Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler eds., "Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices" (SUNY Press, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Indian Religions

Episode: Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler, eds. – "Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices" (SUNY Press, 2025)
Host: Dr. Raj Balkaran
Date: November 13, 2025

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Main Theme and Purpose

This episode centers on the conception, development, and key themes of the new edited volume, "Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices", published by SUNY Press (2025) and co-edited by Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler. The book examines shifting currents within Hindu religious practice and iconography, using the concepts of "sweetening" and "intensification" as analytical lenses. The discussion explores how these two paradigms reveal broader processes of transformation, adaptation, and negotiation within diverse Hindu contexts—both historical and contemporary—and underscores the volume’s breadth, contributors’ approaches, and the implications for scholarship and pedagogy.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origin and Genesis of the Project

• The collaboration began when Xenia Zeiler invited Amy Allocco to Helsinki in 2019 for a lecture. They quickly realized shared research interests and conceptualized an innovative project around the dual paradigms of sweetening and intensification in Hinduism ([01:48–04:09]).
• Initial fieldwork in India was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to virtual events and panels (notably at the American Academy of Religion 2021 meeting), after which the scope expanded to a full edited volume with a diverse group of contributors ([01:48–04:09]).
• Quote:

  "We started to scheme about a collaboration and a project focusing on these converging and diverging themes of sweetening and intensification."
  — Amy Allocco [01:53]

2. Defining “Sweetening” and “Intensification”

• Sweetening refers to processes such as “softening,” “gentrification,” or “Sanskritization” of deities and rituals, often discussed with reference to goddesses, but the editors expand it beyond traditional paradigms ([05:11–08:37]).
• Intensification captures not only new or heightened forms of religious expression—sometimes around previously marginalized practices or deities—but also invigorated engagement in changing sociopolitical contexts ([05:11–08:37]).
• The editors intentionally kept definitions flexible, encouraging authors to explore both tendencies and their interplay in various ethnographic, textual, and visual contexts ([07:29–08:37]).
• Quote:

  "Sweetening in itself is a form of intensification, which wasn't clear to us right from the beginning. But that was one of the beautiful outcomes of this conversation."
  — Xenia Zeiler [07:53]

3. Structure of the Volume

• The book is organized into four parts to reflect the breadth of material:
  • Temples, Localities, and Deities
  • Ritual and Possession Performances
  • Pilgrimage and Festival Practices
  • Narrative and Visual Spaces (including new media and visual culture) ([09:50–11:20])
• The editorial approach accommodates diverse case studies spanning South Asia, the diaspora, and a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives ([11:20–13:31]).

4. Aims and Contributions of the Volume

• Explores how religious change operates on a spectrum—using "sweet," "neutral," and "intense" as metaphors—to describe ritual, aesthetic, and doctrinal transformations ([11:20–13:31]).
• Brings together fresh research and covers both major and lesser-known deities, practices, and traditions.
• Emphasizes multi-sited case studies and practical examples to demonstrate theories in action.

5. Intended Audience

• Scholars in Hindu studies, religion, anthropology, and related disciplines.
• Undergraduates and graduate students—individual chapters are particularly useful for teaching specialist themes ([13:46–15:13]).
• Specialists in regional traditions (e.g., Garhwal, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, etc.) will find relevant case studies ([13:46–15:13]).
• Quote:

  "I really think about this as a volume, of course, that scholars will gobble up and really enjoy, but also that undergraduates as well as graduate students will be able to make really great use out of."
  — Amy Allocco [13:46]

6. Further Reflections: Sweetening as Intensification

• The editors discuss how "sweetening" is not the opposite but rather a particular form of intensification—by making a deity's image more “palatable” or “mainstream,” tradition is both softened and amplified.
• Quote:

  "If you sweeten a deity and the mythology of a deity, for instance, ... that is a kind of intensification of a certain aspect, one which is favored over other, possibly less mainstream, often aspects..."
  — Xenia Zeiler [18:14]

7. Surprises, Insights, and Editorial Experience

• The conceptual framework’s broad applicability surprised the editors, and they were pleased to see contributors interpret sweetening/intensification through creative theoretical lenses (like using chaat—a street food—as a metaphor) ([21:27–25:12]).
• Even well-known deities or traditions appeared anew under this analytic lens ([22:55–25:12]).
• Quote:

