Here are 100 books that A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses fans have personally recommended if you like
A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’ve been intrigued by the Hindu goddess traditions since I first read Is the Goddess a Feminist as an undergraduate student. After reading this book, I changed my course of study and life, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and my first few books on Indian goddess traditions. Now, I continue to share my passion for Indian goddesses as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona.
This is my favorite book on Indian/Hindu goddesses. Even after all these years, I believe it to be the erudite and accessible book that portrays the complexity of goddesses and their relationships with devotees. Each time I re-read the book, I glean additional insights into India, Hinduism, and the ways that the sacred feminine shapes the lives of people in the Northeast region of India.
The worship of Devi (the Goddess) is one of the most vigorous and visible religious phenomena in northwest India today. This study uses interviews, participant observations, and textual analysis to explore the nature of the Goddess and her devotees' experience of her.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve been intrigued by the Hindu goddess traditions since I first read Is the Goddess a Feminist as an undergraduate student. After reading this book, I changed my course of study and life, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and my first few books on Indian goddess traditions. Now, I continue to share my passion for Indian goddesses as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona.
This book served as my entry point to Indian goddess traditions. It examines a millennia-old tradition alongside the modern concept of feminism. What emerges is a nuanced and complicated set of essays that challenges my understanding of goddesses and their relation to women and men. At the end of the day, I walk away with a greater appreciation for both goddesses and feminism.
In India, God can be female. The goddesses of Hinduism and Buddhism represent the largest extant collection of living goddesses anywhere on the planet. Feminists in the West often draw upon South Asian goddesses as theological resources in the contemporary rediscovery of the Goddess. Yet, these goddesses are products of a male supremacist society. What is the impact of powerful female deities--their images, projections, textuality, and history--on the social standing and psychological health of women? Do they empower women, or serve the interests of patriarchal culture? Is the Goddess a Feminist? looks at the goddesses of South Asia to address…
I’ve been intrigued by the Hindu goddess traditions since I first read Is the Goddess a Feminist as an undergraduate student. After reading this book, I changed my course of study and life, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and my first few books on Indian goddess traditions. Now, I continue to share my passion for Indian goddesses as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona.
This book is a riveting exploration of the major goddess festival in India, Navaratri, and a follow-up volume of the popular Nine Nights of the Goddess.
I love this book because it dives into the regional diversity of the festival, taking me on a journey into the many ways that the goddess is celebrated throughout India and into the lives of her devotees. What I find so mesmerizing about Nine Nights of Power is the balance between breadth and depth that gives me a flavor of the diversity of the traditions with deep dives into the individual case studies.
The autumnal Navaratri festival—also called Durga Puja, Dassehra, or Dasain—is the most important Hindu festival in South Asia and wherever Hindus settle. A nine-night-long celebration in honor of the goddess Durga, it ends on the tenth day with a celebration called "the victorious tenth" (vijayadasami). The rituals that take place in domestic, royal, and public spaces are closely connected with one's station in life and dependent on social status, economic class, caste, and gender issues. Exploring different aspects of the festival as celebrated in diverse regions of South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, this book addresses the following…
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
I’ve been intrigued by the Hindu goddess traditions since I first read Is the Goddess a Feminist as an undergraduate student. After reading this book, I changed my course of study and life, writing my Ph.D. dissertation and my first few books on Indian goddess traditions. Now, I continue to share my passion for Indian goddesses as a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Arizona.
This book is not only a deep scholarly engagement with the world of art collection and Hindu goddesses, but it also reads like a mystery novel. Kaimal took me on a journey from India, the home of the images/works of art under discussion, through their disparate journeys in the shadowy world of international art collecting and sales. It made me understand how the modern museum is stocked with images taken from active sites of religious practice.
Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis is a book about the lost home, the new homes, and the journeys in between of nineteen sculptures that now reside in at least twelve separate museums across North America, Western Europe, and South India. After piecing together what these goddesses and their former companions might have meant when they were together in tenth-century South India, Kaimal traces them into the hands of private collectors and public museums as these objects became more thoroughly separated from each other with each transaction. In the process of export and purchase, and in the hostile as well…
I am an author whose work has reverberated globally in the fields of Sustainability, Jain Studies, Film Studies, and Diaspora Studies. With over 30 years of experience in academia and the corporate world, I have held the position of Head of Department (HoD) for Humanities and Languages. As the Director of The India Centre at FLAME University, I have led numerous initiatives to promote Indian culture and scholarship, including international conferences, research projects, and cultural events, leaving an indelible mark on the global academic landscape. My suggested five books are also in these fields.
