tic; Culture and Psyche;and The Colors of Violence. Among his four works of fiction are
The Ascetic of Desireand Ecstasy. He has also published a new translation of theKama-
sutra(with Wendy Doniger) for Oxford World ’s Classics and the novelMira and the
Mahatma. His books have been translated into eighteen languages around the world.
philip lutgendorfhas taught in the University of Iowa’s Department of Asian Lan-
guages and Literature since 1985, where he offers Hindi language classes as well as
courses on written and oral narrative traditions of South Asia, including Indian film. His
Life of a Text(1991), on the performance of the epic Ramayana, won the A. K.
Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. He received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 2002–2003 for the book project that has resulted in Hanuman’s Tale: The
Messages of a Divine Monkey (forthcoming). His research interests include epic per-
formance traditions, folklore, and mass media. He regularly teaches courses on Hindi
cinema and runs a Web site devoted to this subject (www.uiowa.edu/~incinema)
mckim marriottis one of the world ’s best-known anthropologists of South Asia. He
received his doctorate from the University of Chicago and went on to become profes-
sor of anthropology and of social sciences at the same institution, retiring in 1998. He
has researched villagers and urbanites of India and professionals of both South Asia and
Japan. He is the author and editor of several books and articles, including the well-
known Village India: Studies in the Little Community(1955) and India through Hindu Cat-
egories (1990). His influence on his many students is legendary.
vasudha narayananis Distinguished Professor of Religion at the University of
Florida and a past president of the American Academy of Religion (2001–2002). She
was educated at the Universities of Madras and Bombay in India, and at Harvard Uni-
versity. She is the author or editor of six books, including Hinduism(2004), and more
than ninety articles and encyclopedia entries. Her research has been supported by grants
and fellowships from several organizations including the American Council of Learned
Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She is currently working on
Hindu temples and Vaishnava traditions in Cambodia.
laurie l. pattonis Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and
Chairperson at Emory University. She received her doctorate from the University of
Chicago. For several years during the last two decades she has made her Indian home in
Pune, Maharashtra. Her scholarly interests include the interpretation of early Indian rit-
ual and narrative, comparative mythology, literary theory in the study of religion, and
women and Hinduism in contemporary India. In addition to many articles in these fields,
she is the author or editor of seven books, including Myth as Argument: The Brhadde-