Tulasi Srinivas, "The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty" (Duke UP, 2025)

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Welcome to the new books network.

Welcome back to the new books in your religion's podcast.

A podcast channel here in the new books network.

I'm your host Dr. Rush Balkaran.

More importantly, I have the pleasure of welcoming to the podcast today.

Dr. Tulsi Ashunivas, who is Professor of Anthropology

at Emerson College.

We are covering a brand new Duke University press publication

with fascinating work called The Goddess in the Mirror

and Anthropology and Beauty.

Tulsi, welcome to the podcast.

Lovely to see you.

Tell us about the first look in this mirror.

How did this book come into being?

That's a fascinating question.

It came into being quite accidentally.

You might have seen my book The Colony Elevator

and Anthropology Wanderer, which I wrote a couple of years ago.

When I was in Daniela researching that book

from say 1997 to 2017, actually, in between all that.

I used to get kind of tired of being at the temples.

There's a highly masculine environment.

And it's rule-bound, the way I had to address, the way I had to speak.

And on certain days, I would get increasingly frustrated and tired

when you show the back of the line.

Even though they were very welcoming and I learned a great deal

at times, I just felt suffocated.

And I would leave and I would go to find in Bangalore,

which is my site of fieldwork for the past 25 years.

The good, my schoolmates with whom I had grown up in the city

who had, by this time, become sort of entrepreneurs

and city government officials and sort of the elite

of the city as it were.

And I would go and find them and I went to an all-girled school

so there were most of them were women.

And I would arrive at their homes.

And inevitably, someone in their homes,

a maid or some assistant,

or sometimes even their children would say,

well, so and so is that the beauty partner, the salon.

And I found myself following them in order to have a conversation

and find the other parts of myself in the salon.

And growing up, I had not been much to a beauty partner.

In fact, I tell the story in the book of my mother

from whom most people learn beauty regimens

was naturally very beautiful,

very to a very unusual looking in an Indian setting.

And she had a natural sense of self besides her uppercase status.

She was well-educated.

She had a sense of self whereby, you know, and as an academic,

the family can have good, good beauty rituals.

So I was not familiar with these salons except occasionally

had gone there with my college friends.

And finding myself there 20 years later,

I became quite fascinated with what was going on.

And I recount this singular story

where I go there with the college friend Radhika

to one of the fanciest poshest salons in Bangalore at the time.

And the life of activity it was, as women were getting,

the eyebrows threaded, the hair straightened and colored.

And you know, facial waxing and threading

all these beauty processes that they engaged in.

And at the same time, I found that they were telling myths

to one another largely from the Mahalharata

but also from the Ramayana, you know, traditional Hindu myth.

That I've been culturally codified within the nation state

of India, culture of India.

So a lot of Muslim and Christian friends knew these stories as well.

And they would narrate these stories.

Only they narrated them in a way that I had never heard before.

And so I became interested in this seemingly secular spaces

where religion was present but in unexpected ways.

In ways that you didn't, it would bubble up suddenly

in the story.

And so I started thinking about beauty.

What is an attribute of goddesses?

As well as the processes that human women and others,

as it turns out, undertake in order to feel beautiful.

And how these were linked.

And what it meant to what beauty was in the Hindu context

in contemporary India.

And what it did in these spaces as well.

So that's how I came to it and sort of backed into this book.

Yeah, I mean, it's not really fascinating.

The very most certainly we'll talk, we'll speak about your findings

and sort of some of the contours momentarily,

with the very premise, right?

The very, you know, sort of hiding in plain sight.

And beauty salons as sacred sites would speak tongue and cheek

as sites of baton, mythic recitation and reformulation.

And the sort of symbiosis or synergy between mythic narratives

and beauty myths pun intended.

And so it really is quite a novel concept that I suppose

one can only stumble upon, happenstance,

because the book really is an anthropology of beauty

that's utterly distinct, but not unrelated entirely

from a philosophy of aesthetics.

And it's really, the very concept seems to be novel.

And there's a great deal of intrigue in the methodology itself.

I mean, I don't know, new enough of your niche of your subfield.

But it seems to be quite groundbreaking.

It's a very sort of stance, would you say?

That's kind of you to say a lot.

