Leela Prasad’s riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking, alongside public discourses on ethics. It shows that the study of oral narratives and performance practices is essential to a proper understanding of lived Hinduism. Prasad builds on more than a decade of ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri in Karnataka. Here a vibrant local culture has flourished for centuries alongside a tradition of monastic authority. The oral narratives that abound, and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life, compel her to ask: ‘How do people imagine and express what is normative when the sources of what is normative are many and divergent?’ Moral life–in South India as elsewhere–Prasad suggests, is intimately connected with the aesthetics of narration. Imagination has a vital role in shaping lived religion, in how people create, refute, or relate to texts, moral authority, and community.
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