"Pacifying the Bewitched and Besotted: The Role of Banke Bihari's Adornment"
Indrani Maharaj, UC Davis, Ph.D. Student
Shringara (adornment) is generally understood as an act of love by the devotee, a way in which the devotee can enjoy and offer reverence to the body of god and for god to reveal his/her beauty. The adornment of Banke Bihari in Vrindavan offers a different perspective on the purpose of adornment. In this paper, I will use legends, narratives from the 16th century, about the body of Banke Bihari to argue that in this case, adornment works to conceal and veil, for the naked, unadorned body is understood by devotees to be too beautiful to be beheld. The icon charms devotees rendering them crazed by love and devoid of sense of self. To contain the icon’s unfathomable beauty, shringara covers the body and darshana (auspicious viewing) is done through jhankis (stolen glances) reaffirming Banke Bihari’s adornment as a way to protect devotees from insanity. Drawing on visual culture theory and the politics of the gaze, I examine how the ritual culture of devotional gaze at Banke Bihari's temple creates a paradox in which the act of seeing is simultaneously enabled and withheld. Such ritual culture transforms darshana into a carefully mediated practice of controlled vision.
"The Enigma of the Mirror-Faced God"
Layne Little, UC Davis
Two examples of an exceptionally rare iconic form can be found in the Patan Museum in Kathmandu, Nepal, identified in the museum caption as an esoteric personal deity or iṣṭa-devatā. Eventually, the museum director amended the caption to identify these images as representing the clan deity (kuladevatā). What distinguishes these from all other religious icons in the region is that they present a crowned deity framed by an elaborately decorated prabhāvali or makara torana archway, but these gods are faceless. Instead, their featureless faces are a mirror-like expanse of polished copper or brass set beneath an ornate five lobed crown. The shift in the museum’s classification helps situate the use of this form of icon within the context of formal ritual worship of the kuladevatā known as kul pujā, or what Newar Hindus and Buddhists refer to as digu pujā. Normally the ancestral deity of a given community will be represented in an aniconic form as a simple stone (śila ) taken from one’s ancestral village. Presumably these faceless images would have been placed in front of the śila to lend a face (of sorts) to the simple stone icon for the biannual observances of kul or digu pujā. In this paper, I explore the relationship between the iconic-faceless image and the aniconic and also faceless image. Can we see the iconic, but faceless image as adornment, a way to embody the aniconic god? Or is it meant to invoke similitude between the clan devotee and clan god, with the devotee seeing their own face in the reflective surface of the mirror? If so, can we regard the devotee as adorning the god, who functions as a cipher, reflecting back the devotees to themselves.
“How to Decorate the Invisible? Hindu Aniconism and the Mystery of the Many Tamil Empty Shrines”
David Monteserin Narayana, Stanford University, Religious Studies
Hinduism is routinely associated with the practice of darśan, following Diana Eck’s groundbreaking study: deities must be seen to be effective, and they are embodied in icons or mūrtis that are then adorned in multifarious ways. Yet in Tamil Nadu, some deities are often formless and their shrines strikingly empty. The Śiva liṅga is said to represent Śiva’s formlessness, and liṅga worship has been the main focus of studies on Hindu aniconism. However, in some instances, Śiva is not only formless but also empty, and this emptiness is materialized through an empty shrine displaying no liṅga, or only a pedestal. What happens then, and what does this mean? During my Fulbright-Nehru Graduate Fellowship, I traveled throughout Tamil Nadu and discovered that this practice is widespread. I initially focused on the famous Naṭarāja temple at Chidambaram, where Śiva is worshipped as space within an empty room. My travels, however, led me to many shrines exhibiting similar patterns of invisibility and emptiness: an unstudied, living tradition of Hindu aniconism, in which the deity is worshipped as a formless presence without a liṅga or mūrti. This phenomenon involves not only Śiva and his consort in Dravidian stone temples (as in Māṇikkavācakar’s Avuṭaiyār Kōvil), but also local Tamil goddesses such as Māriyammaṉ, also called Ākāśa (space) in Kumbakonam, where she is worshipped as a candlelight with no material icon. My talk will propose a framework and a possible textual basis for understanding this phenomenon.
