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Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India. Ishita Banerjee Dube. Rashpatri Nivas, Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2001. 195 pp.
The temple of Jagannath in Orissa has been the subject of notable works by ethnographers and historians of high caliber, especially by German scholars. In terms of scholarly attention it is probably only second to the politically charged center of pilgrimage, Ayodhya. Indian temples and pilgrimage centers have been studied by such distinguished scholars as Herman Kulke, Jonathan Parry, Chris Fuller, Arjun Appadurai, Peter van der Veer, and many others and Ishita Dube's book is a worthy successor to that tradition of research. Trained as a historian and well grounded in ethnography, Dube's work is an excellent study of the history and recent...