  "Even traditions and deities about whom I think I knew quite a bit became really fresh with this new level of analysis or new layer of analysis applied to them."
  — Amy Allocco [24:46]

8. Representative Chapters and Case Studies

• The editors highlight chapters on both well-known and obscure deities and practices. Examples include:
  • The “rabies goddess” Hadkaimata (Terry Ganel, Gujarat)
  • Feral gods in Tamil Nadu (Indira Muhammad)
  • Dandanagaraja (Aqal Jasil, Garhwal, Himalayas)
  • Karumariyaman in Michigan (Tracy Pinchman)
  • Kali in contemporary visual and political contexts (Rachel Fell McDermott) ([27:37–31:03])
• These case studies illustrate the adaptability, shifting meanings, and ongoing change in Hindu practices, iconographies, and communities.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the definition process:

  "We realized that sweetening in itself is a form of intensification, which wasn't clear to us right from the beginning."
  — Xenia Zeiler [07:53]

• On the spectrum of religious change:

  "It tries to think through these changes on what we call a scale of sweet, neutral and intense. Right? The spiceification on some grounds, and in other cases, a softening, a kind of blending, gentrifying, etc."
  — Amy Allocco [11:23]

• On the volume’s coherence:

  "What I think is one of the more coherent volumes that I've ever been a part of. And I think that's also a really special element that emerged over the process."
  — Amy Allocco [24:56]

• On the diversity of content:

  "The sheer diversity of where and how this happens was one of the things which for me is ... a highlight in preparing this edited volume."
  — Xenia Zeiler [22:15]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Origin & Genesis: [01:41–04:44]
• Defining “Sweetening” and “Intensification”: [05:11–08:37]
• Structure of the Volume: [09:50–11:20]
• Aims & Contributions: [11:20–13:46]
• Intended Audience: [13:46–15:13]
• Sweetening vs. Intensification (Theoretical Refinement): [18:14–20:59]
• Editorial Surprises & Unity: [21:27–25:12]
• Representative Case Studies: [27:37–31:03]

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Conclusion

The episode provides a rich, accessible entry point into contemporary Hindu studies, explaining how the twin concepts of sweetening and intensification help scholars and students alike make sense of both tradition and transformation within Hindu practice. Through an engaging back-and-forth, Allocco and Zeiler highlight the dynamism of Hindu traditions and the promise of their analytical framework, underscoring the volume’s value for both research and teaching. Special attention is paid to diversity (geographical, methodological, and thematic) and the collaborative achievement brought forth by the volume’s contributors.

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Summary compiled by New Books Network Podcast Summarizer.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Hello and welcome back to the New Books in Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Baltar. On. More importantly, I have the double delight of welcoming back to the podcast doctors Amy Loco and Zinnia Zeiler, who are co editors of a sweet publication, indeed one called Sweetening and Intensification Currents Shaping Hindu Practices. This is a brand new SUNY Press publication. Welcome both to the podcast.

[C]

Thank you. Happy to be here.

[D]

Happy to be here. Exactly. I can chime in.

[B]

There you go. So tell us about the origin. How did this come into being?

[C]

So Xanian invited me to come to Helsinki to University of Helsinki where she teaches in 2019 to give a lecture on my work on bringing home spirits of the dead into Hindu Tamil households. And during that visit, we started to scheme about a collaboration and a project focusing on these converging and diverging themes of sweetening and intensification. And the next year we applied for and were awarded a collaborative international research grant from the American Academy of Religion. So. So that was way back in 2020, and we had the idea of doing joint fieldwork in India and then bringing other scholars aboard and then going ahead with some sort of a special journal issue or an edited volume centered around these themes. But as you can imagine When I invoked 2020, the pandemic thwarted many of our plans and we had to retool. But we were able to bring together eight scholars from different global locations in south and Southeast Asia, Europe and North America to present together in a double panel at the Madison meeting the next year in 2021. That was online, but we had a double panel there, and that allowed us to test some of our arguments and expand and refine the focus on the parameters of our themes and also to generate greater interest in the project. And then Cine and I published a call for abstracts, and we got an overwhelming response from different scholars at different ages and stages. So from junior to more established scholars all over the world, actually. And we had a very hard task of sorting out who we were going to invite to contribute to the volume. And we worked on it. SUNY offered us a contract. We're really happy to work with SUNY again on an edited volume. And what you see here is 13 chapters and a critical introduction, the fruits of multiple years of labor. Sunny and I did get to meet in person eventually, as the pandemic subsided, we were able to collaborate, and we're really grateful to that initial AAR grant that brought us together.