"Textiles in Stone: Decoration, Ornament, and the Material Economy of Gandhara"
Izzah Khan, University of Texas at Austin, Art History
Gandharan Buddhist narrative reliefs formed a central component of the decorative programs that adorned stupas across the northwestern Indian subcontinent. Among their most striking yet understudied features is the repeated and elaborate depiction of patterned bed linens, woven blankets, and textile-covered platforms within key episodes from the life of the Buddha. Unlike other South Asian sculptural traditions, where textiles appear primarily as bodily drapery, Gandharan narrative reliefs uniquely monumentalize decorated textile surfaces within architectural ornament. This paper argues that such imagery was neither incidental nor purely decorative but constituted a deliberate ornamental strategy embedded within the visual and economic life of the region. I propose that Gandhara’s distinctive emphasis on textile ornament reflects its historical position as a major center of textile production and exchange linking South Asia with Central Asia and the Mediterranean. Literary references, Greco-Roman travel accounts, and archaeological evidence for early cotton cultivation, dyeing, and block-printing traditions extending from the Indus Valley into Gandhara and Uḍḍiyāna (Swat) attest to a deep regional textile history and export economy. Situated along Silk Route corridors, Gandhara developed thriving industries in cotton, wool, silk, and embroidery that shaped patterns of patronage and regional identity. Through close visual analysis of narrative reliefs as architectural decoration, this paper demonstrates that carved bed textiles functioned as ornamental intermediaries linking sacred narrative, viewer devotion, donor identity, and craft prestige. Gandharan stupa decoration thus reveals how ornament operated as an active agent, mediating between economy, devotion, and visual culture, and transforming textiles into one of the most conceptually charged decorative forms in Buddhist art.
"Karmic Hierarchies and Spectacular Femininities: The Paradox of Trans Recognition in Thai Theravada Buddhism and Public Society"
Kayley Whalen, aka Cael Leigh, UC Davis, Anthropology
Thai trans feminine people known as kathoeys have long occupied visible roles in celebrations tied to the Theravada Buddhist calendar. As ritual performers, kathoeys help stage public expressions of Thai-ness that intertwine nationalism and Buddhist tradition. These festival performances gave rise to contemporary kathoey cabarets and beauty pageants, spectacular arenas in which trans femininity is celebrated as cultural heritage. Yet this visibility exists alongside moral stratification. Within popular interpretations of Buddhist karmic rebirth, being born kathoey is often understood as the consequence of sexual impropriety in a previous life, positioning kathoeys lower than cisgender men (phuu-chai) and cisgender women (phuu-ying) within karmic hierarchies. This moral framing both constrains and enables: kathoeys are marked as spiritually deficient, yet granted performative license to enact extravagant femininities deemed improper for phuu-ying. Beyond the stage, however, legal and social inequalities persist, including limited protections from discrimination and the inability to amend gender markers on state documents. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Thailand between 2019 and 2024, including participating in Thailand’s Miss International Queen trans pageant, this paper examines how kathoeys navigate the paradox of trans recognition: celebrated as ritual and national icons while denied full religious and civic equality. It argues that spectacular femininity becomes a site through which karmic hierarchy is simultaneously reproduced and contested in Thai public society.
"Patterns of Piety: Decorative Form and Abstract Meaning in Jain Sacred Wall Hangings"
Lynna Dhanani, UC Davis, Religion
This paper will discuss how decoration on nineteenth and twentieth-century Jain choḍ paṭas or sacred walling hangings delineate abstract conceptions of devotion and the marvelous in intentional ways that guide the viewer along the multiple registers of the textile. Decoration creates meaning on landscapes and hints at other aspects of Jain visual culture, such as manuscript painting. Eye-catching works of velvet and sateen cloth lavishly embroidered with gold and silver gilt thread, choḍ shine with visual references to Jain mythology, influential spiritual teachers, sacred sites, ritual traditions, and other prominent religious themes. Historically significant textiles arising from seventeenth- to twentieth-century South Asian trade, local artistic production, and diverse religious patronage, these sacred wall hangings adorn places of worship at various religious institutions in India as well as the homes, shrines, and temples of Jain immigrant communities in the West.
"When Light Adorns a Mountain: The Presence of Yogaville's Kailash Staircase"
Amy-Ruth Holt, Independent Scholar
Many temples are built on mountain tops in the Indian tradition that are reached through staircases. The staircase renders the movement of walking up the mountain a transcendent act that symbolically ties these temples to the heavenly mountain abodes of Hindu deities. Such staircases can be found on diaspora temples throughout the world, including Yogaville in Buckingham County, Virginia. Founded in 1980, Yogaville is the ashram of the Tamil guru, Swami Satchidananda Saraswati (1914-2002), who oversaw its main construction. After much complaint about the tiresome walk up the hillside, his followers added this staircase after his death to connect his three temples; the Lotus Temple at the hill's base, the Chidambaram Temple on the hillside, and the Kailash Temple at its summit. Without this staircase, the arrangement of these temples would appear discordant and are difficult to travel between. But with it, not only are these temples easier to visit consecutively, they clearly illustrate the main philosophic teaching of Swami Satchidananda on Universal Light. When practicing yoga, he described this divine light (or shakti) as activating the chakras of the body from the base of the torso to the crown of the head to reach a state of enlightenment –– sat (Truth), chid (Consciousness), ananda (Bliss). The staircase, in this way, forms a pathway for this light on earth, where the Lotus Temple represents the base chakra (sat), the Chidambaram Temple the heart chakra (chid), and the Kailash Temple the crown chakra (ananda). Walking up these steps recreates the internal journey of this light on the external landscape, allows access to the guru's teachings through embodied practice, and continually adorns the temple mountainside with his divine light and presence. Sometimes it is the afterthought, an addition, or an adornment, perhaps not planned by the original guru or architect, which brings everything together. It is the missing key that unlocks the meaning of the structure; this is what the modern staircase at Yogaville represents.
