New Books in South Asian Studies · New Books Network

Syona Puliady, et al., "Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings" (U Washington Press, 2025)

·1 hr 32 min·5 clips

In Jain immigrant homes in Southern California, an embroidered cloth hanging replaces the traditional statue as the central object of devotion.

The object carries the argument. The guest treats chodpatas as religious objects, not decorative extras, and keeps returning to the way visual beauty, status, and devotional work sit in the same textile. Fasting gives the conversation a human foothold. A conversation with a Jain woman in Colorado, originally from Delhi and Digambar, helps explain how Gujarati fasting practices can be read through these objects. The textile makes piety visible in costly form. Velvet, gold-wrapped zardozi thread, and commissioned workmanship turn expense into part of the religious claim, rather than something to apologize for. That is where the episode gets interesting. Ascetic discipline and wealth do not cancel each other out. The guest pushes against the idea that money has to stay outside religious value, especially when the proper use of money can be meaningful in religious terms. Lay communities do much of the work here. The hangings point to relationships between pious lay groups and mendicant communities, including the wish to attract high-ranking monks for chaturmas. The archive is visual, but it is also social. An embroidered devotional object becomes evidence for gendered devotion, patronage, communal piety, and how a community wants to be seen. Women's fasting gets special attention. The sharpest turn comes when lay women's ascetic discipline is set beside the more traditionally male world of commissioning and display. The hangings gather several kinds of agency. Their force depends on patrons, but also on the visible piety of the people whose practices make the community readable. The category keeps shifting. Near the end, the conversation tracks a 20th century move from commemorating lay men and lay women more or less equally to a form that almost exclusively commemorates lay women. That shift gives the textiles a historical pulse. They work as changing records of Jain social life rather than stable ritual objects. The tone is scholarly and patient, but not dry. The episode lets art history, religious studies, and gender history rub against each other instead of filing the hangings into one neat box.

As heard by us

A close look at devotional textiles as markers of piety, money, and standing.

The piece treats these embroidered Jain textiles as more than ornament. It connects them to piety, patronage, fasting, and the public performance of community standing.

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Why you'd press play

You want a close read of sacred objects that carry social history.

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