"[The Cow in the Elevator] teased me into questioning what Srinivas has so beautifully and chillingly thought through for decades—wonder as an ethical practice." — Dhruv Ramnath, The Citizen
"Srinivas provides a lively lesson in religious originality with applications and implications far beyond Bangalore or India." — Jack David Eller, Reading Religion
"The central contribution of this book is its presentation of wonder as a new category of anthropological inquiry, and its interdisciplinary approach of parsing wonder from the vantage points of ritual and liturgical lives, socioeconomics, and aesthetic and creative spheres. Srinivas’s deployment of these specific categories by no means limits its readers; on the contrary, the book inspires readers to revisit their own field experiences, and look for the moments of wonder." — Arthi Devarajan, Anthropology News
"Tulasi Srinivas does us a service in identifying important insights arising from her study of ritual practice that will help us to better understand wonder. Hopefully, her work will prompt other scholars to use an anthropological approach to better understand the dynamics of wonder from the perspective of the interlocutors they study." — Steve Derné, Asian Anthropology
"The Cow in the Elevator captures in lovely detail and theory-rich rumination, the evolution and dynamism of Hindu ritualism in modern Bangalore, calling attention to the unstable and creative dimensions of ritual, and the ethical possibilities and challenges it opens up within this rapidly changing city. Scholars of Hinduism and South Asian urbanism will find much to ponder in this book, as will anthropologists interested in ritual theory and practice." — Andrew C. Willford, Pacific Affairs
"Srinivas has a lovely turn of phrase and can convey poignancy well, especially in the interludes of her field notes, which come bursting upon the book." — Manisha Sethi, Contributions to Indian Sociology
"I treasure The Cow in the Elevator for its sparkle and its positive news about hope and creativity in often bleak circumstances. Rich in original analytic insights, this book is not a tidy package but a cornucopia from which all kinds of sweet and bitter products may be extracted, tasted, consumed, and transformed: high-powered caloric fuel for interpretive intellectual energies. . . . Daring, insightful, and highly engaging, The Cow in the Elevator offers so much that its capacity to provoke unanswered questions in no way detracts from its invaluable qualities. Certainly, no other book on religion in urban India so effectively conveys the ways that ritual excess works wonders." — Ann Grodzins Gold, American Ethnologist
"In this intriguing and richly-textured book, Tulasi Srinivas immerses us in the world of contemporary Hindu ritual practice in Malleshwaram, a suburb of the South Indian city of Bangalore. . . . The Cow in the Elevator is a deeply insightful work that offers us a glimpse of the creativity and wonder that sustain Hindu ritual life in the concrete jungles of modern, neoliberal India." — Tracy Pintchman, Anthropos
"The content and flow of the book are highly engaging: from conceptual backgrounding to contextualising the specific field-sites in modern Bangalore, the reader travels from the past to an urgent present; from modern empty apartments bereft of dwellers, yet needing blessings; to shifting moral and cosmological bearings; to neoliberal economies with their accompanying (il)logics, towards possibilities for hope." — Chand Somaiah, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology
"This pathbreaking book is about the politics of wonder in the ritual life of a Hindu neighborhood in a major Indian city. The book itself is a wondrously written treatment of the saturation of neoliberal lives by a radical cosmology of performance, affect, and technicity, through which ritual life transfigures the pains and puzzles of modernity. It should be read by all students of ritual, affect, and emergent practices of globalization." — Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger
“Brilliant and erudite, The Cow in the Elevator emerges from Tulasi Srinivas's long-term commitment to making sense of religious life in urbanizing, high-tech India. With ethnographic verve and a keen ear for diverse voices, Srinivas tells lively stories of the Hindu priests and devotees who improvise on existing ritual forms in contemporary Bengaluru. Theorizing the human need for wonder and exploring how ritual may generate wonder in changing circumstances, The Cow in the Elevator is a wondrous book.” — Kirin Narayan, author of Everyday Creativity: Singing Goddesses in the Himalayan Foothills