"Seeing through the Mind’s Eye: Adornment Beyond Indexicality in Āḻvār Poetry"
Malavika Kannan, UC Davis, Religion
This paper examines how Āḻvār poetry envisions decoration and adornment of temple deities, highlighting the interplay between verbal and visual icons. While Āḻvār poems often reference specific temples and their surrounding landscapes, they rarely provide indexical descriptions of the main fixed idol of the deities, or their adornments. Instead, they create imaginative descriptions of the deity’s ornamentation, thus generating verbal icons that capture a devotional experience. Drawing on close readings of selected poems along with temple and ritual practices of adornment, this paper explores how poets such as Kulaśekhara Āḻvār, Nammāḻvār, and Tirumaṅgai Āḻvār responded uniquely to the same site, producing diverse visions of the adorned deity. This paper argues that in Āḻvār bhakti poetry, temples function not as objects of literal description but as catalysts that transform darśana into interior anubhava, and generate verbal icons that are reactionary and imaginative rather than indexical to the physical site. This enables the poem to exceed the physical temple it names. The paper expands on how the specificity of temple and adornment is not an end but a means for transcendence, where reference to the site propels the devotee from the temporal world into the eternal. It also briefly introduces the readers to how later ritual traditions invert this trajectory, re-visualizing and embodying these poetic worlds, such that the previous non-indexical descriptions have become part of temple ornamentation.
"Saris and the Sal Tree: Decoration and Ritual Practice in Jharkhand’s Spring Festivals"
Linda Saraswati Klausner, University of Tartu, Folkloristics, and Åbo Akademi University
Across Indigenous Adivasi spring festivals in Jharkhand, sari aesthetics – pattern, color, and drape – make distinctive group identities recognizable. At the same time, the sari is highly versatile, ranging from festival attire to a surface for receiving offerings and, in some contexts, ritual dress for the sacred Sal trunk. Following the sari’s changing address across human and other-than-human domains, my guiding question is: how far do the boundaries of decoration and adornment extend in ritual life? Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in Ramgarh and Hazaribagh districts, I begin with the Santali observance of Baha Parab at the jaherthan (sacred grove). I focus on two vernacular, embodied actions that make spring’s “newness” tangible: women receive consecrated Sal leaves and flowers into the folded front of their saris – held against the body, then worn in hair or behind the ear – and festival time may include embraces with the Sal tree itself. As a planned extension in Ranchi, I will also observe the Oraon community’s Sarhul festival, where the traditional red-and-white sari may be draped on the Sal trunk as ritual adornment. Set alongside Baha Parab, the contrast lies in address: in one, cloth gathers offerings and sari-clad women encircle the tree; in the other, cloth is directed to the tree itself. I draw on fieldnotes, interviews with ritual performers, elders, and women participants, and sensory documentation. Engaging folkloristics with material approaches to lived religion, I read decoration as a practice of recognition and relation, made tangible in the sari’s versatility as ornament and instrument.
"Adivasi Adornment and Aesthetics as an Assertion of Synthesis"
Maharshi Vyas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
What does it mean when members of Adivasi (Indigenous tribal) communities gather in distinctive traditional clothing, ornaments, and other material markers of visible difference to participate in a public devotional ceremony? Scholarship on Adivasi performative traditions rightly suggests that the adoption of traditional dress and material culture marks a clearly visible assertion of tribal or Indigenous difference (Alles 2012, Middleton 2015, Elison 2018). Building on these works, this paper argues for a form of difference and visibility grounded in a desire for synthesis of two distinct worlds. In the devotional gathering examined here—the Adivasi Samuh Lagna (collective wedding ceremony) organized by the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha in Gujarat—Bhil Adivasis seek to synthesize two seemingly contradictory worlds that many simultaneously inhabit: one of Adivasi traditionalism and the other of modern Hindu devotionalism. The ceremony, which took place in 2023, involved one hundred Adivasi couples who wedded simultaneously. The traditional dresses, turbans adorned with LED-lit ornaments, music, and dance—performed before and throughout the ritual—bring together Adivasi difference and Hindu devotional belonging. Although the event’s structure may suggest carefully staged participation, moments of spontaneity—when participants break into collective dancing with the guru and flash LED-lit ornaments—problematize this assumption. The ceremony shows that Bhil Adivasi adornment functions as a deliberate practice of public visibility before a largely middle-class, non-Adivasi devotional audience. I propose the concept of “adornment as an assertion of synthesis,” whereby modern decorative excess signals difference while claiming recognition and acceptance within expanding Hindu devotional publics.