I didn't feel groundbreaking when I was writing it.

Let me back up a bit and say that.

Once I finished the column, the elevator,

I realized that while it was a standalone book,

what I was really embarking on is a trilogy about Bangalore.

And about Bangalore's unexpected sacred spaces

as a sort of company town, an industrial company town

that has now become the sort of site of neoliberal

technologies and cutting edge sort of technologies, now AI.

Bangalore's particular space within India

is unusual and yet prototypical of Indian cities

and some fundamental way in its social and cultural and past milieu.

But I realized that after the culinary elevator

that I was very interested in religion,

but I was also interested in how it was embedded

in the culinary elevator, which is very embedded

with sort of technology and the technologies

that we used to create wonder.

Now this is book tour of the trilogy.

And here we find the technologies of beauty

that women and others, those aspiring to be women,

those called women, use in order to ground themselves

in certain spaces and the way they use narrative,

telling of these stories in distinctive ways.

And so this is part two in anthropology beauty

and part three which I'm working on now

is called the Lake of Fire in anthropology of grace,

which gets into technology and its relationship with climate,

the larger sort of Bangalore geophysical, geomorphological structures

of the Bangalore region.

So it's right now it's a three-parter

and this is part two.

And it's kind of you to say it's part-breaking.

It is the first ethnography of Indian beauty powers,

which are ubiquitous three years.

Yes, yes.

So it's not my imagination.

This is Aburvata.

This is new.

It's new in the site.

It is the first full length study of ethnography of beauty powers,

which is hard because beauty powers are so central to Indian life.

Every Nagar has them, every locality, every neighborhood,

even villages.

There's the Bootypala in villages, every, you know,

Mufassal town has them.

And so Bangalore being a sort of cutting-edge beauty place,

a lot of beauty queens come from Bangalore.

They pass through Bangalore because Bangalore has always had,

like, training for modeling and polywood actresses, etc.

So there's a real sort of cultural beauty.

And so it became, once I dove into it,

it became really interesting to me what beauty is.

And yes, it's philosophical in some senses.

It's speaking back to the Western idea of beauty.

It's true.

Because what is clear in what comes true in the ethnography was

that they're different truths at the same.

And the way one thinks about truth is not the way a Kantian

discourse on truth, but rather a sort of ethnography of aesthetics.

What is the, my real question here was,

what is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics?

And how does it play out in India, as opposed to, say,

Western understandings of beauty, socratic understandings,

Kantian understanding, or even more recent understandings,

sort of feminist readings of beauty as being a sort of oppressive

standards that women have to adhere to.

All that plays true in Bangalore as well.

But there's something else happening, too.

Because I found, you know, the sort of feminist narrative of beauty

being oppression and women being victims of this beauty discourse

that has a flowed through Serb and Advisors' books,

no, no, no, science books, all that.

I have, when I met my friends who were middle class

and some lower middle class women, some trans-Hijra women,

I found it hard to think of them as victims of this discourse,

who, for less victimized victims, I could not imagine,

but they had taken control of the narrative,

and they had taken control of the narrative by telling these myths,

these stories of goddesses like Draupadi,

of Kamakya Devi, of Sita, of Durga.

These sort of formative, sort of goddess,

would be very religious studies scholars,

think of these formative, sort of female characters,

telling them in unique ways, telling the stories

to sort of massage power into new friends,

and to, so, and to think of power as being,

being inherent in being women and in being goddesses.

So the opening vignette is called Thine Deviya,

where this woman jokingly looks at herself in her friends

and imigrants us, we have a Thine Deviya, and three goddesses.

And I always took that to be a joke until I realized

that it was a tongue-in-cheek representation.

So my question is, if women can be goddesses,

or goddesses women, there's a plea there that's very interesting.

If women are scribe to be goddesses,

what power does that count them?

And what power is not granted to them?

As, you know, where does that line lie?

And so I was playing with all these things,

and they fell into different chapters

that are attributes of the goddess.

So first one is called elure,

or why does a woman need to be alluring,

and what is elure dupe for the goddess?

Then you have radiance, and this whole sort of notion of luck,

shmeeping the radiant goddess, this sort of, you know,

goddesses are supposed to be Hiranya Garpe,

the claiming womb, they're supposed to be light skinned,

they're supposed to be radiant,

and if they are not, then there's a reason to call this dark.

