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This chapter introduces the story of the deities Balaram and the Yamuna River, which offers an honest reckoning with human dependence on the earth for sustenance and human entitlements to the earth's production in the context of Balaram's multiple obligations to the earth, his family, and his subjects. It situates Balaram's story in its geographical, religious, and cultural contexts, defines relevant terms and concepts from the Hindu tradition, and explains why devotees understand Balaram as a protector, agriculturalist, and guardian. This story both helps us recognize how a disconnect with the origins of our food both enable and result from assumptions—whether conscious or not—of entitlement to the earth's resources and helps us question why narratives that appear to justify aggression towards the earth prove so enduring. Exploring the moral aspects of food and food production bring this dilemma home and demonstrates that how and why we tell stories about agriculture must be central to our lives.

During the Hindu springtime harvest festival of Holi, devotees celebrate the renewal of social bonds and agricultural fertility because Holi festivities demonstrate the intimate ties between social and agricultural health. This chapter, which is based on the author's experiences in the Braj region of northern India, describes Holi rituals and practices in Baldeo, the center of Balaram pilgrimage. It explores Holi's comedic role in releasing social and agricultural tensions and stabilizing society but argues that defusing tensions do not resolve structural problems, and the resulting stability tends to maintain existing hierarchies. For example, anxieties over the fear of famine, that the earth will not cooperate, tend to lead to stricter controls and narratives (and practices) of domination rather than reciprocity and partnership and so make it more difficult to envision alternatives for food production. Analyzing the social role of stories of control and mastery over the earth provides insight into the reluctance to explore alternative agricultural practices.

This chapter demonstrates parallels between the pastoral paradigm of Vaishnava devotion and the neglect of agriculture in Western environmental thought. It explores how pastoralism and idealized landscapes can create an idyllic view of the natural world and obscures our debt to the earth for subsistence or our reciprocal obligations. For example, both the Braj pastoral and the trope of wilderness in environmental discourse in the United States romanticize the natural world and exclude the possibility of human intervention in the land. Vaishnava pastoralism and Western environmental thought both emphasize romanticized and urbanized views of the natural world that exclude labor, production, and violence. By exploring the role of agriculture in the context of religion, nature, and society, we can understand the persistence of certain stories.

Sundardās (17th century) was a disciple of the Sant teacher and poet Dādū and a prominent poet himself. He hailed from eastern Rajasthan and settled in the Qaimkhani capital of Fatehpur in Shekhawati, a place where Sants, Nāthyogīs, and Sufis met. While writing mostly in Braj Bhāṣā coloured with Rajasthani and more rarely in a number of other Indic idioms, he also authored a couple of overwhelmingly Persian songs. Whereas a natural adaptation to the Islamicate culture was common with the Sants, that Persianate poetry represents a deliberate artistic and theological effort to express the Sant message in Sufi terms. Rather than engaging with the intricate points of Sufi concepts, Sundardās uses Sufi notions just as far as they tally with Sant principles. While not giving up his Sant stance, he caters to the multi-vocal and multi-religious audiences characteristic of the region.

This chapter examines the Panj Piare story in the works of Giani Gian Singh, specifically Panth Prakash (1880) and Tavarikh Guru Khalsa (1892–1921), and it situates this examination in the context of Gian Singh’s historical environment. This study of the Panj Piare narrative in these texts provides us with insight into the messages that Gian Singh was encoding throughout his prolific career, messages that were very much aligned with the trajectory that was plotted by the Sikh intellectual movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Singh Sabha and the Tat Khalsa.

Chapter 3 further examines Dwivedi’s visually oriented strategies to establish literary authority amidst resistance, especially from critics who publicly decried his brand of poetry as crude, and from poets who continued to publish in Braj Bhasha. Dwivedi’s response was pragmatic: he attempted to bring sophistication to Khari Boli poetry through a cultivated association with art; and he modelled poetry that adhered to a modified agenda. He authored and commissioned a series of image-poems, poetry inspired by and published alongside paintings by Ravi Varma (1848–1906) as well as other contemporary artists. Dwivedi’s limited use and sanction of Braj Bhasha’s linguistic and literary influence in these image-poems did not match his agenda in cartoons and prose. Such maneuvers defined the very substance of modern Hindi poetry in the early twentieth century and established Khari Boli as the language of modern Hindi literature.

Are English-taught courses a trend that western European countries should embrace? Is it time for rethinking and moderation? This chapter examines the movement toward English medium instruction (EMI) and the ways in which it is tied to internationalization, including student and faculty recruitment, scholarly work, and academic conferences. It examines the incentives and challenges for institutions, particularly the connection between EMI placement in international university rankings. It lays bare the benefits and burdens of EMI to faculty members and students and the divide in teaching and professional advancement opportunities between those who are proficient in English and those who are not. It addresses the concerns raised by scholars regarding “domain loss,” especially in the hard sciences, and the production and dissemination of knowledge. It examines steps that the Nordic countries have taken, particularly in “parallel instruction,” to internationalize their faculty and student body while preserving their national language.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the conceptions and worship of Mount Govardhan and its many stones. Mount Govardhan is a well-known sacred hill located in northern India and one of the most prominent features of Braj, a cultural region associated with the popular and playful Hindu deity Krishna. While describing and examining some of the principal characteristics of the worship of Mount Govardhan, this book aims to reflect on the gap that exists between the sense of reality one experiences every day while living near the sacred hill and the dominant reality experienced in everyday life in the United States, which fosters a portrayal of such worship as absurd, or even worse. The radical difference that exists between these two views creates a fruitful space for thinking about larger, more general issues encountered in the academic study of religion.

This chapter introduces some of the foundational stories related to Mount Govardhan and describes the physical features of the mountain as well as the sacred terrain that surrounds it. For instance, the story of the origin of Mount Govardhan, as told in the Garga Samhita, is a narrative widely known by worshipers of this sacred mountain and central to many theological conceptualizations of its deeper meanings. Perhaps most significant for the latter initiative is that Govardhan consists of the consolidated form of supreme love that emerged out of the bliss-filled hearts of the divine couple Radha and Krishna. There are also stories on how Mount Govardhan came to be situated in Braj. They are narrated in texts and recounted by numerous knowledgeable people residing near the sacred mountain today.

Nagaridas’s Tīrthānand (1753) is the memoir of a two-year pilgrimage to Braj composed by Nagaridas, also known as Savant Singh, the deposed king of Kishangarh in Rajasthan. Pauwels delineates how the ‘culturally mediated category’ of pilgrimage structures Nagaridas’s experience and its narratological reconstruction in the versified memoir. Just as pilgrimage itself is a polysemous experience that satisfies multiple goals and needs, so the Tīrthānand too works at multiple levels. As Nagaridas narrates events in the mundane world—visits to temples, devotional singing, religious plays, and the like—he frequently elevates these happenings onto the mythological plane of Radha and Krishna’s eternal Braj. Yet contemporary political circumstances and errands of royal necessity intrude at critical junctures of the narrative. The Tīrthānand is thus a tribute to mythical Braj, a travelogue, and a chronicle of contemporary political and social developments.