Zo Margaret Newell. ‘Picturing the Goddess: Images and the Imagination of Modern Hindu Religious Identity’. PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, May 2011. 293 pp. [official site / PDF]
From the Abstract
This project inquires into the role of visual print technology in the construction of a pan-Indian sense of religious identity at the end of the colonial era. I take as my starting point the statement by Sri Ramakrishna of Calcutta that “a real Hindu” is someone who has, and worships, pictures of deities — specifically, pictures of the mother goddess — and proceed to the phenomenological and historical consideration of a selected set of images.