[D]

Yeah, indeed. It started right here in this office where I'm located right now. I was reminded of that sitting here, Amy, in 2019, as you say, on my. Or at my round table, it was right here where this idea was born. And we were trying and testing mutual interests, which we at that point had already identified. We have them. And, yeah, we came up with this idea, which we still think is beautiful and sort of innovative. Thanks.

[B]

So you've come full circle. This is great. It's always fun to hear the genesis and the backstory and, you know, for any collected volume, you could have a hundred such volumes. And they're all very, very different stories in terms of the back end. And we can appreciate how much work it is to, you know, to bring all these scholars together to showcase their work. So speaking of this innovative paradigm, what do you mean by sweetening and intensification? What are those words all about?

[C]

So sweetening has received a fair amount of attention in the academic literatures on South Asia, often to do with goddesses and samyatization or gentrification, bourgeoisification. There are many ways of talking about these kinds of softenings that we see, but we didn't want to confine our work just to goddesses and also to the paradigms of Sanskritization that we saw already discussed in certain places. So we were able to build on that literature and think about the ways that new ritual forms, new media landscapes, diaspora contexts, neoliberal realities, globalization. I could keep going on. There are many examples across the chapters are impelling traditions to move in these directions. But we also were really interested in this trend or current a process of intensification where perhaps new forms were emerging around stigmatized or previously marginalized practices. Rituals, iconographies, ritual offerings, substances, et cetera. These visual forms are threaded across a number of chapters and iconographies. And we wanted to bring these two trends or currents into sustained dialogue and take a more inclusive approach in not only highlighting male deities as well as goddesses, but also thinking about the ways in which these two function, sometimes in tandem and sometimes diverge. And we asked our contributors to, as much as possible, talk about both tendencies, both currents in each of their examples and chapters and contributions. And so what we see is a range of theoretical interventions, a really diverse range of geographies and strands of Hindu traditions, both within South Asia and beyond, that analyze both of these trends in conversation and dialogue.

[D]

Exactly. And you said it wonderfully. And we also tried to make it clear when advertising the book and of course in our conversation to the authors, precisely what you said. It's about trying to at least establish this conversation. And also we have been asked numerous times about proper definitions of sweetening and intensification. Of course, that is crucial to our work and to the authors who wonderfully dealt with that. So the only one thing that I could add to what you said now, Amy, is that in the process of designing this book and thinking more about also these categories of sweetening and intensification, we realized that sweetening in itself is a form of intensification, which wasn't clear to us right from the beginning. But that was one of the beautiful outcomes of this conversation. And I think it is now, now well grounded in the author's work in the individual chapters.

[C]

Yeah, thanks for adding that, Ksenia. That is something that emerged out of conversations and also reading the chapters and reading our fabulous reviewers comments. The other thing that I might add to that is that one of the initial questions that we started out with is, is intensification a new set of practices and iconographies and responses to new contexts? Is this actually a new set of processes that are emerging or are what we're seeing is some sort of an insistence given new political and social and economic realities on, you know, former practices, existing practices, and then a new intensification of them? So these are often rigorous and visceral and sometimes bodily practices that are, you know, emerging in new media formats and ritual landscapes and diaspora context. So that's one of the questions about intensification that a number of the chapters trace out.

[B]

So what would you. How would you characterize some of the overarching themes? Like what? Or otherwise put what. What would you say the volume does? What work does it do?

[D]

Well, we have tried to find a structure in the book which gives room for the very diverse material and geographical and media related settings that authors fortunately invoke to make their arguments about sweetening and intensification. So we have four parts, we call them all together. One is called the first one, in fact is called Temples, Localities and Deities. Then we have an individual part on ritual and possession performances because they are so important for this discussion. Another one on pilgrimage and festival practices, because again, this was a space setting, so to say, that emerged as key areas where these processes, currently and partly also in history, take and have taken place. And we have a last part which is called Narrative and Visual Spaces, because we also wanted to include very recent contexts. I already mentioned the media. So we have certain discussions. We have chapters on visuals, on paintings and images, but also on film, just to mention a few.

