Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger's Material Acts In Everyday Hindu Worlds is an exemplary text refocusing on Material Agencies maneuvering ethnographic and performative methodologies in the discipline of religious studies. Fluckiger's book is part of the Hindu studies series published by the State University of New York Press in 2020. The book is an upshot of Flueckiger's long time fieldwork across India. Primarily she has conducted three field visits, namely from the states of Chhattisgarh, Hyderabad and the South Indian pilgrimage town of Tirupati and explored five forms of material performance in each chapter.

Flueckiger draws the term 'material act' from J. L. Austin's linguistic term 'speech act' from the work How to Do Things with Words (1975). Where Austin argued that language is not just a medium of communication but, it can do something. And saying something, we also perform some kind of action. In Flueckiger words, "material objects do not simply reflect preexisting ideologies and identities but that their performativity also creates identity, theology, transformation; they do something—material acts" (p 10). The relevant feature of Flueckiger's work is that she traverses into the religious study to engender an indigenous theory of the agency of materiality. Fluckiger shifts the focus to materiality and shows that the possibilities of materiality speak for themselves. Flueckiger has taken three scholars, Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, and Jane Bennet, to analyse material agency in this book. In summary, the purpose of Fluckiger's text is further to expand the idea of materialities in religious studies, unearth indigenous theories of materiality, and recognize how some materials can have a more profound impact on humans and other materials. Thus Flueckiger endeavours to widen the field of the Hindu world and what we call "religion."

The first chapter, "Agency of Ornaments; identity, protection and auspiciousness," peruses indigenous articulations of the material agency reveals on the basis of ornaments. Flueckiger starts the chapter with the observation of silver/glass bangles in the state of Chhattisgarh. The word ornaments refer to glass bangles, earrings, silver and gold, and even a tiny bamboo stick has its own agency in the native lives of Chhattisgarh. The writer thoroughly goes through lifelong examples of babies protected with dots of kohl in their forehead to certain castes who perform on the occasion of a girl's first-menstruation rituals, their marriage, widowhood and demise (22-30). In the part of 'The Tali in a South Indian Goddess Tradition,' the author explores an unwonted performativity of Tali (necklace). Usually, a woman wearing tali signifies that she is married, be that as it may, according to a group of unmarried women, the Matammas, their marriage was with goddess Gangamma. In the case of Gangamma, she and her sister are also unmarried according to the local narrative, but still, they wear tali. Interestingly, Matammas have always identified themselves as auspicious, and they never have to lose their tali and the idea of widowhood nonexisting to them.

The author shows how materialities like Talis can perform unique agency in their lives instead of identifying the concept of husband with it. For instance, one personal narrative goes like this, "Pujaramma expressed a very different experience of the tali; the tali relationship was not one of restriction, but of both compulsion and freedom to move. She reported that the goddess had ordered her to keep wandering, from village to village, hill to waterfall; then, 'I keep going around every uru (village). I don't know when she'll stop me and where she'll allow me to build a permanent place'" (32). Correspondingly in Flueckiger's ethnographic narratives, most females do not solely relate tali with their marriage (Bindings and restrictions); instead, the ornament of tali strengthens their power, auspiciousness and freedom. In another section, with the help of oral indigenous narratives, she explores how tattoos have the agency of going beyond a female physical body and death and how tattoos can manifest an independent agency in their eternal life. The crux of this chapter is that for an indigenous female, the question is not what ornaments and tattoos mean to them but what they do to them. For an outsider, these ornaments may have the value of economic status, caste and ethnic identities, but for the women who wear them, it plays the role of protection, auspiciousness, relationship and even in their afterlife.

Subsequently, chapter two, "Saris and Turmeric; performativity of the material guise," discusses the different aspects of materiality in the annual festival of a village goddess known as Gangamma in the South Indian town of Tirupati. The chapter was framed around men wearing female (Goddess) guise (Locally known as stri vesham, like saris, turmeric, breasts etc.) to have transformative power. Here are four sections exploring different narratives and multiple possibilities of interpretation—the first section exploring the family narratives of weavers caste Kaikalas. Flueckiger mentions a man named Venkateshvarlu's experience "As soon as I hold the sword and put on the crown, full ugram (power) comes to me. While roaming the streets, I feel like the goddess going to war" (47). The second section looks at the laymen who take guises of females because of their vows or to fulfil a particular motive.

Section three explains the male experience of stri vesham. An absorbing experience of a man that goes like "I wanted to see what it would feel like to be a woman. My mother felt very happy to see me as a female, a girl. She said, 'Oh, my lovely daughter" (61). Such narratives explain how materialities can transform a person and can create and destroy identities and personal realities. Furthermore, the author evinces how women are connected to power higher than men; one of the purposes of male transformation is to get part of women's Shakti. A male's narrative goes like "Taking vesham, just once a year, you can get a corner on women's Shakti" (62). The last section decodes divergent agencies of turmeric and how the turmeric agency transforms the nature of the goddess Gangamma.

Transfiguration and everyday life are not contrasting; instead, the process of transfiguration is the intensification of everyday activities, which explains chapter three. Outwardly two different rituals are the base of the chapter "Material Abundance and Material Excess; creating and serving two goddesses". Initially, Flueckiger throws light into 'Varalakshmi Puja', an annual ritual vow performed by upper-caste married women in South India. The locus of attention here is the markets and kitchen with detailed descriptions of elusive and momentary day to day events. The idea of Varalakshmi is conceivable by concepts like abundance, auspiciousness, wealth, courage, knowledge Etc.

