Pralay Kanungo is Professor at the Centre for Political Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He has been a Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Visiting Professor at Maison des Sciences De L’Homme, Paris. Kanungo is the author of RSS’s Tryst with Politics: From Hedgewar to Sudarshan (2002) and co-editor (with Daniela Berti and Nicolas Jaoul) of The Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva (2011). He has written several articles on Hindutva and is currently working on a manuscript on communal violence in Kandhamal.
Deepa S. Reddy is a cultural anthropologist with the University of Houston—Clear Lake and Director of India Outreach Programs of the University of Houston System. She has written on the contestations of identitarian politics in India, the globalisation of caste via the discourses of race and human rights, and on how sample collection and donor registration initiatives, such the International HapMap Project and the U.S. National Marrow Donor Program, facilitate reconceptualisations of bioethics, civic identities, and even the role of the market in medicine and genetics. Her book, Religious Identity and Political Destiny, was published in 2006. Her current research interests range from public expressions of Hindu-ness to (bio)ethics, medical tourism and drug development in India.
Maya Warrier is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Her research interests centre on popular forms of contemporary Hinduism in a transnational context. She is currently working on a fieldwork-based project examining ‘alternative spiritualities’ in Britain’s holistic health milieu, with a focus on the ancient Indian health tradition, Ayurveda, in its contemporary British manifestations. She is author of Hindu Selves in a Modern World: Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission (2005), and co-editor of Theology and Religious Studies: An Exploration of Disciplinary Boundaries (2008).
Raymond Brady Williams is LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana. His research on Swaminarayan Hinduism and religions of immigrants from India and Pakistan is recorded in several books, including A New Face of Hinduism (1984), Religions of Immigrants from India and Pakistan (1988), A Sacred Thread, ed. (1992, 1996), Christian Pluralism in the United States (1996), An Introduction to Swaminarayan Hinduism (2001), Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in the United States (2001, 2007) and Williams on South Asian Religions and Immigration (2004). He was the founding editor of Teaching Theology and Religion (1998–2002).
John Zavos is Senior Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. His recent publications include Religious Traditions in Modern South Asia (2011), co-authored with Jacqueline Suthren Hirst, and several articles on Hinduism and Hindu organisations in the UK. He has worked extensively on the Hindu nationalist movement and is the author of The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India (2000). Between 2008 and 2010, he was the principal investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network project: ‘The Public Representation of a Religion Called Hinduism: Postcolonial Patterns in Britain, India and the US’.
Amrita Basu is the Paino Professor of Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, USA. The focus of her research is Hindu nationalism and global women’s movements. Her recent publications include her edited anthology, Women’s Movements in a Global Era: the Power of Local Feminisms (2010), and her co-edited volume, with Srirupa Roy, Violence and Democracy in India (2006).
Chad Bauman is Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. His book, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868-1947 (2008), was named Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006–2008, by the Society for Hindu–Christian Studies. In addition to the chapter in this volume, his research on American Hinduism led to the publication of a state-of-the-field article (co-authored with Jennifer Saunders) that appeared in Religion Compass, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2009) as ‘Out of India: Immigrant Hindus and South Asian Hinduism in the United States’. His current research focuses on Hindu–Christian conflict.
Gwilym Beckerlegge studied religions at the Universities of Oxford and Lancaster, and is currently Professor of Modern Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at The Open University, UK. His research has centred on the growth of seva within the Ramakrishna Math and Mission and other contemporary Hindu movements. Publications include Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission (2006), Colonialism, Modernity and Religious Identities (2008) (editor and contributor), and ‘ “An ordinary organisation run by ordinary people”: a study of leadership in Vivekananda Kendra’ in Contemporary South Asia.
Véronique Bouillier is a social anthropologist studying Nepali sectarian castes and ascetic communities from a Shaiva background (Dasnami grihastha Sannyasis, Jangamas, Newar Kusles, and Kanphata Yogis). Focusing on the relationships between Nepalese kingship and the Nath or Kanphata Yogis, she authored ‘Ascètes et Rois. Un Monastère de Kanphata Yogis au Népal (1997), and then pursued her research on the Nath Yogis sampradaya in India. Her study of their monastic institutions and the change they have been confronted with resulted in the publication of Itinérance et Vie Monastique. Les Ascètes Nath Yogis en Inde Contemporaine (2008).
Christiane Brosius is Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has published on the popular audio-visual and visual culture of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s (see Empowering Visions, 2005). Her other research interests are ritual agency, urban anthropology, diaspora studies and commercial Hindi film. Her latest book has just been published and is entitled India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (2010). It carries ethnographic case studies about urban architecture and town-planning, heritage tourism and spiritualism, and lifestyle specialists and magazines. Currently, she is working on the globalised imaginary of Valentine’s Day and the visualisation of romantic love.
Arun Chaudhuri is completing his PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research interests centre on the socio-political life of religion—broadly including questions of how religion is imagined, lived, and mobilised, and more particularly with the movements, reinventions, and transformations of Indian religions in relation to cultural and economic globalisation, public and popular culture, the dynamics of multiculturalism and transnationalism and the politics of race, class, culture, and ethnicity embedded therein.
Namrata Ganneri is Assistant Professor of History at the SNDT College of Arts and SCB College of Commerce & Science for Women, Mumbai. Her doctoral dissertation, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, focuses on the politics of Hindu nationalist organisations in the early 20th century Bombay.
