Stanford Humanities Center
A scholar of South Asian religions, Elaine M. Fisher is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Focused on the Śaiva traditions of peninsular India, her research reconstructs notions of religious subjectivity and the religious public in early modern Hinduism.
SHC Project
The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Devotion in Early Modern India
In March of 2018, a new religion was born in India. Its story, however, has yet to be told. Fisher’s current book project, The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Devotion in Early Modern India, reconstructs the prehistory of India’s newest religion, known as Vīraśaivism or Liṅgāyatism, from its own voices, drawing on a novel corpus of unstudied and unpublished archival sources in a plurality of languages. In the process, the project brings religious studies and translation studies into dialogue, developing a new conceptual vocabulary for speaking about multilingualism across regions and humanistic disciplines.
