Overview
Shreya Maini is a PhD candidate in Religion, Aesthetics, & Society at Duke University whose research is based in India/South Asia. Her interests sit at the intersection of religious studies, historiography, and ethnography.
Her dissertation asks questions like: Can the scholarly understanding of the category of Hinduism be challenged by eclectic New Age spiritual movements in contemporary India? Or are “hybrid” movements eventually co-opted into mainstream religious formations and politics? What kinds of social, economic, cultural, and personal factors create the space for people, who otherwise come from traditional or conservative religious backgrounds, to be open to New Age practices? And finally, how do New Age and hybrid understandings (re)shape attitudes toward (and temporalities within) history, geography, politics, globalization, and the category of “religion” itself?
Her dissertation asks questions like: Can the scholarly understanding of the category of Hinduism be challenged by eclectic New Age spiritual movements in contemporary India? Or are “hybrid” movements eventually co-opted into mainstream religious formations and politics? What kinds of social, economic, cultural, and personal factors create the space for people, who otherwise come from traditional or conservative religious backgrounds, to be open to New Age practices? And finally, how do New Age and hybrid understandings (re)shape attitudes toward (and temporalities within) history, geography, politics, globalization, and the category of “religion” itself?
Her dissertation addresses these questions through an exploration of the literatures, lifeways, and forms of knowing found in a now-global spiritual group called the World Teacher Trust, focusing on two of the Trust’s signature practices, C.V.V. yoga (an unorthodox yoga invented in the early 20th century by a yogi named Master C.V.V.) and spiritual astrology. In doing so, her project uncovers the spiritual and/or religious resources that ordinary Indians are relying on to make sense of a fast-changing world.