Overview

Connected Places is a study in the religious geography of India. It explores ways in which people live in and understand their worlds. In the book, Anne Feldhaus examines a variety of religious ideas, images, and rituals that give people a sense of the coherence and meaning of a particular region. She demonstrates how a multitude of intersecting, overlapping, yet in some ways disconnected regions can co-exist in one part of India. The book focuses on Maharashtra, the Marathi-speaking region of western India that is home to 125 million people. Using rich examples from this state, Feldhaus explores how people in Maharashtra orient themselves to the world, how they connect places to one another, and how they understand themselves in relation to the regions they inhabit. The book draws upon Feldhaus's decades of experience visiting holy places, attending religious festivals, and interacting with story-tellers, pilgrims, and priests, as well as her careful reading of travelogues and religious texts in Sanskrit and Marathi. This revised edition includes new material from medieval Marathi bhakti literature not found in the original.

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Anne Feldhaus is Professor Emerita of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. In 2022 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she served as President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2018-19. Over the past five decades, she has lived in India at regular intervals, adding up to more than a dozen years. She is fluent in Marathi and has traveled extensively in Maharashtra. Her work combines philological and ethnographic approaches to the study of religious traditions in the state. Besides Connected Places, her major publications include Water and Womanhood: Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra (1995) and several books on Old Marathi religious literature. She co-edited A Dictionary of Old Marathi (1999/2000) with S.G. Tulpule and is currently translating the first literary text in Marathi, Līḷācaritra, for the Murty Classical Library of India.

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