This study examines the figure of the Yogi as he moves from nineteenth-century colonial India into the Western, and specifically American, imagination and historical landscape. The study utilizes Paramahansa Yogananda as a case study and approaches his role and contributions from two perspectives: a literary critical approach to his writings and a historical account of the contexts that serve to illuminate his work and career especially where they contribute to our understanding of the modern interaction between Indian and Western thought. Chapters 1 and 2 trace a broad history of Yogis and Yogi-figures, first contextualizing them in their original Indian framework before moving to Western portrayals and interactions. Chapter 3 surveys Yogananda’s life through the lens of sources other than his famous Autobiography, while Chapter 4 analyzes on Yogananda’s teachings in the United States as reflecting the concerns of Progressive Era capitalism and scientific universalism. Finally, Chapter 5 examines the Autobiography itself as a carefully constructed narrative of Yogananda’s spiritual growth and identity as a Yogi.

“Animals in Hindu South Asia: From Cosmos to Slaughterhouse” takes a novel approach Hindu ethics, animal ethics, and the ethical principle of nonharming, ahiṃsā. While many sources on Jain, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions explore the topic of ahiṃsā in detail, exploring its origin, basis, meaning, and practice, comparatively few provide analyses of how it relates to both religious taxonomies and historical practices of animal domestication and consumption. This study examines Vedic and Hindu texts to identify enduring ideological patterns regarding domesticated animals and how these patterns facilitate the systemic exploitation of animals in human society. “Animals in Hindu South Asia” begins with Vedic literature of the first and second millennia BCE and proceeds into Dharma and Yoga literature of the first millennium CE. The first two chapters investigate ancient cosmologies, animal taxonomies, and sacrificial and dietary regulations, charting how taxonomical and prescriptive emphases shift over time. The third chapter focuses on Hindu ethics, particularly as espoused in the Mānava Dharmaśāstra and the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra, and provides analyses of karma, ahiṃsā, and the moral status of animals. The fourth chapter shifts to the modern and contemporary periods, beginning with a critical evaluation of Hindu-inspired cow protectionism and its neglect of bovines’ material well-being, or their biobovinity. This chapter also discusses the history of Subaltern Studies, the notion of subalternity, and ultimately argues for the inclusion of animals under the category “subaltern.” The final chapter interrogates the ethical implications of theories of “entanglement” and “relatedness” (theories largely inspired by the work of Donna Haraway), how these theories are almost exclusively applied to human-animal relations, and how the theories can be employed to justify exploitative human-animal relations. Overall, the study offers critical insights into South Asian religious studies, Critical Animal Studies, and the ethics of human-animal relations.

"Lord in the Temple, Lord in the Tomb" is a sustained analysis of Hindu samadhi shrine burial practice and its relation to broader Hindu temple traditions. The study is structured as a two-part exploration of Hindu sacred space. Part I is an extended study of the development of Hindu temple traditions, from their roots in Vedic ritual structures to their full flowering in the ideology of temple design delineated in the Vastu-Shastras and Shilpa-Shastras. Central to the development of the Hindu temple is the understanding of the space as pervaded by the living presence of the deity who is housed within in the form of a murti (sculpted image). I provide a sustained analysis of two particular temple traditions, one Shaiva and one Vaishnava--the Minakshi-Sundareshvara temple complex in Madurai and the Vitthal temple compound in Pandharpur--to illustrate how the understanding of the temple as a "living space" dictates the manner in which the space is interacted with over time, leading to what I call a mythico-historical personality of place. I highlight the process by which the temple space is continually re-inscribed with new layers of meaning through the devotees' repeated encounters with that space over time.

In part II of my study, I consider the samadhi shrine as an expression of sacred space, which contributes to our knowledge of a prevalent and significant form of sacred space in the Indian religious milieu that has received relatively little attention. The study specifically concerns the samadhi shrine compound of Jnaneshvar Maharaj (thirteenth century C.E.), the founding guru of the Varkari tradition, and to a certain extent, the broader network of samadhi shrines associated with the this Maharashtrian bhakti movement. I argue that the Varkari tradition's understanding of the perfected body of the realized saint, as expressed by Jnaneshvar himself, allows for the saint's body to be revered as a murti and the space of the surrounding samadhi shrine to function as a particular kind of temple. Moreover, I show that, as in the case of the Minakshi-Sundareshvara and Vitthal temples discussed in Part I, this understanding of the samadhi shrine as a "living space" dictates the manner in which the space is engaged with by its devotees over time, generating a particularized mythico-historical personality of place. In extension, I posit that the samadhi shrines of the Varkari tradition form a dynamic network of sacred sites that is anchored at its hub by the Vitthal Temple in Pandharpur and constitute a complex sacred geography that traverses the entire landscape of Maharashtra.

The puruṣa—the “person” addressed throughout Indic texts—is not a microcosmic replication of the macrocosmos; he is the phenomenal world itself. This dissertation provides a textual and historical examination of the puruṣa concept in the Vedic Saṃhitās, Brāhmaṇas, Upaniṣads, Pali Nikāyas, pre-classical Saṃhitās of early Āyurveda, and the Mahābhārata. I argue that, contrary to the dominant scholarly position, the cosmos is only ‘in’ the person insofar as the person expands to be the same measure as the cosmos. In the political and religious poetry of the Vedas, the person is modeled after Indra, who creates the world by swelling to its limits in the guise of the Sun. In the Brāhmaṇas, the sacrificer toils to become like Indra, to discover the puruṣa in the Sun, and thereby attain the immortal expansiveness of svarga-loka. In the Upaniṣads, the person is the recursively reproducing, blissfully autophagous eater of the world, who transcends space and time by “yoking” up to ever greater expanses through yoga. In the early teachings of the Buddhist Pāli canon, the person is non-different from the “empty” elementality of the world, and the bhikkhu meditates on this fact to extinguish his belief in self, person, or world. These earlier views of the person are synthesized and given paradigmatic expression in the pre-classical Saṃhitās of Āyurveda and the Mahābhārata, where the logics of Yoga and early Sāṃkhya dictate that person and world are “identical” and “the same measure.” In the words of the foundational Caraka Saṃhitā, the pre-classical person who is fully realized, “bears the yoke” of the world as the sovereign master of its materiality, harmoniously conjoined to the phenomenal totality that is named puruṣa.