Explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.

This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions—namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists intensification, which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges. This volume emphasizes an inclusive approach by bringing these two currents into sustained conversation. As Hindu traditions are increasingly expanding into new settings, including but not limited to new diaspora and new media contexts, the long-established yet ever changing scale of sweet/neutral/spicy unfolds in new ways, as well. The essays in this volume delineate these developments across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Indeed, the volume's multidisciplinary approach shows how these processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.

"This volume is distinguished not just by its geographical and linguistic diversity but also by its variety of disciplinary approaches—textual, historical, literary, visual, and anthropological. All of the chapters take pains to showcase Hinduism's lived and living traditions as they adapt and change. Further, they expand how we understand the sweetening/intensification dialectic within the context of several current impulses, including globalization and the rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India." — Archana Venkatesan, University of California, Davis

"The driving theme of this book opens into fascinating twists and turns in the study of Hindu traditions while poking important holes in scholarly assumptions. Against the backdrop of long-observed processes of Sanskritization, or sweetening, we find these processes to be far from inevitable or unidirectional. Through this collection's vivid explorations of how deities, rituals, and traditions sweeten and intensify over time and space, we find a new appreciation for the dynamism of Hindu traditions." — Corinne G. Dempsey, Nazareth University