The Home of Dancing Sivan is an inquiry into the traditions of the Citamparam temple in South India, the only Hindu temple where the image of Sivan as Natarajan, the dancer, is the central focus of worship. Younger begins with the living traditions, describing the community of Ditcitars, the two hundred priests of the temple who carry on an ancient tradition involving six worship periods each day, and discusses in detail the elaborate temple festivals, which attract up to 200,000 people. He analyzes the three hundred inscriptions on the temple walls, and seeks to determine from them,...

The annual festivals that are central to the south Indian religious tradition are among the largest religious gatherings found anywhere in the world. Most are located at Hindu temples, but some are at Buddhist, Christian, or Islamic centers, and many involve people or symbols from more than one religious tradition. To an observer, the activities of a festival may seem chaotic, but the participants consider the activities the ritual focus of a distinct religious experience, and frequently testify that it is in the activity of a festival that they find their most profound sense of religious...

When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African laborers. The new system of "indentured" labor was supposed to be different from slavery because the indenture, or contract, was written for an initial period of five years and involved fixed wages and some specified conditions of work. From the workers' point of view, the one redeeming feature of the system was that most of their workmates spoke their language and came from the same area of India. Because...