This book presents multi-faceted images of religious experience in the Marathi-speaking region of India. In addition to Irawati Karve's classic, "On the Road," about her pilgrimage to Pandharpur, there are three essays by Karve that appear in English for the first time. Here is possession by gods and ghosts, an actual sermon by an inspired saint in the traditional bhajan style, and an autobiographical account of the religious nationalism of the militant R.S.S. These are engaging, true-to-life accounts of the lives of individual Hindus. Essays and imaginative literature, a poem, and a short story interplay the ideas, concepts, personalities, practices, rituals, and deities of Hinduism in a surprisingly coherent manner.

Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the past two hundred years. The book surveys a specific set of religious vocabularies from South Asia that, Aravamudan argues, launches a different kind of cosmopolitanism into global use. Using "Guru English" as a tagline for the globalizing idiom that has grown up around these religions, Aravamudan traces the diffusion and transformation of South Asian religious discourses as they shuttled between East and West through English-language use. The book demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not just a secular Western "discourse that results from a disenchantment with religion, but something that can also be refashioned from South Asian religion when these materials are put into dialogue with contemporary social move-ments and literary texts. Aravamudan looks at "religious forms of neoclassicism, nationalism, Romanticism, postmodernism, and nuclear millenarianism, bringing together figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Deepak Chopra with Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Salman Rushdie. Guru English analyzes writers and gurus, literary texts and religious movements, and the political uses of religion alongside the literary expressions of religious teachers, showing the cosmopolitan interconnections between the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire, and the American New Age.

Festschrift honoring Ramesh Mohan, b. 1920, professor of English and vice-chancellor of Meerut University; contributed articles.

"Film made in Bombay" have a much longer and more complex history than "Bollywood"; and what is widely projected as "authentically Indian" is a politicised and ideologically contested space since the first decades of the 20th century. How did the historical audiences in Bombay actually respond to the first "Indian films", to an Indian filmaker's mediation of ideas and feelings of "being Indian"? In what way did for instance in 1913-18 the first long narrative films by the pioneer Dhundiraj Govind Phalke convey patriotic sentiments? These are some of the questions tackled by Brigitte Schulze, a sociologist and activist of Indian cinema cultures since the late 1980s. Exploring the beginnings of Bombay's cinema means to enter spaces largely occupied by orientalist or nationalist myths; however, once these are critiqued her discursive and contextualising approach brings into light long forgotten visions and landscapes of a "cinematographic humanism" beyond caste, class, gender or nation-state.