"Performances in Stone: Architectural Adornment, Natural Landscapes, and Sanskrit Drama in Medieval India"
Tamara Sears, Rutgers, New Brunswick
This paper explores new ways of engaging architectural sculpture and ornamentation, with a particular investment in the performative nature of friezes encircling medieval Indian temples. Most scholarly on temple imagery focuses on the āvaraṇa-devatās that evoked the emanation of the enshrined deity along the main projections of the temple wall. Instead, I focus on the figures occupying the basement moldings and subsidiary niches, which have more often been treated cursorily as either purely decorative ornament or generic scenes of everyday “secular” life. Instead I suggest that such images are best explored through two other lenses. The first is through the lens of Sanskrit drama and performance, through which coded tropes in literature were also enacted visually through the temple wall. In such cases, I suggest that the bodies of sculpted figures would have resonated with the bodies of actors at court. I consider the significance of comportment and bodily practices and the emergence of shared gestural “languages” operating across text and image. The second is through the relationship between temples and their living landscapes. For example, I suggest that depictions of soldiers and courtiers in procession through dense forests may have resonated with conditions of travel as experienced by those visiting a distant pilgrimage temple. In other cases, they may have meaningfully engaged real world flora and fauna, harmonizing the temple with its natural environment. Through my examples, I play with the notion of adornment as something that moved on and beyond the temple walls through embodied experience and performance.
"Visvakarma Master of Fine Handicrafts"
Rebecca Manring, Indiana University, Religious Studies
Viśvakarma the divine architect built Lanka, he built Yama’s palace, he built Varuṇa’s underwater palace, he made the flying chariot Puṣpaka and others; these things we know from the purāṇas. Less known is his role in creating various handicrafts. In Rūparāma Cakravartī’s 17th-century Dharma-maṅgala, the god designs and creates a heroine’s wedding finery. And he crafts the shield her heroic son will use in his battles to establish the worship of Lord Dharma. Though the two projects are quite different, the products of both are otherworldly. Viśvakarma covers the upper garment Rañjāvatī wears, of the most expensive silk, in exquisite embroidery depicting such tales as the dāna-līlā and the rāsa-līlā. And he adds whole flocks of cuckoos, crows, wagtails, mynahs, skylarks, owls, and gallinules, and herds of deer. He similarly covers the hero’s shield (which is not much over a meter in diameter) in illustrations. Here he etches several stories from each of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. After all that he adds beautiful flowers, a leaping tiger, a lion atop an elephant, and many sorts of birds. A cormorant swoops over the river and grabs a fish. And finally the artisan turns to the contemporary setting of the epic. He adds the Gauḍeśvara and his evil Prime Minister Mahāmada with blackened face and a dog urinating on his head. What is our poet telling us through these utterly fantastic artifacts? Why is he visually bringing the Sanskrit classics to Bengal?
"Masked Boundaries: Adorning Popular Performances in the India-Bangladesh Border"
Aniket De, UC San Diego
Popular Performances shared among Hindus and Muslims in the India-Bangladesh border – Gambhira in Malda, Gamira in North Bengal, and Alkap in Murshidabad – all feature elaborate masked dances and specific costumes bearing symbols of peasant life. In this paper, I argue that the material culture of decoration, specifically wooden masks and hats, play a crucial role in communicating meanings across religious and caste boundaries. In my book, The Boundary of Laughter (2021), I analyzed Gambhira songs to explore shared spaces of performance across national borders. Building on that research, I have focused on the role of material culture in creating that shared space of meaning between Hindus and Muslims, and also put Gambhira in comparative light with other performances in the region. Building on the works on Bengal’s material culture by Frank Korom, Pika Ghosh, and Susan Bean, among others, I show how material cultures of decoration are crucial for crossing the boundaries of the 1947 Partition. This paper focuses on two decorative practices: wooden masks (for masked dances in India), and the costumes of a loincloth (lungi) and conical hat (toka) (among Muslim and Christian performers in Bangladesh). On the one hand, I chart out the variety of wooden masks, and their differing interpretations by Hindus and Muslims. On the other hand, I show how peasant costumes play a critical role in communicating common themes across different religious identities. Together, they make a compelling case for focusing on the material culture of adornment as a means of crossing boundaries.