The success of Flueckiger's vetting is that it explores how domiciliary events are deeply intertwined to a village festival with micro-narrative and colourful delineation of events. Succeeding the section shows the 'Gangamma Jatara' happening in the month of mid-May when summer is at its peak. Flueckiger narratives go through the streets of Tirupati, vegetarian offerings, animal sacrifice, ideas like ferocity and excess, the importance of speciality, temple performance and social boundaries traversing the relation to materialities across caste. Collocating Varalakshmi and Gangamma ritual performances, seemingly there is a juxtaposition between abundance and excess, auspiciousness and ferocity, knowledge and power. As it may seem, the author, in sum, makes an illuminating observation that there is a possibility of an underlying material truss and continuum rather than a juxtaposition. Such underlying materials create both goddesses' performances and give them multiple agencies beyond what humans intended to do.

"Expanding Shrines, Changing Architecture; from protector to protected goddesses," chapter four, traces the intricacies of village goddess shrine's transition to middle-class Brahmanic culture due to urban expansion and the possibilities of using the material agency as a promising modus operandi to understand the transition. Investigating three shrines with unique performance and aesthetic pasts, Flueckiger argues that materiality, predominantly architectures, have its unique agency to transform goddesses' identity and devotees' theology. The author ferrets around three shrines, namely Nalla Pochamma temple, Maisamma-Lakshmi temple, Bhagya Laxmi shrine at Charminar and all of them are in the arena of Hyderabad city. The chapter shows a brief account of each shrine's oral-personal narratives, family-caste history, and spatial-divine status, which makes Flueckiger writings more revealing and informative for a general audience besides scholars and students of religious and performance studies.

The provenance of grama devata (Village deity) was traditionally rooted and confined to near village boundaries in an open space or near river banks with an intimate relationship to a family or personal experience. However, due to hastened urban germination, grama devata's shrines become puranic-style, Vedic temples and centre of political-community-caste discourses. Starting from materials like architecture and even how the presence of Kumkum can create goddesses in a trice with social-caste-theological divergence. In the epilogue of the chapter, the author pays heed to a crucial existential argument. "In the case of Hyderabadi grama devata shrines, their material changes are initiating changes in the nature of the goddesses themselves-from grama devatas who protect to goddesses who need protection, quite literally" (127). In the long run, the corollary of the grama devata transition symbolises the village or water bodies effaced by urban expansion, and open space shrines move to the systematic structural religious abyss. Thence, Flucekiger's study shows how the agency of materiality can create or eliminate such a colossal transition.

In the culminating chapter, "Standing in Cement: Ravana on the Chhattisgarhi Plains," the author limns three different cement Ravanas and how materialities of Ravana can perform alternative ideology and theology forbye exploring the possibilities of multiple interpretations. The first example is analysing a Ravan constructed by a Vaishnava temple, Dudhadhari Math, in an open field known as Ravan Bhatha at Raipur. The author's one key focus of Ravan Bhatha is a miniature donkey head over the middle head of Ravana's statue and the manifold of its material significance, which most people either unheeded or unnoticed. Here we can see an enigma of material presence and visual absence, which ruminates the possibility for the agency of absence. The following example is looking at a unique Ravana dressed dhoti, scarf, and belt in gold with a thread in his body like a brahmin, carrying a sword and bow of a warrior at the town of Dhamtari. The tertiary example thumb through Ravana as a Gond (An Adivasis community) ancestral king. Historically, representing Ravana as a Gond ancestor is relatively new, pointing out Gond's political-social activism. This performance, showing the Gond imagination, signifies the absence of the mainstream Ramayana narratives, making Ravana the centre of attention. Intrinsically, the chapter unseals alternative ideology and theology by exploring Ravana's presence through permanent material existence.

Addressing performance studies, even though religion studies and performance studies maintain a distinct historical background and focus, we can see a growing convergence between analytical frameworks, objects of studies and theories. And Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds is one of the examples where we can deeply observe such a convergence. As a discipline, actions are consequential for performance studies; in a way, performances are actions. To expand the idea further, the book Performing Religion In Public argued that “religion is not (just) a set of ethical, ontological or theological assertions, but a dynamic, lived, and fluidly embodied set of actions, practices, gestures and speech acts at specific points in time and space [...] In short, religions exist because they are performed" (Chambers, Toit, and Edelman 2013, 1-2). And it is where performance studies are pertinent and show the scope that religion is an actively made and creative process. By asserting that seeing, witnessing, narrating, reenacting and representing all are matters of creating meaning and experience. Therefore, performance scholarship has very crucial expertise to offer and reshape the building blocks of religion.

Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds is a compendious study of how the material agencies can go beyond what initially humans intended to do with it and how they can play an active role in our understanding of everyday religious life. In Flueckiger words, "A reader may argue that if ornaments, for example, count as religion, then religion as a field of study has no boundaries. However, I take my cue for what counts as religion from an Indian-language term often used to translate 'religion' as dharma. The term is derived from a Sanskrit verbal root dhr that literally means "to hold". Thus, dharma can be interpreted as "what holds [the world] together, what makes the world meaningful—that is, religion" (165). In sum, Flueckiger gave us a new approach to looking at the world with unarticulated material possibilities, material uncertainties, the agency of presence and absence, the possibility of material questioning and conflicting subcultural narratives. Above all, Flueckiger's work shows how indigenous cultures can show us an alternative possibility of being; thus, the text is a potential source for those fascinated by religious and performance studies.




     — Reviewed by Athil Banna