There's a reason.

So there's this sort of inherent fire of power or radiance,

which has been interpreted in the sort of more cotidian world

as face creams, face brighteners, bleaching of faces.

And so there's this sort of play between gold and glowing radiance, etc.

which you see all this passing through the beauty industry.

And that is chapter two.

And then you have a wounded goddess,

Vekama Kya Devi,

where the wound, you know,

the many parts of sati that fall and create the geography of India,

the sacred geography of India,

the essential wound that it takes to be a goddess,

and how these women are wounded,

and here the book tilts to consider the women who work in the parlors,

many of them migrant women,

who come from the north-east,

from Tripura, Meghalaya, Nepal,

Manipur,

and Assam, and Gauhati Premen,

and come to Bangalore to be beautiful workers and restaurant workers.

And it goes to fertility and being married

and this notion of Bhagya Luck,

or how that's a life to beauty.

And finally, it sort of moves into the transverse,

to think about how fluidity, gender fluidity,

is part of the goddesses' habitures as well.

And so all the chapters are sort of attributes of the goddess,

that play through cotidian women's lives,

and how they see that attribute,

how they align themselves with it,

or misalign themselves with it,

and how then that becomes a frame for them understanding power in the way they work.

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You know, there are so many endlessly fascinating threads.

I think for those listening,

walk us through your sources,

because this is intriguing.

Like, what are your sources for this?

How do you gather data for this book?

I'm like a jacket doll, I think, like a magpie.

I just, I'm not, I pick up what strikes me as a shiny object

in terms of data.

I'm like, what is this?

They catch my eye,

and then I become sort of obsessed with it.

And I circle around it madly.

Many, many, many years.

I'm very slow.

And then it requires enough heft in my notebooks.

And I start thinking seriously about it,

and I think, you know, because you trip over data.

I mean, my father used to say around every corner in India,

you can find books waiting to be written.

I think that's true.

So, you know,

it's my notebooks are full of throwaway aside.

But when they're not throwaway aside,

they seem to form into pattern in my head.

And then I become obsessed.

And then I choose to shine the objects

until I add enough of them,

and they sediment into something.

And then there's a real search for the data.

So, initially, while I was in India,

all this sort of stuff I was collecting,

and then it's sedimented into some,

a frame whereby I started thinking of,

you know, there was enough about goddesses

and narratives and stories and beauty processes

that I started thinking seriously about them.

And then some, when I wanted for the interview

or something,

the pandemic struck.

And so, I was cut off from the field.

And so, part of the research took place

as room and by a text and by that time,

I have fairly robust networks in the field,

and I have enough sort of connections.

And so, I would, my data stream was endless throughout the night

and throughout the day till they went to sleep,

or beauticians and beauty parlor clients

were sending me endless sort of kecks

with screen grabs, with gifts of them twirling

with images of their new makeup,

with now TikTok videos,

which they're sort of speaking to,

or speaking about with different perks

that they were using with,

wanting my input,

do you think this looks better?

This is blue eyeshadow look better.

What do you think of our new eyebrows?

You know, endless.

Pinging into my phone,

so that I felt like I was trying to drink

from a fire hydrant.

And the question began,

became for me,

how do I encapsulate this in a book?

So, part of the book has texts with,

then a text.

And as I put it,

so, screen grab.

So, the text that I got into the text of a book

to think about the meta-texture beauty,

what was women doing when they were communicating with me.

And so, yeah,

the data became,

I couldn't drop my arms around it.

It's still so much.

It's,

it's layered and dense,

where, with thoughts,

emotions,

the way emoticons,

it was rich data,

arts, flowers,

good morning.

You know, on every festival I would get,

sort of images of a goddess.

Every Navaratri was a nightmare.

You know, I had to download my phone after every Navaratri,

because you just couldn't take the material.

So, yeah.

So, it was fascinating and deeply troubling to me,

because I didn't sleep for three years

while this was going on in 2020,

2021, 2022.

She's like this.

Endless data stream.

Until I said enough.

It just can't.

So, I've quietened them for a little while.