This book connects the latest environmental research with Hinduism, one of the most ancient religious traditions of India.
It has well-researched chapters by top-notch experts in Asian Studies and Environmental Studies that touch various natural resources such as the mountains, rivers, oceans, and land, as well as their consumption and reverence by Hindus in India and beyond.
This fourth volume in the series exploring religions and the environment investigates the role of the multifaceted Hindu tradition in the development of greater ecological awareness in India. The 22 contributors ask how traditional concepts of nature in the classical texts might inspire or impede an eco-friendly attitude among modern Hindus, and they describe some grass-roots approaches to environmental protection. They look to Gandhian principles of minimal consumption, self-reliance, simplicity and sustainability. And they explore forests and sacred groves in text and tradition and review the political and religious controversies surrounding India's sacred river systems.
I'm a retired medical doctor and have been at various times a military officer, a paediatric surgeon, and a university professor. My passion for this topic was ignited when I was a member of UNESCO’s Maritime Silk Route Expedition, sailing on a voyage retracing the ancient Silk Road of the Sea, with a team of scholars—historians, archaeologists, writers, film-makers—each an expert on some aspect of the Silk Routes. After retiring from medical practice, I have devoted my time to researching more about the Maritime Silk Route – reading, visiting places, listening, and talking with other experts. Having acquired much knowledge about the subject, I wrote Sri Lanka, Serendib, and the Silk Road of the Sea.
I was fascinated by this book by William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian who has written widely about the Indian subcontinent.
He explains in intriguing detail how India and Indian civilisation contributed so much to the world—from the religions (like Buddhism and Hinduism) that took root in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, China and Indonesia, from the creation of the numerals that we use today and mistakenly refer to as Arabic numerals, from the exotic goods that flowed out of India and drained the gold of the Roman Empire.
He creates a plausible case for the Indian subcontinent being responsible for transforming the technology and culture of the ancient world,
Reading Dalrymple’s book gave me the insight and confidence to publish my own book, which complements and supplements the stories and ideas discussed in his book.
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Waterstones and TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR A SPECTATOR and History Today BOOK OF THE YEAR
A revolutionary new history of the diffusion of Indian ideas, from the award-winning, bestselling author and co-host of the chart-topping Empire podcast
'Richly woven, highly readable ... Written with passion and verve' Spectator 'Dazzling ... Not just a historical study but also a love letter' Guardian 'An outstanding new account ... The most compelling retelling we have had for generations' Financial Times
India is the forgotten heart of the ancient world.
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
I’m a scholar who has spent most of his working life looking at the history of North Africa. This passion was formerly directed toward looking at the conditions that Europeans imposed on local populations, but in recent times, I have moved solely to consider forgotten cultures made by indigenous Muslim and Jewish populations. Making this move has been the best, riskiest, and most rewarding choice I’ve ever made in my career, and I am now a cheerleader for the incredible forms of art made by ordinary people in these societies.
I love the open-mindedness of this book and the way in which it can open your mind as a reader.
Can pictures think for themselves? How do pictures communicate with each other and with their audiences? These are the kinds of questions that this pathbreaking work opens up to its audience.
It also changed my sense as to how photography and painting/prints relate to each other, as well as providing a strong defence of the idea that deep cultural critique can be founded upon the study of quite ordinary objects and texts.
'Photos of the Gods' is a comprehensive history of India's popular visual culture. Combining anthropology, political and cultural history, and the study of aesthetic systems, and using many intriguing and unfamiliar images, the book shows that the current predicament of India cannot be understood without taking into account this complex, fascinating, and until now virtually unseen, visual history.
Most of my career has been spent as a scholar of interfaith relations, understanding how people understand each other and develop dialogue. This laid the background for my book, while I also understood the need for looking at not just how people get on during the good times, but what happens when religious communities and non-religious groups end up in antagonism or even violent confrontation.
