Papers – Page 7 – ECSAS 2025

Echoes of Change: Dalit Contributions to Christian Periodicals in Colonial Telugu India

The emergence of Christian periodicals in Telugu regions during colonial India marked a significant intervention by Protestant missions, particularly impacting the Dalit community. These periodicals arose in the context of mass conversion movements, wherein Dalits, marginalised within the Hindu caste system, embraced Christianity en masse. This conversion opened educational opportunities previously denied to them. Missionaries […]

Generating a Readership: A Study of Rajbanshi Children’s Little Magazine Soyda

My paper will do a detailed study on Soyda, a Rajbanshi Children’s little magazine. The first issue was released in March 2023, and there have been four issues since. Rajbanshis are an ethnic community, and they mostly hail from parts of West Bengal, Assam, Bihar, Bangladesh, and Nepal. They speak the Rajbanshi language. Although this […]

Mantras and the construction of sectarian boundaries

While mantras hold a central role in both individual and collective Hindu rituals, they also possess particular importance in the delineation of Hindu sectarian boundaries. Ritual greetings, whether practiced in the morning and evening, exchanged during telephone conversations, or included in written correspondence, often involve the recitation of specific mantras that are emblematic of particular […]

The Worship of the Goddess Manasā: Healing and Praising through Mantras

At the apex of the Bay of Bengal, the Hindu-Brahmanical snake goddess Manasā is praised as an ambiguous loving mother who protects from snakes’ venom and cures infertility in the soil and the womb. Manasā’s blessing or curse targets primarily Hindu women, who are often accused of provoking accidental and tragic events as consequences of […]

The meaning of mantra in Vedic prose

Vedic scholarship has often viewed mantras simply as “bits and pieces of the Vedas put to ritual use” (Staal 1989), assigning the term to formulaic utterances of various lengths and forms, from verbatim, lengthy quotations from the R̥gveda to short exclamations such as svāhā. The word mantra itself is, however, used sporadically in the Vedic […]

Mahāvaiśvadeva-śastra in the Agniṣṭoma and mantras of ritual misdirection

The mahāvaiśvadeva-śastra is a Ṛgvedic chant that appears at the beginning of the eleventhseries of Ṛgvedic chants (śastra-) and Sāmavedic song (stotra-), which is the first of two series’or śastras and stotras that accompany the third or evening pressing of soma in the vedicagniṣṭoma or soma sacrifice. Most of the syllables of the mahāvaiśvadeva-śastra are […]

Words for “Sound” and Concepts of the Sonic in Early India, I: Vedic Prose Texts

It has long been customary in Indology to frame mantras in terms of ritual “speech, word” (vāc), particularly as embodied by the divine goddess Speech. As Padoux (1963; 1989) has shown, the framing of mantra as vāc aligns well with traditional conceptions in Vedic and Tantric texts. Spurred on by sound studies, sensory studies, and […]

The English Mantras of Master C.V.V. and The Politics of Language in the Indian “New Age”

This paper explores an alternative paradigm of mantra practice: New Age mantras in English. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2024, I examine the practices of spiritual practitioners (many from orthodox Brahmin families) in South India who engage with C.V.V. Yoga, a spiritual system founded by Cancupati Venkasamy Rao Venkat Rao (1868-1922), or Master […]

Skibidi Mantras: Viral Magic, Digital Rituals, and the Playful Evolution of Sacred Sound

This paper explores the phenomenon of “Skibidi Mantras”—a term denoting the incorporation of the viral “Skibidi” phrase into mantra-based practices in a contemporary yoga community. By examining the ways in which digital culture, social media trends, and mantra practices intersect, this study considers how non-traditional utterances take on performative, ritualistic, and even spiritual dimensions in […]

The Possible South Asian Roots of the Rosary

In various religions that have their roots in Eurasia, short formulas (such as prayers or mantras) are recited over and over again. To keep track of the number of repetitions, special counting aids are often used, usually strings of beads that can also be worn as necklaces or bracelets. Depending on the region and religion, […]