At our 2025 Regional Meeting, we announced the winners of our Student Paper Award competitions
Aneri Patel from the University of Toronto won our Undergraduate Student Paper Award for her paper titled "Reimagining Sacred Space: The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor and the Mediation of Pilgrimage"
Shashank Rao from the University of Toronto won our Graduate Student Paper Award for his paper titled "Hindu Studies in the Time of Hindu Nationalism."
Please join us in congratulating our two winners, and thank you to all of the students who submitted fantastic papers this year!
To read the full abstracts of these papers, see below!
Aneri Patel (University of Toronto) Reimagining Sacred Space: The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor and the Mediation of Pilgrimage
Hindu temples have long shaped religious identity, serving as spiritual sanctuaries, cultural landmarks, and symbols of collective memory. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor, launched in 2019 and inaugurated in 2021, redeveloped the space connecting the temple to the Ganges, reshaping the pilgrimage experience through modernization. By improving infrastructure and accessibility, the project reconfigures sacred space to meet the demands of both devotion and tourism, raising questions about heritage preservation, political narratives, and urban transformation. This paper examines how temple redevelopment mediates pilgrimage, drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Thomas Tweed’s theory of religion as movement. Foundational works like Diana Eck’s Banaras: City of Light and Catherine Asher’s Architecture of Mughal India provide historical context, while Kajri Jain’s Gods in the Time of Democracy explores the intersections of religion, politics, and material culture in contemporary India. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor exemplifies how sacred spaces are not static but dynamically mediated through physical transformation. By analyzing this redevelopment, this paper contributes to discussions on how pilgrimage and religious identity are continually reimagined in a changing world.
Shashank Rao (University of Toronto) Hindu Studies in the Time of Hindu Nationalism
As Hindu nationalism has become a global presence in the past few years, scholars of South Asian religious traditions have revisited the relationship of the study of religion to practitioners. The “insider-outsider” dynamic has long been part of the field’s history, and in the scholarship on Hindu traditions, it has been a formative concern. However, the question of the involvement of practitioners in Hindu studies has acquired new salience in light of current affairs. Unlike previous iterations of this debate, history has become the preferred discipline of the field’s Hindu nationalist critics. Genealogical and other forms of historical criticism have typically been central to religious studies scholarship, and in India, what Janaki Nair calls the “demand for a past” is equally central to public debates on language, literature, and religion. If history has become the dominant mode of self-understanding in India, what kind of reflexivity should this prompt from scholars of Hinduism as it relates to practitioners of Hindu traditions?
To effectively respond to the challenges posed to public understanding of the past by the spread of Hindu nationalism, we must revisit the foundations and motives of our scholarship. In my presentation, I offer a preliminary history of Hindu studies and examine the ascendancy of historicist methods in relation to the rise of Hindu nationalism. I then consider the prospects of engaging Hindu theology and other constructive fields to renew and refine the commitments of Hindu and religious studies in the face of Hindu nationalism.