JASSAL, AFTAB SINGH. 2024. Gods in the World: Placemaking and Healing in the Himalayas. Religion, Culture, and Public Life. New York: Columbia University Press. 244 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-21497-1 (paper).

KEYWORDS: body, placemaking, relationality, non-human, India

Aftab S. Jassal’s Gods in the World is a finely crafted ethnography of Uttarakhand at the juncture where neoliberal development converges with a resurgent Hindu nationalist agenda. Jassal conducted much of the fieldwork in 2011 amid state-sponsored initiatives that marshal economic, scientific, and bureaucratic resources to reconfigure local temples and deities. Jassal shows how the insertion of Danda Nagaraj as a “fifth abode” on a time-honored pilgrimage circuit exemplifies the instrumentalization of sacred space for broader political ends. This mobilization seeks to establish a narrowly sanctioned mode of divine engagement — one mediated exclusively through Brahminical ritual authority and formal darshan in consecrated precincts.

Yet such official narratives occlude the plurality of devotional life. Jassal identifies two critical shortcomings of the Hindu nationalist enterprise: its underlying bias against Muslim and Dalit communities, and its insistence on a unitary ontology of the divine that privileges textual, temple-bound practice. In contrast, Uttarakhand’s communities experience their deities through richly localized modalities such as oral traditions, embodied performances, and ritual forms that often elude state-backed priestly hierarchies. By collaborating with jagari gurus, Dalit ritual specialists who mediate village deities across caste boundaries, Jassal charts these peripheral sacred spaces to reveal fault lines between state-sanctioned and vernacular ways of knowing.

The result is a richly textured portrayal of human-divine relations that attends to their affective, moral, and political dimensions. Jassal shows how deities can unsettle village governance, repair the ruptures wrought by patrilocal displacements, and enable communities to restore balance through embodied rituals. Being chosen to speak for a deity may bring affliction, but when guided well, it can also bring healing. These deities also voice communal suffering and may even contest newer regional deities. Portrayed as immanent and transcendent, they permeate the very fabric of social life. Gods in the World thus deepens our understanding of Himalayan religious practices while also demanding a reassessment of religious sovereignty amid competing claims to truth and authority.

Jassal foregrounds placemaking — the processes by which people produce, negotiate, and inhabit meaningful locales. In his conception, place is not a static backdrop but an ephemeral, dynamic domain of social action co-created by deities, humans, speech, movement, and material objects. He contends that placemaking serves as a vital technology of healing, reshaping social reality. Within this cosmos, deities offer, choose, or impose their presence upon places and persons, to which humans respond by “surrendering” their agency. Even when a deity is invoked via an oracle for ritual healing, that invocation itself emerges from circumstances deemed divinely motivated. Consequently, Uttarakhand reveals an asymmetrical, deity-governed world in which deities wield greater power than humans.

Jassal’s study advances scholarship on Himalayan religious practices and placemaking in two significant ways. First, by centering village deities and their placemaking rituals, he reveals the processes through which deities manifest, engage with, and exert authority over social life. Second, drawing on theories of embodiment, he demonstrates that placemaking operates through possession: the body becomes a site of negotiation, where inviting a divinity operates a space for human-divine interaction, and anchoring that divinity “in place” sets boundaries that calibrate its benefits and dangers. He further shows that deities’ power travels via human hosts and material artefacts, rendering somatic religious practices both central and pervasive. As an analytic category, placemaking thus reveals how diverse religious narratives and practices intersect, producing an epistemological map of religious traditions that sharply contrasts with the Puranic order maintained by caste-privileged temple priests.

In Chapter 1, Jassal draws on the Garhwali orature, particularly the gaths, or ritual songs of jagar ceremonies, to trace a genealogy through which village deities enter social life. He maps these deities’ connections to both Puranic gods and local rulers. He shows how this nexus informs devotees’ understanding of two pivotal shrines in the Garhwal region: Sem Mukhem and Danda Nagaraj (28). The latter temple has recently been incorporated into a pilgrimage circuit harnessed by Hindutva nationalists. Consequently, in this chapter, the author illustrates the collision of two distinct epistemologies and ontologies of human-divine relations. Jassal demonstrates how Puranic and Garhwali religious forms intersect, and he highlights embodiment as an organising principle in local cosmology, even when elite Brahmin priests at these temples fail to recognise its centrality.

In Chapter 2, Jassal illustrates that dosh, which is the continuum of affliction and healing, is understood by jagar mediums as a constellation of interlocking disturbances—psychophysical, social, and environmental—that affects humans and non-humans alike. This encounter is metaphorically likened to a “hooked thorn of jujube tree,” which pierces and adheres to divine and human actors. Dosh arises from the arrogance of deities or humans, or from the harm done to a serpent, and thereby spreads like a contagion, attaching itself to people, creatures, objects and places (66, 73). Yet these afflictions also open a space within the body for the deity, prompting negotiation of its presence along with attendant ideologies, ritual forms, and subjectivities. As Jassal observes, “affliction and healing are not seen to constitute an oppositional binary; rather, they are recursive, iterative movements in a process of relational and existential trans