme in the scholarship on South Asian religion, Malik describes a few of the jāgars he has attended, bringing a phenomenological perspective to bear on these events that entangle multiple, shifting points of view, including the scholar's, in a mutually transformative “swirl of worlds” (pp. 220–23).

Like many books written over an extended period, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment appears to have emerged into form through prior essays: five of the seven chapters are adapted and extended from other publications, and each chapter carries a separate bibliography. The book could be taught not just as a whole, but in selected chapters for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses on such topics as South Asian religion, the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of justice, and phenomenological anthropology.