"When Adornment Becomes Waste: The Afterlives of Ritual Flowers in Hindu Temple Ritual"
Nicole Karapanagiotis, Rutgers University, Camden, Philosophy and Religion
Flowers play a central role in Hindu devotional ritual, where they are used to adorn mūrtis, beautify altar spaces, and materialize devotion by being offered to gods and goddesses in the form of garlands and loose blossoms (then redistributed to devotees). Yet interestingly, once their ritual use has ended, these same flowers occupy an ambiguous status: still religiously potent, but no longer actively adorning mūrtis or sacred spaces. Given this status, Hindus do not typically treat these flowers as ordinary refuse but instead submerge them in rivers such as the Ganges and Yamuna. Scholars estimate that roughly 800 million metric tons of flowers are offered across various religious centers in India each year. Because a substantial portion of these flowers are used in Hindu temple ritual and later discarded in rivers, large quantities end up in India’s rivers, contributing significantly to water pollution and the degradation of river ecosystems. In this paper, I explore both the problem of ritual flower waste created by Hindu temple ritual as well as environmentally-conscious start-up businesses—such as Phool and HelpUsGreen— that are endeavoring to solve it. By collecting and repurposing discarded ritual flowers into incense, perfumes, and oils, I argue, these businesses are giving ritual flowers what Trine Brox calls ‘afterlives.’ In this state, discarded ritual flowers no longer signify “waste” nor does the end of their initial ritual use signify their ritual termination. Instead, in their afterlives, these flowers are marked by transformation, transitioning from one ritual form and function into another.
"Adorning the Beloved, Disclosing the Real: Poetic Embodiment and Theophany in Jāyasī’s Padmāvat"
Ryan Brizendine, UC Davis
Building on Naseem Hines’s (2009) argument for the distinctively Sufi, therefore ultimately religious nature of the Avadhi premākhyāns, Aditya Behl (2012) identifies their catalytic fulcrum to be an extended head-to-foot description of the heroine, whose elaborately enumerated beauties suggest flashes of divinity, thereby propelling both hero and hearer\/reader onto an erotically charged path of transformation. Indeed, Behl actually proposes the ritual recitation of these poems in Sufi khānaqāhs to be an instrument of ecstasy. Thomas de Bruijn (2012) has shown the imagery in these sarāpā set-pieces to be characterized by descriptive excess, focused on meaning-accumulation rather than explanation, as the poets’ way of expressing invisible realities within the limits of representational language. Francesca Orsini (2017, 2023) largely adopts Behl’s fertile if not fully documented reading, while Heidi Pauwels (2023) counsels caution, intimating over-interpretation in at least the early case of the Candāyan. One of the most alluring aspects of these works, alongside their mellifluous verse, is their drawing simultaneously upon Indic rasa-based poetics and Persian Sufi poetic models. So far lacking, however, is attention to the texts and contexts that would most clearly confirm a spiritual-methodic orientation: Persian Sufi lexicons, hermeneutic guides, and samāʿ-manuals (Lāhījī, Mafātīḥ al-eʿjāz; Hamadānī, Mashāreb al-aẕwāq; Bakk, Merʾāt al-ʿārefīn), all of which foreground physical features of the beloved. As both a test case for Behl’s theory and a promising means of unpacking these poems further, this paper applies these pedagogical works to the twenty-stanza sarāpā\/śikh-nakh-varṇan of the jewel of the genre, Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (1540).
"The many arts of adornment in Sucindram’s gopuram"
Anna Seastrand, University of Minnesota
In the late 19th century, the soaring entrance tower (gopuram) of the Sucindram temple became a site of intriguing artistic experimentation. While South Indian murals traditionally served as a kind of mise-en-scène, providing both visual and intellectual background for the rituals and events that occurred before them, the murals of Sucindram represent a striking departure. Executed to resemble framed European oil paintings, complete with trompe-l’oeil nails and golden picture frames, these works innovate murals by responding to the many new forms of art and styles that emerged in the late colonial period. Located in the historic princely state of Travancore, these murals are more than mere decoration; they are a visual record of a culture in transition. By examining the way divine and royal subjects are "staged," we uncover how 19th-century artists used the temple walls to reflect, and reflect upon, the sweeping social and political changes of the late colonial period.
"Adorning an Adored Goddess in Madurai"
Gita V. Pai, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Alaṅkāram, the sacred practice of adorning deities, is an integral part of temple rituals in the Hindu tradition. As a gesture of devotion and reverence, priests perform alaṅkāram by draping silk textiles, placing intricate jewelry, and bestowing floral garlands on the devotional stone or metal image after ceremonially bathing the god with sanctified substances (abhiṣēkam). A significant moment occurs when temple priests lift the curtain to reveal the fully-decorated mūrti (Sanskrit, “embodiment”) or tirumēṉi (Tamil, “sacred body”) as they chant key mantras and wave flaming lamps. Devotees, who regard the religious form as embodying the divine, receive darśana, the auspicious sight of and from the deity.
