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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 transformation” (23). Throughout this account, he emphasises the 

body’s special status as the medium capable of stabilising the deity’s dwelling.  

 

In Chapter 3, Jassal examines the panno ritual, in which village deities—functioning as 

political divinities—engage their “constituents” through dramatised episodes of the 

Mahabharat. Performed by Dalit mediums, this dance-possession ceremony serves as a forum 

for deities and villagers across caste lines to express their demands and grievances. Although 

in Jassal’s account, a particular panno ultimately reinscribes caste hierarchies and imposes an 

extra levy on landless Dalits, it nonetheless created a fleeting space in which the marginalised 

could present complaints directly to both the gods and the village’s landed elite (5).  

 

In Chapter 4, Jassal presents the case of ghost affliction among married women, showing how 

these disturbances mirror the physical, emotional, and relational upheavals produced by 

patrilocal marriage (101). He observes that women “theorised afflictions, including ghost 

affliction, not as exceptional but rather as coextensive with the gendered struggles and 

difficulties of everyday life and marriage” (117).  

 



 

 

In Chapter 5, he turns to oral histories of Dalit oracles and priests, who occupy a paradoxical 

position: as valued priests and healers, they embody religious authority, yet they themselves 

remain members of caste-oppressed communities (128). These narratives trace how Dalit 

ritual specialists, skilled oracles, healers, and musicians come to their vocation in a quest for 

belonging, learning to listen when the gods call them home and endowing their lives with 

purpose. Their stories underscore both human agency and the reciprocal bonds between the 

divine and practitioners, revealing how these connections foster fulfilment and healing for 

religious practitioners (127).  

 

In Chapter 6, Jassal traces the ritual procession of village deities, guided by jagar priests, to 

their “uncle’s” shrine at the Jhakar Saim. This expedition reveals a mythological geography: 

an embodied, intensely local sense of place that transcends modern administrative boundaries 

(159). Here, an ontology distinct from the Puranic traditions emerges. For the pilgrims, 

bathing in the village spring to encounter the divine eclipses the mere visual encounter within 

temple precincts (170). In the Epilogue, Jassal introduces the concept of manana, which is to 

acknowledge, honour, and respect, as a more meaningful term than 'belief', suggesting that 

religion is a relational inner, lived reality rather than an abstract proposition.  

 

Each chapter stands as an independent exploration within its own thematic terrain, yet 

together they map a cohesive vision. Jassal guides us through a diverse array of religious 

lifeworlds while quietly articulating his unique approach to the anthropology of religion, 

body, and place. The intellectual toolkit he assembles invites readers to recognize the 

religious across varied spheres and layers of social existence. Three pressing issues are 

catalogued in the book but remain undeveloped analytically: 1.  the polyvalent nature of the 

Garhwali narrative and ritual complex; 2.  the position of landowning Garhwali villagers vis-

a-vis Puranic and Hindutva versions of Hindu traditions; and 3. The agency of humans in 

divine-human relationships. 

 

Although Jassal richly documents origin myths, his later chapters sometimes suggest that the 

Garhwali orature is monolithic. He begins his book by meticulously cataloguing variations in 

Garhwal’s origin myths but then abandons this pluralizing approach, implicitly portraying 

orature as uniform. Although his emphasis on orature enriches our understanding of Hindu 

practice, the absence of divergent voices within this normative framework risks reducing 

orature to a static artefact.  Preserving its multiplicity requires attention to how ordinary 



 

 

people engage with these narratives in a discordant manner. In the Preface to Listening to the 

Heron’s Words (1994), Raheja and Gold integrate Subaltern Studies into ethnographic 

practice, shifting from archives to field inquiry to reveal ruptures in discursive fields and 

emphasise that subaltern perspectives are neither fixed nor singular. Rather than recovering 

one definitive subaltern voice, they urge us to “recognise the discontinuity, the interpretation 

of the hegemonic subversive, and their varied deployments, from moment to moment in 

everyday lives” (16). By adopting this approach, ethnographers can ensure that orature 

remains a vibrant and contested site of meaning.  

