Philip Lutgendorf

Hanuman's Tale

Hanuman, the Hindu monkey-god, is best known in the west for his role in the ancient epic Ramayana (he is also considered the tales first author), in which, as the devoted servant of Rama, the tales hero, he leads a ferocious monkey army to help defeat the evil Ravana and rescue Ramas wife Sita. But because he does not figure as prominently as others in the ancient Sanskrit texts that have traditionally been studied by western scholars, Hanuman has often been relegated to the status of minor deity. Philip Lutgendorf moves beyond these texts to examine Hindu popular literature, art, and ritual, and shows that Hanuman is perhaps the most beloved deity in the Hindu pantheon. Far from being a mere sidekick, Hanuman is worshipped widely in India and the diaspora, across lines of caste and sect. There are more temples devoted to Hanuman than to any other god or goddess, and there has even been something of a competition to erect the largest statue in his honor (the tallest so far, in Paritala, stands 135 feet high). Lutgendorf offers a comprehensive examination of this remarkable figure, exploring every facet of his legend. Drawing on an enormous treasure trove of previously untapped sources that he has gathered through years of fieldwork, as well as on interviews with devotees, he traces the history of Hanumans character, teases out the many variations on his story, and examines the sources of his enormous appeal.

Making tea in India Chai, capitalism, culture

This essay examines the process by which tea, a plant and product introduced into the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century as a colonial cash crop, became indigenized and popularized as chai, often regarded today as India’s ‘national drink’. This process mainly occurred during the 20th century and involved aggressive and innovative marketing by both British and Indian commercial interests, advances in the technology of processing Assam tea, and changes in social space and practice, especially in urban areas.

Jai Santoshi Maa Revisited

Cecil B. DeMille’s cynical adage, “God is box office,” may be applied to Indian popular cinema, the output of the world’s largest film industry, albeit with certain adjustments—one must pluralize and sometimes feminize the subject of the adage. The film genre known as “mythological” was present at the creation of the Indian feature film and has remained a hardy perennial of its vast output, yet it constitutes one of the least-studied aspects of this comparatively understudied cinema, cursorily dismissed (or more often ignored) by scholars and critics.2 Yet DeMille’s words also belie the fact that most mythologicals—like most commercial films of any genre— flop at the box office. The comparatively few that have enjoyed remarkable and sustained acclaim hence merit study both as religious expressions and as successful examples of popular art and entertainment.

Evolving a monkey Hanuman, poster art and postcolonial anxiety

Hanuman, simian sidekick to the principal human hero of the Ramayana tradition, has evolved within comparatively recent times into one of the most popular and ubiquitous of Hindu deities. He is revered by tens of millions as their ishta-deva or ‘chosen, personal deity’, and his shrines have proliferated in both urban and rural areas. The visual representation of this deity has likewise evolved conventions that, through the mass reproduction and gradual homogenisation characteristic of 20th century popular art, have crystallised in a number of readily-recognisable icons. After briefly surveying the range of Hanumans historical representations, this essay focuses on a subset of 20th century images in which the divine monkey appears as afurless, humanised, and (of late) heavily-muscled hero with only vestigial simian characteristics, and situates these images within the context of a number of contemporary trends in popular visual culture. Finally, it attempts to link this new visual convention to a widespread body of discourse concerning the ‘scientific’ rationalisation and historicisation of Hindu sacred legend.

Two dances and a conference

A symposium on ‘The Evolution of Song and Dance in Hindi Cinema’ was held at California’s Sonoma State University in April 2017. Organized by Rajinder Dudrah and Ajay Gehlawat, its presentations, which generated the articles featured in this special issue of SAPC, offered an array of new perspectives on this cinema’s musical and choreographic dimensions, with notable and especially welcome attention given to the latter. For despite general agreement among scholars of popular Hindi cinema that the presence of music and dance is one of its trademark features, scholarship on this formidable entertainment industry has often focused on its narratives as texts, and to a lesser extent on acting, camerawork, and mise-en-scène – largely ignoring the music and dance sequences that may constitute as much as a third of a film’s running time, or even dismissing them as insignificant add-ons or ‘spectacles’ of emotional excess (see, e.g. Prasad; Dissanayake and Sahai). And if song itself has been (to venture a pun) downplayed in most Indian cinema scholarship, the films’ choreographic component has usually been still more overlooked. This is perhaps natural given that most film and cultural studies scholars lack specialized training in musicology (or the emerging discipline of ‘choreomusicology’ highlighted in Usha Iyer’s contribution), and though two ethnomusicologists who presented at the symposium have produced important books on Hindi cinema (Beaster-Jones; Booth), scholars (like me) who lack such training are often painfully aware of their inability to effectively analyze in musical terms what is going on in song/dance sequences. In bringing together eminent ethnomusicologists with other scholars who write on Bombay cinema and with two whose work focuses on dance and its practitioners, the symposium demonstrated the potential richness of a more wholistic approach to (what one participant called) the ‘layered assemblage’ of Hindi films. It was thus, especially, appropriate that the academic presentations were bracketed by two dance performance events happily arranged to coincide with the symposium – a screening

Ritual reverb: Two ‘blockbuster’ Hindi films

This essay re-examines a highly successful and much discussed film of the mid-1970s, Jai Santoshi Maa, along with a comparably celebrated hit released two decades later, Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! Theorizing that the unexpected success of both these films may lie in their structuring around popular forms of ritual, it situates each in the context of its production and reception and considers the nature and implications of some of the forms of participatory practice that each film, at very different historical moments, encouraged.

The Life of a Text; Performing of the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas.

The Life of a Text offers a vivid portrait of one communitys interaction with its favorite text--the epic Ramcaritmanas--and the way in which performances of the epic function as a flexible and evolving medium for cultural expression. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and readers interested in the culture of North India and the performance arts will find breadth of subject, careful scholarship, and engaging presentation in this unique and beautifully illustrated examination of Hindi culture. The most popular and influential text of Hindi-speaking North India, the epic Ramcaritmanas is a sixteenth century retelling of the Ramayana story by the poet Tulsidas. This masterpiece of pre-modern Hindi literature has always reached its largely illiterate audiences primarily through oral performance including ceremonial recitation, folksinging, oral exegesis, and theatrical representation. Drawing on fieldwork in Banaras, Lutgendorf breaks new ground by capturing the range of performance techniques in vivid detail and tracing the impact of the epic in its contemporary cultural context.

Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre.

This study deals with Ayodhya, a Hindu pelgrimage centre in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Its subject is, however, not pilgrimage or pilgrims. My research focusses on those who reside in Ayodhya rather then its visitors. By offering an interpretative description of the life histories of religious specialists -monks and priests- and of the institutions that tie them together, I intend to analyse the main forces that mould religious identity and experience.