The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York

Abstract

This book is a portrayal of a flourishing Hindu temple in the town of Rush, New York, dedicated to the great south Indian goddess Rājarājeśwarī. Guided by an exuberant Sri Lankan guru known as Aiya, temple practitioners embrace yet definitively break with tradition. Known for its ritual precision and extravagance, the temple and its guru defy convention by training and encouraging non-brahmans and women to publicly perform priestly roles, and by teaching the secrets of Śrīvidyā, a highly exclusive Tantric tradition. Weaving together traditional South Asian tales, temple miracle accounts, and devotional testimonials, the book is organized into three parts reflecting various intersecting worldviews, traditions, and landscapes with which temple practices and participants contend. The book’s first part explores the temple’s emphasis on ritual performance and potency, and the resulting collisions between miraculous and mundane worldviews as experienced and understood by Aiya, temple participants, and the ethnographer-author. Part two explores how Aiya and his students deftly balance convention with non-convention, breaking rules of orthodoxy that make room for leadership and learning, and providing possibilities otherwise unavailable in traditional temple settings. Part three explores the diaspora condition as experienced within the Rush temple context. It chronicles the joys and challenges of negotiating domestic and foreign traditions, and the effects this has on human and divine participants, temple rituals, and the temple terrain itself. In sum, the book argues that in a setting where science illuminates the sacred, where traditional religious practices allow for breaking with the same, and where foreign terrain becomes home turf, the Goddess not only lives, she thrives.

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