So, I could think about it with some distance.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

So, one of,

one of the many in three intriguing threads of the work,

at least to yours truly,

is this invocation and usage

and we're proposing a myth of mythological narratives

of drawing the wellspring

of Indic myth

in a way that I haven't quite seen before,

which is saying a lot,

because we've seen a lot of,

a lot of innovating and repurposing of Indic myth.

You say a bit about this,

this, this, this functioning,

not as charters,

but anti-charters,

and sort of maybe invoke some example

other vis-a-vis droplet year of Vandaria.

That's, you know,

save it more about this for the listeners.

Yeah, and, you know,

and once you've always studied myth,

you've been fascinated with the way

a myth is worth constructing.

You know, let me strouse,

of course,

it is comparison of myth across,

across different cultures,

it was sort of systemic,

and he ducks,

but all myths all over the world

are constructed of smaller units called myth-teams,

and those imaginative constructions

that build into a grammar of myth.

That was very interesting,

structurally, like,

how is a myth constructed?

But more importantly,

for my work,

the application of myth,

as it were,

as Malanowski,

and his understanding of myth,

and other anthropologists

who had dealt with religious myths,

sacred myths,

other Native American myths,

or, of course,

the Indic myths.

And the notion was that

myth was a charter,

and the way myth functioned

was as a charter for being,

so it laid the sort of

rules by which people

lived their ontologies.

And this is a common understanding

of the way myth functions

in anthropological understanding,

that if myth is a legal charter,

then what it is doing

is it is constructing

the sort of parameters

by which one can live one's life.

So, see the time that frame becomes

the ideal type, woman, wife,

mother, etc.

And Rama becomes the ideal type,

male hero, masculine,

god figure.

Then we're left between

Sita Rama,

with the problem,

which families have circled

around as to how could Rama

treat Sita that way?

How could he demand her

to go through the fire trial

and accuse her of

infidelity when he knew better?

But if it looks at it,

not as a charter,

if one looks at,

as Ekera Manojan says,

women standing on the myth,

we lose the masculine

governmental charter force of the myth.

But rather we look at

just the ontology of being,

we look at aesthetics

as ethics itself,

just the beingness itself

becomes the ethics.

We also then understand

that charters have anti-charters,

that what the women are doing

is they're reconstructing

in their very telling,

though the frame of the narrative

seems somewhat similar,

what they're doing is

they're sort of gently twisting the myth,

so that it becomes an anti-charter,

rather than a charter

for living,

it becomes what's the living teaching us.

So it turns it,

it inverts the idea,

and that inversion is really important.

If one inverts,

they say Rama Sita thing,

then it's not the relationship

between Rama and Sita,

that is at play,

it's the Sita's relationship

with herself,

and the being of that self,

that becomes crucial,

or if you take Draupadi,

right?

Draupadi Vastravarana,

the removal of her clothing

in that famous scene

in the Mahabharata,

how can you treat a goddess

and a queen this way,

and the argument,

sometimes given is,

of course,

the sexist misogynist argument

is that she was married

to four husbands,

and this is Duryodhana's argument,

that she was no better

than a prostitute,

and so she would be treated as such,

and she comes there with her.

Here being pulled,

clothes stripped,

and that's a very powerful moment,

the narrative,

it's a pivot point in the narrative, right?

That is the reason,

given why the Kauravas had to be,

had to be taken to the battlefield,

because of the Jizonna,

if one does the narration differently,

as many women did,

yes, the Jizonna is part of it,

but they focus on what happens in a battlefield,

and what Draupadi says

at the end of the dice game,

and which is dragged into the Subhash,

she says,

I will not tie my hair

until it is washed

in Duryodhana's blood,

so she takes control of the narrative,

and the battle is her will,

is her will,

that Duryodhana be killed,

righteously and effectively,

and then she ties up her hair

after it is washed in his blood.

So the force of her,

sort of ethical claim on the world,

is made clear,

versus her being this,

wife who need the men to protect her,

rather she takes control of the narrative,

and she works through the men,

to justify her beingness.

This is not a chart,

it was my argument,

rather this is,

from women's supposed powerlessness,

into their power for claims upon the world,

and so it becomes a way of thinking about,

to beingness and beauty,

that is not rooted,

in Kantian truth,

but rather rooted,

in the ethics of an aesthetic claim upon the world,

a sensory claim upon the world,

which is very Hindu.

