Twentieth-century expectations for the increasing secularization of public space and the retreat of religion to the private sphere have been contradicted by the myriad ways in which religion has emerged afresh in politics, legal systems, and everyday life. Religious communities have harnessed new technologies and notions of belonging enabled by the conditions of urban growth and transnational connectivity. The two monographs considered in this review essay examine the abiding centrality of religion in India's modern cities, situated in two particular metropolitan areas, Bangalore and Kolkata.Footnote ¹ They consider a range of individuals who have transformed the ways that Hindu temples and religious rituals engage with their modern surroundings—as Deonnie Moodie notes, “Indianizing modernity rather than simply modernizing India.”

Both Tulasi Srinivas and Moodie center their studies on the urban Indian middle classes who have catalyzed the refashioning of temple spaces and temple-based rituals, and, from different angles, both depict ways that urban public spaces and changing religious practices are interrelated. Their studies join a growing field of scholarship assessing the renewed centrality of religious institutions to the character of neighborhoods and, for many, the imagination of modern Indian cities themselves. Yet these studies also provide intriguing contrasts, partly grounded in their respective locations of focus and methodological approaches.

In The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City, Moodie embarks on a precise, carefully focused study of the Kalighat Temple in Kolkata. Analyzing assertions that it is the oldest and most religiously powerful temple in the city, she considers the symbolic value that the temple came to hold for certain members of Calcutta's Hindu intelligentsia throughout the past century, elucidating its representation of varying notions of the city, Bengaliness, and modernity. Through this account of the long century between the 1890s and the 1990s and into the twentieth century, Moodie examines the evolving nature and composition of middle-class identity, from the burgeoning Anglophone bhadralok of the late nineteenth century to the current globalized elite of entrepreneurs, business managers, and information technology professionals who make up a new upper middle class (pp. 105–6). Moodie successfully combines her historical research with ethnographic explorations, including a consideration of acts of resistance to these shifting power dynamics by those outside their purview: temple beggars, vendors, traditional Brahmin custodians of the temple, and those patrons who eschew the Vaisnavizing reforms that critique animal sacrifice and Tantric practices as suitable modes of religious expression.

Moodie intertwines historical and legal analysis of the changes that middle-class citizens have had over Kalighat's functioning. In fashioning themselves as representatives of “the public,” they have harnessed modern understandings of public space and civic accountability—in alliance with judges, lawyers, and civic bodies—to fundamentally shift the temple's power structures. Moodie's study parallels other closely focused analyses of temple sites as a lens through which to view a broader community in flux.Footnote ² However, Moodie anchors her theoretical contributions to the study of publics and the middle class in urban India. Building on the work of Mary Hancock, Joanne Punzo Waghorne, and Christiane Brosius, Moodie analyzes the development of what she unpacks as modernizing projects at Kalighat. She traces the gradual ascendency of a middle class who seek to change the temple to accord with modernizing idioms of order, cleanliness, rationality, and democracy, subtly displacing earlier idioms of purity, divine power, and the valor of aristocratic lineages (p. 3). She also interrogates the role of Kolkata's middle class in constructing and claiming this “public” as their realm, as harnessed by and for elites, and the implications of this new form of civic power on the temple space. It both democratizes and orders to an extent that may endanger the temple's effervescent appeal. This has class-based implications, as the “gentrification” of these renovation efforts necessitates the removal of populations and practices to make room for the kinds of spaces that middle-class groups want to frequent (p. 20).

Moodie's study is steeped in the Bengali cultural landscape of Kolkata, which balances the legacy of British colonialism with contemporary aspirations for neoliberal, globalized success, defined in relation to transnational conversations about the “world-class city” (p. 35). Yet she perceives more aspiration than arrival in the depictions of the contemporary city. By contrast, Srinivas's study, The Cow in the Elevator, situates similar themes of Hindu religiosity and urban, middle-class identity in relation to Bangalore's booming growth and relative centrism, within India, in a global capitalist economy. In that context, Srinivas invites us into an expansive, immersive ethnographic study of the concept of “wonder” at play in the Hindu rituals and temple spaces within a city often defined by its postindependence technological expansion. She shows that religious rituals have not disappeared from public spaces in this rapidly growing city, but rather, against expectations of growing secularism, there has been remarkable growth of ritual acts due to the “boomtown bourgeoisie” (p. 15).

