Religious Journeys in India

Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions.In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra.Andrea Marion Pinkney is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions at McGill University. John Whalen-Bridge is Associate Professor of English at the National University of Singapore. He is the coeditor (with Gary Storhoff) of many books, including The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature; American Buddhism as a Way of Life; Writing as Enlightenment: Buddhist American Literature into the Twenty-first Century; and Buddhism and American Cinema, all published by SUNY Press. He is also the author of Tibet on Fire: Buddhism, Protest, and the Rhetoric of Self-Immolation.