Yeah, I mean,

just so so fascinating.

I mean, the epics have been,

of, of, of,

persistent and abiding interests.

You know, and,

and we look at,

you know,

it's really, really interesting to see you come

at very similar conclusions,

from such a different aperture or angle,

you know, when I read the phomychidamayana,

to my mind,

it's actually,

quite some sort of,

in a sense,

in that,

it's, it's, it's really,

got on earth as on the throne,

and it's a dystopia,

it's sort of,

where's the utopia?

It's, it's, it's,

it's really,

so, and,

and really it was recently teaching an online course

on the Mahabharata,

and I see that,

this rubbing scene

as the fulcrum around which,

the epic,

the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the,

the sort of the drama,

the tension,

the, the, the conflict,

and it's,

gravity is the one,

who is saying,

you know,

if I,

if, if he locks himself first,

who the hell is it about me?

I mean, am I his to bet,

if he's locked?

I mean,

and no one can answer her,

her legal or a dark-mic question,

everyone's silent,

and the so-called,

wise elders

are severely punished

for this and do course.

It, it,

it's utterly fascinating,

and she,

and she refused,

she's like,

you know what?

It makes the,

it makes the,

the ripping out of the trust

and it's hard,

it makes the,

the washing hair and blood,

you understand,

this relationship has,

it's eligible

because of this moment,

this pivotal moment,

it's, it's so fascinating,

um, you know, there's,

there's,

there's a, there's,

there's a,

a really

within various Southfields. Could you see more about this?

Well, I start with Ramanujan because Ramanujan says, A.K. Ramanujan says very clearly that

in the women's telling it's different of the narrative. And you know, while Miki

Ramanujan is a very North Indian, very masculineist perspective, but South Indian women

in contemporary India, which is where I work, tell the myths with different purposes

at hand, and tell the myths very differently, as Ramanujan says. So he was my starting point.

But then I very quickly realized that what I had followed as a religious study scholar

was this Valmiki thread, which led inevitably to charters and to Hindutva masculineist sort of

understanding. Whereas if one looks like many Mahabharata, many Ramayanas, if one looks at

Kala Richman, Rukse, you know, Nell Hawley's work, you get a very different understanding

how the myths are working in real life. A book within the text and without the text, outside.

So I then became interested in the way Hinduism has worked, say Rasaathili, or Nati Shastraathili.

What is the ethics of, what is the ethical component of these thetics? And how is these

thetics linked to ethics? What is the sensory world if one thinks of the Hindu body in certain

ways or the Hindu argument in certain ways? What is the effect of the sensory world upon

us within? And if you think of the different sort of sheep, the kosha of existence,

and Shulman has written about the Hindu imagination, the moral imagination of Hindus.

And thinking about all this, you know, I realized that making that into notion,

right, of sort of the individual Hindu versus the individual Westerners.

What the women in the Sonan world was? They were both forest in the sense that, you know,

the ethical world flowed through them and so did some, in some senses, the aesthetics of the

world flowed through them. But at the same time, they were impervious in that they were

slapping on all this stuff onto their skins, which was impervious in the sense that they

didn't see themselves as totally porous to the world. Though they worked very hard in

terms of pollution boundaries in terms of the way beauty was constructed, so there's this

play between porosity and sort of impermeability. There's this play between ethics and ethics

has braided within it deep sense of the unethical as well. Because the way currents of the way

migrant women were treated in the parlor and in Bangalore, I found deeply troubling.

You know, the work ethic, the way they were treated by clients, what they had to undergo to

come and be beauty parlor workers, so the ethical has braided within it the unethical.

One may think of this as karmic tech, one may think of it as a notion of Dharma, how you treat

people around you. One may see it through the lens of caste, but it is very clear that the ethical

is also the unethical. How one distinguishes that? It's sort of key to understanding how the

karmic tech load worked. And so it connects to these many sort of central ideas in

Jerusalem, but what I sort of circled around was that it was less about philosophy as we

understand it in the sense that I did not apply Western philosophy to an Indian problem,

which is the way a lot of things are resolved in industries, in anthropology, etc. But rather

what I was trying to do is see how inherent philosophies and inherent aesthetics collied through

the parlor and structured these lens words. Perhaps that's kind of unclear, but maybe

you have to read the book for it to make sense.

