“Instead of lamenting the lack of a progressive secular spirit, Kajri Jain offers a rich, complex, and thoroughly fascinating account of how religiosity itself is being transformed in contemporary India into a public arena of democratic politics. Combining capitalist ambition with electoral competition, the proliferation of religious statuary brings together sacred texts, technology, automobility, and numerology into a new political aesthetic of monumentalism and spectacle. Jain argues persuasively that aesthetics is constitutive of politics, often in unexpected ways.” — Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University