Emilia Bachrach

Biography

Bachrach’s ethnographic research focuses on how people’s interpretations of religious texts inform and are informed by intimate negotiations of the family and the self, and by changing class, regional, and gender identities in contemporary western India. Her monograph on this subject, Religious Reading and Everyday Lives in Devotional Hinduism, is forthcoming as part of the Religion in Translation Series with Oxford University Press.

Bachrach’s developing projects include a study of how Hindu masculinities are negotiated through social media, and an examination of Hindu women’s cultivation of piety through ascetic practices in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. She also works with oral and written texts in early modern and modern languages, including Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Gujarati, and Hindi.

Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Hindu Studies and the Journal of Vaishnava Studies, among others. Her recently published book, In the Service of Krishna: Illustrating the Lives of Eighty-Four Vaishnavas from a 1702 Manuscript in the Amit Ambalal Collection (Mapin, 2019), includes original English translations of 17th-century Braj Bhasha hagiographies.

To learn more, please listen to Bachrach’s discussion about her book with Raj Balkaran as part of the New Books Network’s segment on Indian religions.