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Now we're always about, listen, it's about the scenic route. It very much is about, you know,

those who are interested in the book will read the book. We're putting it on the radar.

And if at the very least, we're teasing it. I mean, we're staying, we're staying,

it's sort of a generalist enough level that those who might be interested

whether in aesthetic studies or other facets of Hindu studies might, you know,

they might, you know, they may not, they may folks may not realize that, you know,

if you're studying Shringarh as a classically, this book might be of great help to you.

If you're studying a drop with me, you may not think to look at a study of narratives

within salons, but here we are. I mean, this is, so, yeah, I think the scenic route always

way to go. So we're good. I always have a list of, like, sort of, five-ish questions.

And I rarely stick to it, depending where the competition needs us.

There was one point that I wanted to highlight. We've talked about in passing, you know,

this, I mean, there's a lot we can say about sort of gender issues and sort of the colorism.

There's a lot. There's a lot in here that we can talk about.

But what I would, maybe I'll leave it more general.

When you were writing this book, whether, whether you're sharing your countless

sleepless nights receiving the data or actually solidifying it into, into discourse,

did anything surprise you? Was it, was it sort of like, yes, this is more of the same revelation?

Or were there actual sort of, um, ink store coat where there actually, you know,

flies in the ointment for you and sort of, did anything really, for anything surprised you

about what you discovered?

It's so far in the reveal military, Raj.

So the interesting thing is, um, all of it surprised me.

In the sense that being the child of academics and working in academia,

the notion of, you know, beauty, um, being this sort of currency,

both sexual and power.

I mean, I'm aware of it. I read about it.

But it really pinches on my life in a very visceral way.

And yet I found these when it's so worried about growing old,

so worried about the hair, so worried about, you know, the loss of sort of sexual power,

um, and at the same time referencing myths that had lasted supposedly thousands of years in the imagination,

reciting them and telling them in very different ways.

So the way they told the myth was this endless story, as I call it,

um, which is very like Hollywood blockbusters.

In the sense that you always started in the middle of the story,

um, and it would unwind both forwards and then they would be prequels to the story.

So every time you went to the corner, you got a new episode on what the women were, um,

sort of thinking about and talking about.

So one episode might be on marriage, and they might talk about seat time.

They might talk about drop.

And another episode might be on, um, not the time we go to the Pala when the trading eyebrows,

they might talk about, um, the radiance of Lakshmi.

It depends on what was happening in the wider world.

So on Lakshmi Pujade, you know, they would start talking.

So there was this pushing forward in the narrative and rolling back in the narrative,

and then there was side.

So then they'd start talking about the side characters,

like Gandhari, the wife of, um, Dirtavastra, and how she bound her eyes,

and what that meant for the world, and how could she bind her eyes?

Still all these characters that they referenced.

Who's you know who loves to appeal with their beauty?

But at the same time, they faced ethical conandrums,

and they resolved them within the space of the men.

And I realized what these women, what was surprising to me was,

these women, who were so concerned with their bodies and faces,

were using the myths to resolve ethical conandrums in their lives.

And so they were using age-old sort of technologies brought forward,

and yet their bodies were being subject to sort of the latest technological inventions,

sort of plasma of face shields, and threading,

and sort of different kinds of different kinds of sort of face creams,

and hair straightening, they were, that's what I meant,

by permeability and impermeability.

And that's why Dirtavastra changed always playing with these categories.

That I found surprising, because I thought,

oh, you know, when you think about Hinduism,

you always think about death and creation,

and I thought, yeah, that's a well-worn trope.

But I saw it actually in action here,

and I was fascinated by that quite frankly,

and I found it surprising.

Um, perhaps I should have been less surprised being Hindu myself,

but maybe I've been so lost in texts, et cetera, and teaching Hinduism,

that this was still surprising to me how much it played

in the so-called secular space of the ponder,

where Muslim women, Christian women,

uh, the Syrian Christian women,

uh, in the women of different castes,

all congregated, of different tribal statuses,

all congregated, both as workers and as clients.

It was not even a form homogenous group I mentioned.

