Guests at God's Wedding

Reviews / Votes

"There is a lamentable dearth of material on urban religious experiences in South Asia, which makes this book particularly welcome. The author is a gifted translator; her renditions of the stories and songs of women's Kartik rituals are a pleasure to read and are among the book's most attractive and important contributions. She is also well versed in Sanskrit literatures, which allows her to consider popular traditions and their mythological elements thoroughly and precisely as they may emerge and diverge from Puranic sources. Eminently accessible, the book would be useful at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." - Ann Grodzins Gold, coauthor of In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan

"An excellent resource for South Asian specialists in religion and folklore, Guests at God's Wedding presents a vivid picture of all that is entailed in the sacred month of Kartik." - Kirin Narayan, author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching

"A powerful feature of the book is its combination of textually based and field-based research. Pintchman provides a view of how the religious world of these women participants looks from the inside-with admirable attention, simultaneously, to the issues raised by their construction of reality. The book would make an excellent ancillary text in courses dealing with women's religion globally, Hinduism broadly, and postcolonial challenges to Western feminism." - John Stratton Hawley, coeditor of Devi: Goddesses of India