This paper examines a particular festival focused on adorning the beloved goddess at the Mīnākṣī-Sundareśvara temple in Madurai. Located in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, this temple is dedicated to Mīnākṣī (“the fish-eyed one”), a queen of Madurai’s Pāṇḍyan kingdom who is considered a manifestation of the pan-Indian goddess Pārvatī. Every Mārkaḻi month (December/January) in the Tamil Hindu calendar, a beautifying and bathing ceremony to Mīnākṣī’s utsava mūrti (processional image) takes place. For the first eight days, priests dress and decorate the goddess. The abhiṣēkam itself happens only on day nine, after which Mīnākṣī is elaborately clothed and bejeweled before paraded through the streets in her golden palanquin. This paper argues that seventeenth-century ruler Tirumala Nāyaka had political motivations when he decided to borrow this alaṅkāram-centric ritual from the nearby Vaiṣṇava temple in Srivilliputhur and install it at the Śaiva temple in Madurai.
"The Ascetic in White Robes: Materializing Rāmānuja’s Hagiography in Festivities"
Prathik Murali, University of Florida, Religion
During the annual ten-day nativity festival of Rāmānuja (11th century CE) at his temple in Sriperumbudur, his tirumēṉi (“sacred body”), the metallic image conceived to embody his real presence, is adorned in various ways and is mounted on various vāhanams on processions. One such procession is called veḷḷai cāṟṟu (“white adornment”), in which the ascetic Rāmānuja mounts a gold-plated horse, adorned in white garments, while his householder disciple dons ochre robes. The route of the procession deviates from the path taken on all the other days to enact the hagiography of Rāmānuja fleeing the persecution of a zealous Śaiva monarch. Upon returning to the temple, the deities are given a ritual shower (tirumañcaṉam), before which the adornments are taken off, but are supplemented by adornments of words, where the body of the 120-year old monk is described in a near-erotic fashion, guiding the gaze of the participant, creating a religious way of seeing that tends towards tactility. This paper examines the role of adornments in enacting hagiographies during temple festivities, theorizing how the study of alaṅkāra (embellishment), usually applied to poetry, can be extended to visual and material cultural contexts. The paper's primary questions include: how festive visual and material cultures enact hagiography; what hermeneutic tools are made available to a participant who is expected to co-create the hagiographic narrative; and how we can understand the relationship between textual and festive narrations of hagiography.
"The 'Trickle-Up' Theory of Fashion and the (Upper-caste) Buddhist Appropriation of Outcaste Sartorial Repertoire"
Nicholas Witkowski, University of San Diego
Over the past 8 years, I have authored a number of publications discussing Indian Buddhist monastic clothing, focusing in particular on the “ascetic” practice of wearing robes patched together from fabric scavenged on the cremation ground (pāṃśukūlika). This Buddhist ascetic practice of scavenging for clothing from dead bodies was identical to the sartorial practices common to the cultures of scavenging among outcaste laborers in the ancient Indian death economy. In general, however, scholarship has not made the connection between these outcaste cultures of scavenging and Buddhist “asceticism.” Scholarship prefers explanatory models for Buddhist asceticism that ignore cultural rationales for sartorial choices, presuming instead that wearing ascetic garb is always the choice of a zealous monastic. In other words, scholarship has ignored the possibility that “ascetic” sartorial practices emerged among outcaste Buddhist monastics who brought their sartorial culture into the Buddhist monastery. In this presentation, I will employ the “trickle-up” theory of fashion to argue that Buddhist ascetic sartorial practices, far from being an elite monastic choice, originated, in fact, in the ancient outcaste death economy.