[C]

So I think one of the key things that the book tries to do is to highlight processes and currents of change, so how deities, narratives and practices are defined and how they're changing today in light of all of these circumstances and impulses that we are highlighting so far. So it tries to think through these changes on what we call a scale of sweet, neutral and intense. Right? The spice ification on some grounds, and in other cases, a softening, a kind of bland defying, a gentrifying, a problemizing, et cetera. But not only to look at these in isolation, but to look at these in tandem. And if you look at the sections like Senia mentions, I think that helps us to think about one set of arrangements. Although we tried out and tested many different schematizations of these chapters. But another way of thinking through them is to look at the map that's on the inside. You know, first few front matter pages where we see the really wide geographic distance dispersal of the case studies. And one of the things that I think is really fantastic about this book is the really fresh research, historical, textual, literary, visual, ethnographic and anthropological. And on that the authors have brought to bear on these questions and these categories and these themes. And they bring us to a wide range of places on the Indian subcontinent and then beyond. We have Some really strong chapters about diaspora locations, always in dialogue with or in tandem with, in conversation with subcontinental realities, politics, you know, temple locations, etc, but really interesting dispersals of these themes into new contexts. So that emphasis on change and then wide ranging sort of locations as well as that really multidisciplinary, multi methodological import I think is, you know, some of the work that the volume is trying to do.

[B]

Yeah, it really, really is a rich volume and it's excellent. Excellent array of contributors actually. What would you. Who's this book for? Who might most benefit from reading this book?

[C]

So these sorts of volumes, in my view, make excellent materials for teaching, although I doubt that many people will teach the entire volume as a whole. I think individual chapters can be excerpted to really good effect depending on the themes of particular courses. So I really think about this as a volume, of course, that scholars will gobble up and really enjoy, but also that undergraduates as well as graduate students will be able to make really great use out of. So those are the places where I think it will be most useful. And of course I've already mentioned a number of the disciplines that might be interested in it. I've just come back from the EXIS meeting, the European Conference on South Asian Studies hosted in Heidelberg, and I was at a triple panel about Garhwal where I was able to say, hey, there's this new volume out that has two chapters about practices in Garhwal by Altab Jaisal and Brian Pennington. And people were really excited about reading it and asking for the details, et cetera. So those full who have a very specialized interest in one region of the Indian Himalaya may not find themselves, you know, as drawn in by every single chapter. But there is that regional diversity and thematic diversity that I think gives fodder for lots of different scholars as well as undergraduates and graduate students.

[B]

Yeah, Heidelberg looked like a lot of fun. That was one of the places that I was considering going this year, but there are only so many flights one can take a year owing to resources and time. Also, Amy, your university was hosting a really fascinating conference on sacred journeys, I believe it was. That was another one that really helped me look, it felt right up my alley. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it work with other commitments and maybe you could say a quick word about that. However, out of nowhere this comment is. Tell us a bit about your. Your event.

[C]

No, I'm happy to, Raj, thanks for asking. So the Conference on the Study of Religions of India, or the CSRI, celebrated its 50th anniversary just a couple of years ago. So it's an organization that's been with us in a couple of different forms over the course of now more than five decades. It has a fabulous executive committee of scholars who plan and execute what we understand as very intimate meetings that are often 30 or 40 people. They're usually hosted in the summer. And here at Elon we were able to host it this past summer. We were proud to be able to offer it with a very low registration rate, especially for graduate students, but also for others. And it's a really low to the ground collegial group of people who typically gather around a theme. There are no concurrent sessions. So the idea is that participants are all in and they attend everything and a really sophisticated conversation typically develops out of it. A number of edited volumes have come out of these CSRI meetings. I'm really happy to say that it looks like Reid Laughlin and Amy Ruth Holt and Stephanie Duclos King are taking the lead on editing the contributions that came out of this summer's conference. And also that it looks like CSRI will meet again next summer. There are two locations that are currently being considered, but stay tuned. I'm sorry, and in other places to hear about the theme and the dates for that typically summer conference for 2026.

[B]

That's awesome. I think that's one of the few conferences in the field that I haven't covered on the podcast. It'd be great to, to offer a bit of coverage. I mean, there may be scholars who may not otherwise be aware of it or its contours or its aims. And so I'll certainly look out and reach out to the organizers and without question, Amy and Reeve and whatever the volume comes out will be fascinating to look at on the podcast. Yeah, I mean, some really intriguing questions. I don't want to get too nerdy, but you know, you know, your comments regarding one being a subsection of the other in terms of sweetening intensification. Could you say a bit more about that? I'd love to hear a bit more about that.