Yeah, every, every aspect of the book,

every time you discuss something, you share something,

we just kind of casually walk away,

these massive sort of big ticket ideas of these gems,

such as pluralism,

space of interreligious discourse,

such as the extent to which arguably,

the membrane between quote unquote the sacred and the secular

might be more porous in South Asia.

I mean, there's so much,

there's so much here,

just in the, in the sort of the back trap of the landscape,

much less what you're actually tracking,

it's, it really is endlessly fascinating.

You know, this, this,

the answer to the following question may take on a number of iterations,

but what do you hope folks would take away from this?

Clearly there are a number of things that take away from this work,

but what, what do you feel might be along the lines of sort of the core

innovation,

yeah, innovation of the core sort of,

you know,

or some of what this book is doing?

That's a good question, Raj.

I really don't know what this book is doing.

Oh, good.

I would hope that people would not necessarily,

well, there are two things I hope people take away from work.

That one feminism takes different shapes.

Indian women are pushing back on this sort of mask-ness narrative

in a very unique way.

That's one thing.

The second thing I hope that particularly students take away,

is to have,

I mean, when I started a book that's getting beauty-pollars,

it seemed ridiculous.

No, I mean,

to think of a religious study scholar studying beauty-pollars,

I felt very embarrassed when I spoke about it or thought about it,

but I would hope that people

have the strength of purpose to study what interests them

and to follow it through,

because I think that that widens,

as you said, the aperture through which we can understand

Indian culture, Hinduism,

with all its flaws.

I mean, this is by no means a book that,

that is an apologist who justifies certain certain

the casteism of Hinduism

or the misogyny of it.

It just lays it bare,

so that we contend with the fact that a very ancient religion

that has survived into the modern day

in a different incarnation,

a governmental incarnation now,

has certain unusual philosophies and ontology,

but also it has within it the capacity

both for terrible injustice,

but the language also for a redression

and a turn of pivot towards justice within it.

I think that that is important to state.

Anything that's important for us to remember?

Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating.

I mean, the whole premise,

I mean, the notion that mythic narratives,

if I'm myself saying either they're sort of the tissues

of our consciousness,

we can't, we can't, they're the scaffolding, right?

The narratives that we imbibe in our formative years,

they're not even the things we think,

they're the very scaffolding of how we see

and our very approach.

And this work shows that that is the case,

and it's not something that one necessarily turns on

for religiosity or piety or study or whatever.

It is such that, you know,

you know, the story of Moses in an Abrahamic context

or the story of Draupadi in the context,

it's just part of the sort of lap drop,

the operating system of the worldview,

and can be drawn on consciously

and repurposed consciousness.

So, so, so, so that, I mean,

this is no longer an idea or a theory.

I mean, it's, it's a receiving this in real time.

And also the extent to which,

you have to make some selves

interlace justice and injustice,

interlace, you know,

Darwin and Darwin,

and the shades of gray, I mean,

they're so masterful

at the ideological and the sociological tensions

that that that mastery is,

is, is, is, is aware by they can be endlessly leveraged

by various factions.

Because, because the text themselves,

you know, sort of various normativity is notwithstanding,

the text themselves don't land at a comfortable

and solid position.

And I think it's, it's, it's, it's utterly fascinating

to see them in action in the sway and so on.

And, and to the point that you see,

you sort of started off that response

within terms of, I couldn't have some

a scholar of religion.

And I'm just saying,

well, you know, I mean, I'm in the beauty

follower all day.

But I'm working.

Not as a magician,

as a scholar of religion.

I'm neither getting my nails in all day,

nor am I doing nails all day.

I'm actually doing work at the beauty follower.

I just do what kind of popped into my head was,

I remember a moment in 2017,

not too long after this rotating,

where, you know, it wasn't a question of,

of being able to get a job.

It was a question of there being no jobs to get.

And I wasn't really interested in the whole

session of begging bowl kind of being,

um, it's relocated for that anyhow.

And I remember speaking with a senior scholar

at a conference,

I think I'd given a paper.

It was, well, received a clerical correctly.

And, and, and he was like,

oh, great, a great paper.

You know, what are you doing now?

And it was me.

It wasn't him.

There was nothing in what he was saying.

