简介

I am interested in a wide range of South Asian religious traditions, and concentrate on the medieval and modern movements of northern India. Much of my work has focused on the culture of Braj, an active pilgrimage site known for its lively temple festivals, performative traditions, and literary creations. More recently I have shifted my research interests to include the ancient city of Banaras, a pilgrimage center and temple town located on the bank of the Ganges River. My approach combines both textual research and anthropological fieldwork. My Acting as a Way of Salvation (Oxford University Press, 1988) is an investigation of religious reality construction based on a close examination of a meditation technique devised by the theoreticians of Braj. I have published a book on the circular pilgrimage around Braj, entitled Journey Through the Twelve Forests (Oxford, 1994). This book contemplates the complexities of circular wanderings and different strategies for dealing with the tumultuous nature of desire as I take the reader on a spatial and mythological journey. I completed an annotated translation of a sixteenth-century Sanskrit text, The Bhaktirasamrtasindhu of Rupa Gosvamin (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2003), which presents the religious experience of bhakti in terms of classical Indian dramatic theory. My passion these days is for the field of Religion and Ecology; I am involved in developing this emerging field and am currently on the Advisory Board of the Forum on Religion and Ecology now based at Yale University School for Forestry and Environmental Studies. As a student of the religious cultures of India, I am interested in investigating the effects the current environmental degradation is having on the traditional religious culture which views the immanent world of nature as permeated with divine presence; I am also interested in learning how this traditional theology is being employed by Indian environmental activists to resist environmental degradation. My book River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (University of California Press, 2006) is a study of the Yamuna River, which for centuries has been worshiped as a goddess. In this book I explore various conceptions of this aquatic goddess with texts stretching back over a period of three millennia and current ethnographic research at a number of temples located on the banks of the river; I examine how the current pollution of the river is affecting the religious culture associated with it; and I track the manner in which the religious community associated with the river is marshalling its religious resources to fight the pollution of the river.