Festival of Indra

Michael Baltutis is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Archetypal Indra Festival1. The Early Medieval Indra Festival2. The Journey from the Forest3. Preparing, Entering, and Establishing the City4. Nepali Chronicles and the Living Goddess Kumari5. The Construction of the Indra Festival in Nineteenth-Century Kathmandu6. Sacrificing (to) Bhairav: The Resurrection of a Local Himalayan King7. Tantra, the Mahābhārata, and the Iconography of IndraConclusion: Violence, Politics, Danger, and Ritual ChangeNotesWorks CitedIndex

"…The Festival of Indra is perfectly timed to investigate this event and its enduring importance. At the same time, the monograph approaches the festival of Indra not only through modern ethnography but through premodern texts; for this history, Baltutis argues, reveals its perennial reinvention as a tool of Hindu kingship." — Journal of Religion"This valuable and ambitious work covers an important and understudied ritual form that has a long South Asian history, the Indra Festival. This festival is particularly interesting historically, since it falls between the Vedic sacrificial models of ritual in the earliest period and the image‐puja models of later temple Hinduism. Baltutis approaches the topic as an Indologist, historian, and ethnographer, and the resulting book represents a significant contribution to South Asian religious studies." — Richard H. Davis, author of The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography