8. introduction
women between twelve and fifteen years of age—singing the first verse of the
Tiruppavai.Other stations carried commentaries not just by Brahmin males but by
men and women of varying castes and ages, speaking in Telugu and Tamil.
Later that morning of the first day of Margali, at a neighborhood temple of
Hanuman in Bangalore ’s Indiranagar district, a few hundred citizens came to wor-
ship at Andal’s shrine. Women left strings of flowers for her, for this was the saint
who had made garlands for Krishna. In fact, Andal’s real name is Kodai, which
means “wreath of flowers.” All month long, as at so many other South Indian
Vaishnava places of worship, this temple gave rice boiled in milk (pongal)as a token
of divine favor (prasad).In many homes and temples pongalis truly the dish of the
month, for Margali culminates in the middle of January with a big festival called just
that. As observed today, Pongal is not just Vaishnava or even Hindu but a general
celebration of Tamil and Telugu identity. Arguably, the focus for most South Indi-
ans this month is on the bhojan (food) of Pongal rather than the bhajan (devotional
song) of Andal, but the two are closely intertwined—not just in people ’s minds, but
in the poetry of Andal herself.
Thus the year began—with high hopes for an economic future worthy of Laksh-
mi, the goddess of wealth and good fortune; with rearticulations of traditional pat-
terns of worship that persist alongside practices that trumpet a new Hindu transna-
tionalism; and with actions that would both support and refute the oft-repeated
claim that Hinduism is the most tolerant and all-embracing of the world ’s major re-
ligious traditions. We have launched this New Year from Bangalore, a city with a
distinctly forward-looking profile; other locales would have presented a different
sorting of events. But it is safe to say that throughout the Hindu world—from
Kathmandu to Trinidad to London, Malibu, and Delhi—one would have found a
greater consciousness of the global reach of the Hindu tradition than one might
have encountered even a year before. The trend is clear.
Some of its manifestations have spread far beyond Hindu homes and temples. At
the end of the first week of 2004 Deepak Chopra, the amiable M.D. whose take on
mind/body spirituality has made him a best-selling author and celebrity in the
United States, arrived in Kerala for an eight-day retreat called “Spontaneous Ful-
fillment of Desire.” Many of the fifty people who joined him on this high-end ven-
ture were from California (like Indian-born Chopra) and other places in America,
but others gathered from points as far-flung as Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, and
South America. With yoga as a twice-daily unifying act, everyone in the group was
aware that they owed a deep debt to Hinduism. Chopra’s discourses strengthened
that sense by appealing to certain passages from the Vedas and the Shiva Sutras that