Connected Places: Religion, Pilgrimage and Geographical Imagination in India

Contents: Introduction. 1. Rivers and Regional Consciousness. 2. The Pilgrimage to Singnapur. 3. Travelling Goddesses. 4. The Arithmetic of Place: Numbered Sets of Places. 5. The Algebra of Place: Replication of North Indian Religious Geography in Maharashtra. 6. Pilgrimage and Remembrance: Biography and Geography in the Mahanubhav Tradition. Conclusion. Select Bibliography. Index.

Connected Places is a study in the religious geography of India. It explores ways in which people live in and understand their worlds. In the book, Anne Feldhaus examines a variety of religious ideas, images and rituals that give people a sense of the coherence and meaning of a particular region. She demonstrates how a multitude of intersecting, overlapping, yet in some ways disconnected regions can co-exist in one part of India.

The book focuses on Maharashtra, the Marathi-speaking region of western India that is home to 125 million people. Using rich examples from this state, Feldhaus explores how people in Maharashtra orient themselves to the world, how they connect places to one another, and how they understand themselves in relation to the regions they inhabit. The book draws upon Feldhaus’s decades of experience visiting holy places, attending religious festivals, and interacting with story-tellers, pilgrims, and priests, as well as her careful reading of travelogues and religious texts in Sanskrit and Marathi. This revised edition includes new material from medieval Marathi Bhakti literature not found in the original.