 

Turning from Jassal’s analysis of broad regional myths to his gendered case studies, we see 

where his framework succeeds and where it falters. In chapter 4, Jassal observes that 

Garhwali Hinduism has retained its autonomous nature, which makes the practice both potent 

and enduring. Yet he leaves unexplored how different social actors draw on these narrative 

resources. In his discussion of newly married women’s possession rituals within a patrilocal 

system, he clearly distinguishes between how men and women interpret the ritual. This 

inclusion of diverse voices is commendable, but it raises the question of whether the women 

are only associated with the ritual in a normative, unilateral manner.  

 

Ethnographies across rural South Asia reveal that both married and unmarried women 

appropriate religious narratives and practices to enrich their lives. Raheja and Gold show in 

rural Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan that women’s defiance of husbands—and even young 

wives’ adulterous behavior—can be locally valorized (xvi-xxii), and that normative traditions 

themselves carve out sanctioned spaces for resistance, as seen in married women’s varied 

deployment of veiling in North India (xxiii). Thus, religious practices serve not only as a 

collective practice but as a resource individuals mobilize to forge unique realities. Raheja and 

Gold’s work implies that Jassal’s study of possession rituals may likewise harbor resistant 

potentials beyond his framework. Although broader political cultures have shifted since 

Raheja and Gold’s fieldwork, traditions now face pressure toward uniformity; Jassal 

demonstrates that possession-based practices have nonetheless endured in Garhwal. It is 

therefore reasonable to surmise that these rituals may have preserved their inherently plural 

character. Moreover, by situating himself primarily among the priestly class, Jassal remains 

insulated from the perspective of possessed women and those at the margins of the patrilocal 

marriage system. Their absence reinforces a portrayal of Garhwali Hinduism as prescriptive 

and monolithic rather than dynamic and contested.  



 

 

 

Second, the issue of religious authority resurfaces in the final chapter when a Dalit pilgrim 

confronts a caste-privileged priest, insisting that in Garhwal ritual status cannot be bought. 

Although this challenge targets a caste-privileged priest, it also echoes the broader influence 

of Hindutva-driven religious culture. In the pilgrim’s view, traditional high-caste customs 

have become entwined with development-backed Hindutva agendas. Although the Dalit 

pilgrim conflates high-caste village customs with Hindutva agendas. Yet, Jassal reminds us in 

Chapter 1 that Puranic and Hindutva forms of Hindu traditions remain distinct from Garhwali 

practices, which are rooted in bodily possessions. This contrast raises pivotal questions: How 

do Garhwali elites, whose authority derives from possession rituals, now engage with Puranic 

and Hindutva forms of devotion? Do these registers clash or coexist on their own terms? And 

ultimately, who defines religious authority in Garhwal, and by what means?  

 

Jassal vividly demonstrates how deities intervene in human social worlds, exerting moral 

force while also legitimizing individual actions. In Garhwal, village deities are regarded not 

merely as figures of dependence but as the very source of communal strength. This prompts a 

critical question: Does a deity’s moral force adapt to each devotee’s circumstances? Jassal 

addresses this question in part by tracing shifts in divine influence across locales but stops 

short of examining variation by social position and individual will. Although he frames 

affliction and healing as iterative, cyclical processes, he leaves unresolved whether deities 

themselves rely on human agency to sustain their presence. Do devotees ever contest or 

render a deity obsolete? Under what conditions do individuals navigate competing divine 

discourses? Moreover, of deities so actively engage in a world marked by entrenched caste 

and class divisions and wield considerable, disproportionate power, one must ask: what 

hierarchies exist among the deities themselves? In other words, what is the deities’ caste?  

 

For the contemporary anthropologist of South Asia, the greatest challenge is to eschew 

perennialism, just as historians must guard against presentism. No single ethnographic 

account can address every critical issue; yet Jassal’s book raises many of them, testifying to 

its remarkable ambition. I invite Jassal to treat these questions as catalysts for further research 

and scholarly dialogue.  

 
 
 

 



 

 

REFERENCES 
 

Raheja, Gloria Goodwin, and Ann Grodzins Gold. 2007. Listen to the Heron’s Words: 
Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India. University of California Press. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Mayuri Patankar, M.A. in Religious Studies, Emory University, 2023 
 
 
 
 
 

© 2025 Mayuri Patankar 

 