It was me.

I was mortified to say,

I, I teach, I teach online courses,

you know, sort of mortified at the whole,

not education.

I think it wasn't until COVID,

that it all made sense.

And people were knocking and murderers say,

hey, would you tell us a little more about this whole

on education thing?

So listen, you know, however sheepish you might be about,

you know, being in the first and the beauty follower

to neither be a beautician nor a client.

You know, you certainly you've opened the door here, right?

There's clearly potentially more work to be done in.

And I think it'll be interesting to see the sorts of work

in terms of spaces and methods.

So, so obviously you finally find things,

but the, what I started off saying is they're very

stands of the book.

They're very basic studying,

and the means whereby it's,

it's, it's deriving data.

It's quite novel to my mind.

You know, I'm not in the niche,

but it's quite, you know, that, that,

that's original,

the respective of what you're finding

and then you find all these interesting things.

So I wouldn't be surprised.

If much like sort of all my education

between 27 and 2020,

the three years from now,

you might see,

it may inspire similar work.

Who knows, we'll see.

Is there anything else about,

well, you're welcome.

Is there anything else about the book in particular

or the project in general that you hope to touch on it?

You want to share before we close?

Yeah.

And it's part of this trilogy,

the anthropology of wonder,

of beauty, of grace,

as you can see,

I'm working through categories

that have been classically thought

of as Christian categories,

or are associated with the Christian camp.

But what I want to argue

through these three books,

or what I have attempted to argue,

the very apologetically in this book,

is that these categories

are by no means universal,

but different religious traditions

have attended them in different ways.

So my first book was about Adhpudha,

wonder,

my second book is about

Alankara,

decoration and beauty,

and my third book is about

Anugraha,

grace.

So we have terms for all this,

by which we understand very different things

that the translation

into English is kanji.

But,

I want to argue that they're not universal,

but Hinduism has come at

or Hindu moral imaginations

have come at this

in unique and different ways,

and ways by which we get a grammar

and a lexicon,

of speaking to Western categories,

but through different lenses,

to say yes, Anugraha is great,

but it functions

in a different way,

God's grace,

it functions differently

in the imagination.

And we need to look at that,

we can't accept

the crystal-colonial

understanding of our world,

and it's quick,

it's not just text-based,

but to look at the way

people functionally use this

in their own world.

And that will give us

the grammar and lexicon

to think about

a truly colonial

embedded understanding

of religion,

which we have yet to achieve.

Well, certainly is the work in progress,

and without questioning

your work contributes

to that goal,

to that initiative.

I mean, if there are,

I mean, if one is to presume

or suspect or into it,

that there are experiences

that are universal,

one has to equally suspect

or discern that

iterations and articulations

of those experiences

are sociocultural

and sociocultural.

And even if we permit something

such as quote-unquote grace

that might be approximate,

the something that is

experienced cross-cultural,

such as perhaps laughter,

or would have either way,

one cannot presume

that there are the ways

in which we think of

and leverage

quote-unquote grace

in one culture will be the same

as another.

I've said this a hundred times

on the podcast, if you're studying

South Asia,

and your theories and categories

don't change,

and you're not studying South Asia.

Our subject

to so much diversity

and ways of thinking

and you know,

we sort of notion of

it being a singular culture

even within India.

You have such critique,

you have Mahujan culture,

you have tribal culture,

you have different regions,

you have different ethnicities

and other different ways of reading the text,

understanding the different speaking,

different narratives,

different intersections,

there is so much diversity

of imagination.

To speak of it as one unit

is already enough of itself.

That's why I'm very particular to see

my field work is located in one place

and it has so much diversity

even in that one site.

So it's a very

microscopic understanding

and I hope it contributes

to a larger sort of

encyclopedic understanding

of what's

Asian culture and religion look like

in the contemporary world.

Fantastic.

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

Thank you Raj. Thank you for hosting me.

I appreciate it.

Thank you very much for listening.

There was a few people

who was listening that

we have been

looking at Dr. Tulsi Shrinivas

on a brand new Duke University

press publication

that got us in the mirror

and an anthropology of beauty.

Until next time, keep

well. Keep safe. Keep listening,

reading,

and keep contemplating the

power of duty.

You