[D]

If you think about sweetening and intensification in a tandem, as we did from the beginning, I think you will realize that intensification of any kind, of course, happens on different levels. It happens in different spaces, but it also happens in very different intensities itself in different ways of how this unfolds. When it comes to sweetening, we think of it, we came to think of it along the way as one of these process of intensification, because sweetening a deity, we could Take goddesses as examples, but also male deities. It happens to male deities as well, less frequently, but it does. If you sweeten a deity and the mythology of a deity, for instance, or a very good example I think would be the iconography of a deity. If that sweetens, that is a kind of intensification of a certain aspect, one which is favored over other, possibly less mainstream, often aspects of a deities iconography, in our case example that I pulled out here. Hence we came to think of sweetening as a certain specific of intensification.

[C]

Yeah, we see this in a lot of the contributions to the book, in terms of the offerings that are presented to deities, as well as in terms of temple practices. So we see it also in the architecture of shrines, the sanitization of textual traditions and visual traditions, and the kinds of chants and songs and other musical offerings that might be offered to particular deities. We see it in oral folklore floors as well as in appropriations of written texts. So this is one set of ways that we see the softening, the bourgeoisification, the gentrification of deities as well as practices, the softening of them as a kind of form of intensification, usually in response to new political realities, new caste dominances or arrangements, as well as the appetites, visual tastes, aesthetic needs and devotional sentiments of particular communities.

[B]

Yeah, that really is fascinating. And it sort of begs the question of what, what trends we might see down the road. I mean, I dare not force either one of you into hazarding. I guess if you have some thoughts, I would welcome them. But more broadly, was there anything about this process that kind of really surprised you or something that stayed with you in terms of having this bird's eye view of this rich array of papers?

[D]

For me, definitely it was the diverse levels of how this happens, in which context this happens, in how many different circumstances this happened, and also, of course, how long this has been ongoing already. The book is not only about current trends, though, fair to say, mostly it is. But we do also have chapters which focus more on historical aspects, how this happened in the past. And we can see that the ways in which these changing scales of this food metaphors that we pick, they're sweet, neutral, spicy, how they unfold really, as Amy just said, corresponds indeed very often to timely pressures, if you will, even to outside circumstances, which in a way almost demand for a change in iconography in the offerings, you name it on any level. So that will happen very often. So the sheer diversity of where and how this happens was one of the things which for me is. Well, it was A highlight in preparing this edited volume.

[C]

Yeah, thanks. I was going to say something very similar. You know, Ksenia and I knew that we thought that this was a fabulous set of themes to think with, and we hoped that we would be able to put on some conference panels and maybe turn that into a journal issue. But when we put out the call for abstracts, it was really fascinating and gratifying to see how many contexts this theme could be applied across and with sometimes quite surprising results. So it was an amenable and productive set of processes and categories for people to think with and then also to combine in really interesting ways with other theoretical models and some of their own devising. Some interpretive analogies, like I'm thinking of Carter Higgins uses the metaphor, or the interpretive analogy of Chat, our celebrated street food. But then there are also others like Cultural Memory and Jane Austen, Jan Osman, that Rachel Feld McDermott employs. So there are. There are a range of. Of different ways that people, you know, frame our sweetening intensification categories in terms of other theoretical or interpretive analogies and materials. So the ways in which this was an amenable and malleable and productive set of processes to think with was really exciting for us, as well as the ways in which I felt like even traditions and deities about whom I think I knew quite a bit, became really fresh with this new level of analysis or new layer of analysis applied to them. So even people whose work I've been reading for years, if not decades, like Tracy Pinchman's or Caleb Simmons's. Right. I was able to see a whole new fresh set of perspectives emerge as they applied these processes. And we went through rounds of editorial review and responses to reviewers where people just kept honing and refining their engagement with these processes. And it produced what I think is one of the more coherent volumes that I've ever been a part of. And I think that that's also a really special element that emerged over the process.