While both studies consider themes of middle-class urban religion, Srinivas charts a different methodological route, centered on an ethnography that weaves together almost two decades of fieldwork. Her sites of research include two temples in the neighborhood of Malleshwaram—one dedicated to Krishna and the other to Ganesh. However, her ethnographic examination extends to the entire neighborhood, from its newly constructed high-rises and luxury rooftop bars, to its traditional bungalows and excavations of ancient temple architecture, to property acquisitions by private, often legally dubious actors. In this modern setting, religious festivals are interwoven into public space and are everyday occasions for the expression of myriad South Indian regional cultures, including a linguistic fluidity that spans Tamil, Kannada, Hindi, and English.

Srinivas positions her contribution in relation to ritual studies, centering the concept of wonder and developing an anthropology of wonder, “an ethnography of amazement,” that analyzes ritual in relation to emotion, ethics, and creativity. Her study provides a persuasive intervention in ritual studies, in response to decades-long scholarly conversations ranging from Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz to Catherine Bell and Robert Orsi, among others. Srinivas argues that wonder is apparent in everyday ritual in Bangalore and that it reflects moments of creativity that occur sporadically but then sediment and become instituted in the ritual (p. 4). In this thesis, creativity and sedimentation are inextricable, as “rupture-capture,” and Srinivas positions vivid examples of such ritual creativity to center the change, fluidity, and chaos in ritual instead of assumptions about its fixity or domesticating influence (p. 148). This has broader implications for how we view religion in modern cities, by contesting that tradition and creativity are opposed to each other. Rather, drawing from Antoinette DeNapoli's conceptualization of “experimental Hinduism,” Srinivas argues that Hindu rituals in particular allow a central place for experimentation, and, indeed, creativity is required for “traditions” to survive (pp. 15, 170).

Srinivas's decades of research allow for a palpable tracing of ritual changes and their relation to changing cultural and technological norms in Malleshwaram's temples. She charts, for instance, the shift from strict prohibition of “capturing” the image of the deity on camera to the ubiquitous spread of the iPhone and rise of deity close-up pictures posted on Facebook for mass viewing.

In a fascinating contrast with Moodie's focus on the salaried Anglophone middle classes as a source of modernist change in Kalighat, Srinivas centers the Brahmin priests as the sources of change in Malleshwaram. If, in Moodie's focus in Kalighat, religion is reformed through the arms of institutions (courts, temple boards, etc.), for Srinivas, it is malleable by a more informal range of “localities.” One might point out that Srinivas's main ethnographic interlocutors happen to be older Brahmin men and their implicit centering makes visible only a limited range of agency within the city. However, Srinivas makes a compelling case to extract temple priests from the categorization of staid tradition, and this is a richly textured ethnography, with unusual depth and vivid interlocutors. She also develops a candid self-reflexivity throughout the book, drawing the reader into her process of grappling with her identity as a researcher and her acquisition of a new understanding of “what it means to be a middle-class and high-caste Tamil woman.”

Srinivas's illuminating intertwining of the personal and professional is perhaps most striking in her extension of the work of her father, M. N. Srinivas, to her own argument. Alongside this, personal reflections fuse family intimacy with the ethnographic process. The description of rituals performed (and attended via Facetime) for her mother on the eve of a surgery inserts Srinivas in her discussion of the creative changes occurring through the priests’ ritual experimentation with technology, illustrating her argument through a uniquely integrated approach.