As a Professor of Interreligious Studies, Religious Hatred is one of fifteen books I have written in a career that has seen me teach at universities on three continents, as well as being an advisor and trainer to governments, media, NGOs, and various faith-based organisations and communities.
Something links the other books that I am recommending, and this is that they are all focused on Western societies. This book, however, will take us to India and understanding mob violence against Muslims.
As a psychologist, Kakir draws on his clinical expertise and tells people’s stories compellingly and with insight. In some ways it’s not a book about Islamophobia, it’s about what hatred is, what this does to people, both those hated and those who hate, and the social impact of this.
Above all, it helps us see that violence, as the title says, may have colours.
For decades India has been the scene of outbursts of religious violence, thrusting many ordinary Hindus and Muslims into bloody conflict. This work analyzes the psychological roots of Hindu-Muslim violence and examines the subjective experience of religious hatred in the author's native land. Sudhir Kakar discusses the profoundly enigmatic relations that link individual egos to cultural moralities and religious violence. His psychological approach offers a framework for understanding the kind of ethnic-religious conflict that characterizes the turmoil in India. Using case studies, he explores cultural stereotypes, religious antagonisms, ethnocentric histories and episodic violence to trace the development of both Hindu…
I have for over fifty years studied and written about the Indian nationalist movement, examining it from many different angles. I lived and worked for many years in India. I have throughout had an appreciative but often troubled relationship with Gandhi – admiring him for much of what he stood for, while finding it hard to accept many of his beliefs and actions. This will be apparent to anyone reading the books that I have written. Despite this, I have a deep respect for a man who was undoubtedly a towering figure in twentieth-century history.
Tidrick explores with much insight the influences on Gandhi that shaped his spiritual and political life, ranging from the vegetarian movement, theosophy, esoteric Christianity, nineteenth-century authors and thinkers such as Ruskin, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, along with his sometimes-eccentric understanding of Hinduism. She shows how he saw his mission as divinely-inspired, and his belief that – so long as he upheld his ‘truth’ with rigour – he would have the power to change the world. Gandhi had at times his doubts as to his purity and thus his abilities in this respect, leading him into some ‘experiments’ that could disturb his close followers, as when he sought to test his chastity. In this book, Tidrick reveals Gandhi’s idiosyncrasies in illuminating ways.
Throughout his long and turbulent career as an Indian leader, first in South Africa and then in India, Gandhi sought to fulfill his religious aspirations through politics, and to reconcile politics with his private religious discipline. The Gandhi revealed here is not the secular saint of popular renown, but a difficult and self-obsessed man driven by a sense of unique personal destiny. Penetrating and provocative, Tidrick draws on material previously ignored by Gandhi's biographers and explores the paradoxes within his life and beliefs. Did the nationalist leader truly believe that he was not just fighting for Indian independence but also…
Karl's War is a coming-of-age-meets-thriller set in Germany on the eve of Hitler coming to power. Karl – a reluctant poster boy for the Nazis – meets Jewish Ben and his world is up-turned.
Ben and his family flee to France. Karl joins the German army but deserts and finds…
I am a historian of modern India at the Department of History, University of Delhi, with a longstanding interest in the intersections of gender, caste, sexuality, and religious identities in early twentieth-century North India. My work draws deeply from Hindi vernacular sources—popular tracts, magazines, cartoons, and pamphlets—which offer a rich yet underexplored archive for understanding the everyday life of Hindu nationalist ideologies and also ways in which it was punctured or questioned. Since my doctoral research in 1996, I have been particularly drawn to the everyday gender and caste dimensions of Hindu politics.
This is the final book that I have included in my list. I read this book only recently and thought of it as an important intervention because it traces the roots of modern Hindu nationalism to the encounter between Hindu society and European missionaries under colonial rule, an angle often overlooked in mainstream scholarship.
Manu S. Pillai persuasively shows how colonial pressures led to a reimagining of Hinduism, not just as resistance but also as adaptation and appropriation. For me, the book showed how Hindu nationalism emerged from this complex process, shaped by both confrontation and mimicry.
Its rich cast of historical actors and lucid narrative style make it an important intervention, one that connects cultural anxieties, colonial power, and identity formation with striking clarity.
