Role of Religion in South Asia

The volume under review, a fine-tuned and reworked doctoral thesis, is a critical narrative of the interpretation of everyday and ritual life of a Muslim shrine known as Hussain Tekri. Carla Bellamy took a plunge into this rather adventurous journey with passion driven by irrepressible intellectual curiosity. Struck by a steady stream of visitors every Thursday to her landlady and friend Maya, something that clearly unsettled her New Yorkian rationality, Carla Bellamy discovered that she had a potential research question in front of her. She chose to pursue it despite many odds associated with research demanding enormous amount of fieldwork. She writes, ‘I decided to take a trip to Jaora to see what Husain Tekri was all about. The first visit to Jaora from Udaipur began with a genuinely frightening overnight train ride I had ever experienced in India. The slow moving narrow gauge train was empty and dark, and when we pulled into Jaora, it was a pitch dark night and the power was out, making it impossible to be certain about the station.’