"Material Adornment and Lyrical Decoration for Periyandavar"
Amy L. Allocco, Elon University, Religious Studies
This paper focuses on the elaborate and layered decoration practices that structure ritual performances dedicated to the Hindu guardian deity Periyandavar in Tamil-speaking South India. Like other Tamil kuladevams (lineage deities), Periyandavar is a place-based god worshiped collectively by groups of patrilineal kinsmen in their ancestral village, wherein the deity’s power inheres. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, this paper analyzes the Periyandavar Puja, extrapolating from two multi-day ceremonies honoring the kuladevam held in 2024: one in conjunction with a child’s ear-piercing rite and the other linked to the planned construction of a new temple for him. To stage these expensive rituals, patrilineal relatives hire drummer-priests to fashion a massive anthropomorphic image of Periyandavar and his entourage of diminutive attendants from the soil of the lineage’s native village. These temporary forms must then be successively decorated, enlivened, and worshiped through processes that hinge on various types of adornment. These include the material, aesthetic, and lyrical decoration contributed by the drummer-priests, the food and liquid offerings made by male lineage members, and the rice-flour drawings and trays of gifts presented by lineage wives. In this ritual context lavish, layered decoration practices not only bring Periyandavar and his entourage of guardians more fully into being, tangibly establishing their presence and rendering them accessible and knowable for participants, but also constitute and perform the lineage itself. Decoration, then, entails both lyrical “speech acts” (Austin 1962) and performative “material acts” (Flueckiger 2020) that create and transform person, place, and divinity.
"Of Stone and Song: The Kuravanji in Two Forms"
Manasvin Rajagopalan, School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, India
A six foot sculpture, a balladic performance genre, a wandering fortune-teller. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a deep investment and interest in sensual and aesthetic adornment, from architectural edifices such as mantapas, to descriptive thickness in various literary forms, within the life-world of Tamil South India. The kuṟavañci was one such formal genre, that became an example of this renewed interest in sensuality, through its vivid description of urban life, the figures of courtly women, and most importantly, in the fabrication of the kuratti or hill-dwelling fortuneteller. In this exploratory paper, I engage the visual, tactile sculptures of the kuratti or hill-dwelling fortuneteller that are found at certain Tamil temples in the greater Madurai area, as objects that complicate how we may read embodiment in the literary Kutrala Kuravanji. Taking the ornamental sculpture as an orienting device, I apply its own hewn excess and placement as a reading method for the literary genre, where the human, non-human, and supernatural, adorn the sacred geography of the text. Reading the literary through visual emplacement in stone, I argue that the figurations of the fortune-teller are mimicked across media, in the pursuit of a radical ornamental agency.
"Ritual Elaborations in Early Vīraśaiva Texts"
Gil Ben-Herut, University of South Florida, Religious Studies
“My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold”; “I don't know anything like timebeats and metre,” – Basava’s famous lines (here in A. K. Ramanujan’s translation) and other vacana statements by Śaiva devotees from the Kannada-speaking region are oftentimes understood as emblematic for a Protestant-like rejection by all Vīraśaivas of any form of prescribed worship, in favor of strict religious puritanism and aesthetic minimalism. In this presentation, I shall consider the above positions against elaborate worship practices (including temple rituals) and aesthetic excess that are occupying a space in this community’s religious life, and have been for a long time. In Harihara’s Ragaḷe stories from the turn of the twelfth century, visual ornamentation, rhetorical flourish, and temple rituals reign supreme. In these passages, one finds dense use of literary embellishments and Sanskritic conventions, Puranic descriptions of the gods, and elaborate rituals practices in temples. By juxtaposing vacana statements against visual elaboration with selected passages from my recently published co-translations of Harihara’s stories, I shall pose questions about the nature of the traditions and ways of reconciling (or at least explaining) the seemingly contradictory religious aesthetic sensibilities and disparate notions associated with this tradition.
"Adorning Devotion, Renunciation and Divinity in Mira Songs"
Nancy M. Martin, Chapman University
This paper explores the language of women’s ornaments, of the renouncer’s accoutrements, and of Krishna’s appearance as both yogi and irresistible Lord in songs attributed to Mirabai. The participatory traditions associated with this well-loved sixteenth-century bhakta provide a rich source for such reflection given the prevalence and creative deployment of such adornment and the understanding that the voice therein is distinctly female. Drawing on songs from oral as well as written sources, this investigation will build on earlier work by Hawley (1995), Bhatnagar et al. (2004), and Guignard (2013). The use of visual markers of marital status, auspiciousness, and beauty to articulate resistance to powerful normative social expectations for women and to embrace the virtues of devotion and articulate alternative conceptions of adornment and levels of spiritual realization will be explored. The renouncer’s distinctive “ornaments,” in reference to the devotee and the divine, will then be examined as they mark detachment but also convey experiences of both divine absence and radical freedom. Further with respect to Krishna adorned, the function of standard tropes will be interrogated, in shaping devotion and offering verbal darshan but also in developing internalized visualizations such that the Lord is inscribed in the mind’s eye, visible everywhere the devotee looks. A more unusual utilization of ornamentation in a Mira song to articulate an unbounded experience of oneness with the world will then be detailed, followed by closing reflections on the particular place and power of such adornment in Mirabai traditions and wider devotional performance and practice.