[B]

Yeah, that's lovely. I suppose, to extend the metaphor, I mean, what is the utility of lenses, but to bring it to focus? And these analytical lenses are quite useful. And the ways in which you use them that utterly move beyond or defy binary or polarization and sort of the way in which you both hold space for them to be used in such polyvocalic and multivalent ways. And that, I mean, the messiness of such theoretical models is precisely what actually avails the dynamism of index thought, of Hindu thought, when our models are a little more stringent, a little more binary. You know, sometimes it might be a little bit of a tight squeeze, but. But the extent to which these are both moving targets and they may be complementary, they may be mutually exclusive, in some places, one may be a subsection of the other. I think implicit in that is both in your capacity to richly hold the spectrum and then hold space for that and then that itself allows all these papers to fit that. It's interesting that it is quite a unified. I co edited a volume on Sanskrit narrative. I think there were 18 contributors. We didn't plan that. I don't know, who knows, maybe the Godsit, who knows, there's 18 of them. But other than being about Sanskrit narrative and prioritizing as a corrective the synchronic world of the text and looking at stories, it was unified insofar as we were looking to the power of narrative in the Sanskrit tales, but it wasn't nearly as unified as this sort of work. But there is this juxtaposition between the unity of all the papers and they're all bound together by these moving targets of these categories. So it really is, it's pun intended, it's a delicious enterprise which was made.

[D]

Possible just to say that it's needless to say, but it was made possible because of our fantastic authors. So this is just a shout out, a thank you for the fabulous contributions that we got.

[B]

Fantastic, yeah. Brilliant, brilliant contributions. So is there anything else about the project, the book, the concepts, anything at all? Anything at all you'd like to touch on before we close for today?

[C]

Yeah, I would also say a word about some of the contributions themselves and also our fantastic contributors. You know, as someone who's worked in Tamil speaking south India for most of my career, you know, the, the landscape of Varanasi Devis is not as familiar to me, maybe as for example, Frexenia, who's done quite a bit of work in Banaras over the years. So, you know, one of the first chapters, it's the second chapter actually is the one about little adorable little boy Baktu. Right. So Saplego's chapter and I was able to meet him on his own terms. There's also another corresponding chapter that deals with Bhairava in Rajasthan that comes from Jeremy Saul. Right. So these are deities who are from opposite ends of, you know, the sort of northern end of the subcontinent, who are not well known to me, who I got to meet and spend quite a bit of time with through the process of welcoming these contributions into the volume. So I like that some of these lesser known deities are popping up in this volume and getting their due and getting a lot of attention. I'm thinking here about Hadkaimata. So that's Terry Ganel's chapter about the quote, quote rabies goddess in Gujarat, and then a range of what she calls feral gods in Tamil Nadu. The Vira Naras in Indira are Muhammad's chapter. Many people may know about Dandanagaraja as a form of Krishna in the Garhwal Indian Himalayas. That's Aqal Jasil's chapter, but again, not so familiar to me. So the opportunity to spend time with these particular deities who are shape shifting and taking on new iconographic forms and gobbling up different kinds of offerings in our current globalized and neoliberalized environments, I think has been a lot of fun. And then to see a goddess who I think I know, Karumariyaman from Tamil Nadu, to see how she's interpreted and how she takes shape in a temple in Michigan in Tracy Pinchman's chapter. Or how a deity who we all think we know at some level, but who is, you know, a little bit slippery and hard to pin down in some respects because of her transcendent nature, kali Rachel Fell McDermott renders absolutely fabulously in the final chapter of the volume, thinking about her in dialogue with new visual forms as well as Hindu majoritarian complexes and currents in terms of the culture of hurt sentiments, hurt religious sentiments. So deities we know and deities we do not, in unusual kinds of configurations, always on the move, changing and shifting and responding and adapting in that kind of assimilative way that we're familiar with in Hindu traditions. But yes, as you say, quite nicely, Raj, through these particular lenses. So that has been a particular pleasure. The opportunity to work with this particular set of authors was really quite a privilege and a lot of fun, and I learned so much from all of them across the process of editing this volume with Xi Man.

[B]

Excellent. Well, thank you very much both for appearing on the podcast today.

[D]

Thanks for having us.

[C]

Yeah, it's a lot of fun to talk with you. Thanks so much for the invitation.

[B]

Great. Well, I'm glad you both survived. Photos Listening We've been speaking to doctors Amy Aloko and Zinnia Zeiler on Sweetening and Intensification, Current Shaping Hindu Practices, a brand new Sydney Press publication. All the details are in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep thinking, keep reading and keep contemplating such article as Sweetening and Intensification. Take care.