Although beyond the scope of both scholars’ nuanced, focused contributions, I was left wondering how their subjects’ visions of the city relate to those of other residents. Specifically, how might forms of Hindu-centered Indian modernity not only contest British narratives of the history of Indian urban space, as in Moodie's analysis, but also elide non-Hindu and nonelite groups from laying claim to a history in the city? The conflation of a city and its devout Hindu population has profound implications for imaginations of locality and nation in contemporary India, and the implicitly Hindu character of these agents’ construction of “the public” seems no more natural than their exclusion of nonelite classes in that construction.Footnote ³ For instance, the movement of Kalighat into the space of public state regulation implicitly assumes that both judges and the representatives of “the public” outlined in the temple committee membership rules, including the vice chancellor of Calcutta University, will happen to be savarna Hindus (p. 93).

In tandem with the development of ideas about the temple as a public institution, Moodie examines how emerging discourses of international tourism and modernist aesthetic values have guided decisions for how to expand the temple's footprint and the character of adjoining neighborhood structures. For Kolkata's globalized elite middle class, an attitude of national competition toward modern cities in the Global North informs new priorities for the reform of Kalighat and its surroundings. This introduces an element of the neoliberal, global context into the longer trajectory of Moodie's work.

Srinivas situates her study of Hindu rituals more at length in the space of neoliberal modernity, as a source of “social hope” necessary in neoliberal reality and a “key to anti-alienation, to a sense of feeling and being ‘at home’ in the modern world” (p. 8). Srinivas innovatively charts this as a “shifting discourse from the wonder of nature to the wonder of the built form” (p. 40). Representative ritual experimentations range from “Kasu Ganesh” (money Ganesh), a “new avatar in a time of capitalism,” conceived by the priest Dandu Shastri (p. 101), to a robotic Devi who can thrust her trident into Mahishasura with technological precision (p. 128). While ornamentation and the conspicuous display of wealth on temple altars are nothing new, Srinivas draws attention to their neoliberal transformations through the ways an aspiration for wealth—even in excess—is reflected in new ritual forms, including Ganesh's “money alankaram.” Creative reconceptions of Hindu rituals in the pursuit of wonder provide both a way to contend with the loss of the familiar and a generative way of living in the world (pp. 44, 73). Yet the process of “conscripting capitalist bewitchment” to a ritual wonder also conveys the precarity of the middle class in the neoliberal global capitalist economy (p. 6). Moreover, wonder produced by fixation on wealth and status can strengthen class and caste disparities, providing subterfuge for what one might call a “prosperity dharma” in the temple's devotional space.

While Moodie focuses on discourses of “the public” as harnessed by particular members of emerging middle classes and the state, Srinivas charts the dynamism of “wonder” within the very institutional religious spaces that Moodie's subjects seek to reform. The studies intersect through different visions of the broad shift of power in Hindu temples over the twentieth century, from hereditary, Brahmin-led management to state-led, court-supervised authority. Moodie details the actors who affected this transformation in Kolkata, while Srinivas presents the perspective of the temple priests, who have been impacted by what one, tearfully, calls a government takeover of his temple, highlighting the transformation of the conception of temple land from “gift to the gods” to “capitalist value.” Yet at the same time, both studies provide spaces for considering resistance to this new order—through the everyday evasions of court orders by Kalighat's priests and beggars and through the generative creativity of Malleshwaram's priests in orchestrating divine wonder in the city's modern spaces.

These studies provide a welcome, textured focus on the central place of Hindu religiosity in contemporary urban Indian landscapes, highlighting the dynamism with which rituals and the organization of temple spaces are experienced—not as static “tradition” but as entities that reflect and speak to the changing realities surrounding them. Both monographs are written in vivid, engaging language and would be suitable for specialists, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students alike. Moodie's clear explanations of technical terms and careful framing of her topic blends with a sophisticated contribution to developing notions of “middle class” and “public” and their process of co-constitution. Srinivas's captivatingly personal accounts and contribution to ritual studies convincingly persuades the reader to both rethink conceptions of ritual fixity, conveying the wonder of traditions’ malleability through the creative agency of individuals.