"Entering Ornament: Āhārya Abhinaya and Spiritual Embodiment in Diaspora"
Asa Willoughby, University of Michigan
This paper argues that āhārya abhinaya in Indian classical dance—often treated as decorative excess—is a transformative devotional practice grounded in classical aesthetic theory. Drawing on the Nāṭyaśāstra and Abhinaya Darpaṇam, as well as the cosmological imagery of the Dhyāna Śloka (āhāryam chandra tārādi), I situate āhārya—the costuming and adornment of the dancer—as a necessary form of abhinaya in which ornament functions not as surface but as participation. In this framework, adornment does not symbolize transformation but enacts it: in performance, the dancer does not simply wear adornment but enters into it. I develop this claim by reading āhārya through affect and rasa as a practice that happens to the body. The weight of silk against the skin, the placement of pleats that render movement visible, the sound of bells marking each step, and the darkening of the eyes so expression travels across distance do not decorate devotion; they make it possible. Āhārya thus produces a condition of radical visibility, through which the dancer becomes most exposed in performance before the divine. Rasa, in this sense, emerges not only in performance itself but in the affective labor through which the adorned body is produced. Āhārya is therefore not preparatory to devotion but constitutive of it—and, as a practice that inheres in bodies, materials, and techniques, it is also inherently mobile. In diasporic contexts, this mobility becomes newly visible. As costumes, jewelry, and performance practices circulate across transnational networks, so too do the forms of labor and affect that make them meaningful. Mothers braid hair and fasten jewelry; sarees circulate through kin networks; garments are commissioned across distance. I term this process a pre-performative devotional field, through which affect accumulates prior to performance. Just as āhārya travels materially, the devotional field it generates travels with it, extending transformation beyond the individual performer and beyond the stage itself.
"Kirupāṉanta Vāriyār (1906-1993): Performing Musicalized Oratory on a Vēḷāḷarized Tamil Śaivism"
Praveen Vijayakumar, University of Pennsylvania
This paper, “Kirupāṉanta Vāriyār (1906-1993): Performing Musicalized Oratory on a Vēḷāḷarized Tamil Śaivism” is a study of Kirupāṉanta Vāriyār’s on-stage and on-screen oratory. Vāriyār was the most prolific Tamil religious orator of the twentieth century: he spoke on stages across Tamil Nadu and in parts of the Tamil diaspora, as well as starred in films. Vāriyār’s musicalized oratory popularized a modern iteration of Tamil Śaivism, which some scholars working on Dravidianism have referred to as neo-Śaivism. A closer exploration of Vāriyār’s performances and the history of the making of neo-Śaivism would however suggest that the prefix “neo” may be inadequate. By examining his on-stage and on-screen performances, this paper argues that Vāriyār pontificated on a vēḷāḷarized Tamil Śaivism. Vēḷāḷars, a heterogeneous dominant non-brahmin caste community, held key positions in the colonial bureaucracy and have controlled the agricultural economy, Tamil Śaiva monasteries and key Tamil Śaiva āgamic temples in northern and western Tamil Nadu since at least the seventeenth century. From the nineteenth century onwards, vēḷāḷars wrote and published voluminously on Tamil Śaivism. The strategic centring and canonizing of vēḷāḷar figures in their discourses resulted in Tamil Śaivism’s vēḷāḷarization. This paper suggests that Vāriyār was the harbinger who brought a vēḷāḷarized Tamil Śaivism to the Tamil masses in the twentieth century, and he did so at a time when Dravidianism had assumed a feisty atheistic-secular outlook. That too, with the support of none other than the progenitor of Dravidianism’s new outlook, “periyār” E.V. Ramasami Naicker (1879-1973)!
"Unwelcome Adornment: When Offending the Earth Spirits has Consequences"
Brent Horning, University of California, Religion
Based on my fieldwork in Kathmandu, Nepal in August, 2025 I will argue that supernatural snakes or nāgas, act as adornment, when understood to bestow both skin disease and healing power. Using original ethnographic data, I will focus on the account of a local woman who claims that accidentally offending local nāgas caused her unique skin rash, which was remedied through appropriate corrective ritual nāga worship. Here, nāgas are understood to function as harbingers of unwanted decoration: a crisscrossed facial rash resembling snakeskin. But when supplicated in the correct manner they provide the antidote. In the case of this young, educated, tech-savvy student, these traditional animistic views are compatible with a contemporary global worldview and describe a multivalent relationship between personal health and environmental stewardship. Through close examination of the author’s nāga photos from the immediate region, the religious-aesthetic influence leading to “becoming-intense, becoming-animal” is apparent, described by Deleuze and Guattari in “A Thousand Plateaus”. The article presents a new theoretical framework for understanding the interface of iconography and perception through the intersection of belief, materiality, affect, and philosophy, demonstrating the persistent integration of somatic-religious world building in modernity.