Shalini Kakar is a post-doctoral fellow at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is working on a project, ‘Devotional Fandom and Diasporic Identities’. She completed her PhD dissertation entitled, ‘“Fashioning the Divine”: Star Deities, Devotional Fandom and Cultural Politics in Contemporary India’ in 2010 from University of California, Santa Barbara. She published a paper entitled, ‘ “Starring” Madhuri as Durga: Devotional Fandom and Performative Fan-Bhakti of Pappu Sardar’ in the International Journal of Hindu Studies in 2009. She is currently working on a book on fan culture and its impact on contemporary cultural politics of India.
Ritu Khanduri is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor at University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focuses on media in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial India and the Indian diaspora in the US history and science. Khanduri’s publications include journal articles and book chapters on newspaper, cartoons, comic books and Gandhi. Supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, she recently completed her book manuscript entitled ‘Caricaturing Culture in India’. She is currently researching for a book on Gandhi and conducting a comparative study of women engineers in India and the US.
Hanna Kim is Assistant Professor in social anthropology at Adelphi University, New York. Her research focuses on religious subjectivities, epistemologies of religion, and devotional movements in Gujarat, India. She is the author of several articles, most recently, ‘Public Engagement and Personal Desires: BAPS Swaminarayan Temples and their Contributions to the Discourses on Religion’, published in International Journal of Hindu Studies, volume 13, no. 3, pp. 357–390 (2009) and ‘The Swaminarayan Movement and Religious Subjectivity’, in The Idea of Gujarat: History, Ethnography and Text, edited by Edward Simpson and Aparna Kapadia, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, pp. 207–228 (2009).
Sanjeev Kumar is pursuing his doctoral research on Geography at the University of Georgia. His dissertation is on ‘Understanding transnationalism as lived by Indian immigrants in the Atlanta Metropolitan Region’. He plans to conduct a longitudinal cohort study on the experiences of the Bhutanese refugees, post immigration in the US.
Prema Kurien is Associate Professor of Sociology at Syracuse University, NY, USA. She is the author of two award winning books: Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and Reconstruction of Community Identities in India (2002; co-winner of the 2003 book award of the Asia and Asian America section, American Sociological Association), and A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (2007; Honorable mention 2009, Religion section, American Sociological Association). She is currently writing a book on evangelicalism and ethnic churches and is conducting research on Indian American civic and political activism.
Karline McLain is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA, where she teaches courses on Hinduism, Islam, and media and religion in South Asia. She is the author of India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes (2009), which was awarded the Edward Cameron Dimock Jr. Book Prize in Indian Humanities by the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her current research is on the growing Shirdi Sai Baba new religious movement.
Balmurli Natrajan teaches anthropology at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His research and writings are on theories of culture and group formation, caste, race, globalisation and Hindutva. His book Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age has been published in 2012. Natrajan is also active in the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate and the Mining Zone People’s Solidarity Group.
Kiyokazu Okita obtained his D.Phil. from the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, UK. His doctoral thesis focuses on an 18th century Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava author Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa’s philosophy and its relation to other Vedāntic schools. After teaching Sanskrit and South Asian religions at Department of Religion, University of Florida, he is currently a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Indological Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. His latest research examines the aesthetic aspect of the Gauḍīya tradition, focusing on the Rasa theory according to Rūpa Gosvāmī in the 16th century.
Tanika Sarkar is currently Professor of History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has also taught at the University of Chicago as well as at several campuses in the USA and Europe. She is the author of Rebels, Wives, Saints: Designing Selves and Nations in Colonial Times (2008) and Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (2001). She has co-edited (with Sumit Sarkar) Women and Social Reform in Modern India (2008).
Atreyee Sen is RCUK Fellow in Conflict, Cohesion and Change with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (CIDRA), University of Manchester. She is interested in the anthropology of the city, with a focus on the micro-politics of urban violence in South Asia. Her book Shiv Sena Women: Violence and Communalism in a Bombay Slum (2007) explores why slum women affiliated themselves with a right-wing political project in Bombay. She is also co-editor of Global Vigilantes: New Perspectives in Justice and Violence (2008) which offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary forms of violent vigilantism.
Shana Sippy teaches in the Religion Department at Carleton College in Northfield, MN, USA. Her research focuses on educational, ritual, artistic, and rhetorical expressions among transnational religious communities. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Diasporic Desires: Making Hindus and the Cultivation of Identity in North America’. Through fieldwork, she examines power, agency, and creativity in the development of collective Hindu identities and debates over the articulation of Hinduism in global contexts. Her most recent research explores the politics and practices of representation in Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim interactions and in Indian–Israeli alliances.
Gérard Toffin is a social anthropologist and a member of the Himalayan Centre, CNRS, at Villejuif, France, where he was Director between 1985 and 1996. He has carried out extensive fieldwork among the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley and among the Tamangs of the Ganesh Himal range. He is the author of Pyangaon, une communauté néwar de la vie matérielle (1997), Société et religion chez les Néwar du Népal (1984), Le Palais et le Temple. La fonction royale dans l’ancienne vallée du Népal (1993), Les tambours de Katmandou (1996), Ethnologie, La quête de l’autre (2005), Entre hindouisme et bouddhisme: la religion néwar (2000), Newar Society: City, Village and Periphery (2007). His edited volumes include: Man and his house in the Himalayas (1991), Nepal: Past and Present (1993), The Politics of Belonging in the Himalayas (2010).