Your most recently published work, Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora, explores the Ellora caves. What inspired you to write this book and explore these caves in particular?

This book emerges from a family story I heard when I was a small child from my father. I am Indian American, with an American mother who met my Indian father where they were both attending college at the University of Colorado. As a child growing up in India, I was raised with access to two distinct sets of cultural stories, and my father used to talk about how our ancestors had made the Ellora caves.

The Ellora caves comprise 34 caves in Maharashtra, in Western India, that are now recognized as a World Heritage site. There are Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain caves numbered in a sequence from the south, marvelously sculpted into the basalt rock of this mountain. To make caves that are sculpted, you can’t just design and build them up; they must be shaped through extraction. It’s quite a feat, and to say that your ancestors were involved in such a project is a source of pride.

At the same time, my father also talked about how Ellora was a pilgrimage site for our ancestors, and that for many generations they would go on a pilgrimage to Ellora. Wherever they migrated around India to do construction work for other patrons, they would go back to get the blessings of the God of Making at Ellora.

This God of Making, Vishwakarma, is a lesser-known deity relative to others like Shiva and Vishnu. He is the god of making things and the patron deity of artisans, machinists, and factory workers. Vishwakarma is always iconographically associated with tools.

My interest is both very personal because of the family association, and professional for me as a researcher. I have spent much of my life thinking about Hindu mythology and looking at storytelling as a form of religious teaching and communication. What were the stories around this god with whom my father’s family was associated? I was keen to learn those stories, and especially those about Ellora. I was interested in how they might shed light on the mystery of why Cave 10, which is a Buddhist worship hall, became so sacred to some hereditary artisans. Before the caves had numbers, Cave 10 was known as “Vishwakarma,” or “The Carpenter’s Hut.”

Did seeing Hindu and Jain narratives like stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata in a unique form at the Ellora caves alter your understanding of those same stories?

It was moving and instructive to see scenes from the epics, the Puranas, and other stories at Ellora, and to also extend my knowledge of them. What I was most interested in was not the general texture of the full range of all the religious mythologies, but what was shown in Cave 10, and how it was seen as relating to Vishwakarma as the god of making things. Usually, Vishwakarma is shown with tools in his hands, ready to take on projects of making. Yet in Cave 10, this is a form of the Buddha, without any tools. Rather, his hands are arranged in the dharmachakra mudra, or the teaching pose. Why would the Buddha be recognized here as the god of making things?

I began to look more closely at the stories that established that identification: the ones that are told now, ones that have been published in the last century in regional languages, and even earlier stories that were recorded by travelers to Ellora. It was fascinating to look at a long history of different travelers’ accounts, and some British Orientalist researchers’ accounts, of what visitors were told about the identity of the deity in Cave 10 and why he was seen as a form of the god of making things.

That Buddhist dharmachakra pose was sometimes perceived as a wounded finger, with stories of how the god was holding his wounded finger, having been injured by a tool. Sometimes, the edge of the Buddha’s robe was painted red and seen as the flow of blood from the wounded finger. Other times, that edge of robe was interpreted as a rope, which is also a tool for measuring and binding.

We were able to trace back these stories to the year 1264, when a certain Maharashtrian saint called Chakradhar Swami went on a pilgrimage with his disciples. (He was originally from Gujarat but was based in Maharashtra at the time.) The pilgrims spent some months in and near the Ellora caves. One of the disciples kept a diary of the guru’s movements and his teachings. When they got there, after walking along the top of the cliffs and then coming down, they settled in Cave 14. The guru sat down and had some betel nut and water. Once refreshed, he looked around and was asked, “Who made this?” He replied, “It was made by Kokas the Carpenter.”

Who was Kokas the Carpenter? This took me on a whole other tangent of mythological and legendary exploration. Kokas was seen to be a human who embodied an amsh, a small portion of Vishwakarma. It is said that great makers carry a little bit of this god of making inside themselves, which gives them the sense of ingenuity for making wonderful creations.

Also, in Ellora there is a most marvelous cave, the Kailashnath temple, or Cave 16, that legends also linked with Kokas. This is a temple that was excavated from the top to the base. Usually, you build from the earth to the top, but if you have a whole mountain of stone, you must start at the very, very top and then come down. It is chisel, chisel, chisel, chisel, chisel — and then go inward to hollow out spaces and make the sculptured form. That was a great marvel of the ancient world, and people would come from far distances to see this. This is another reason why people would want to see the god of making somewhere nearby. I'm mostly talking about a historical tradition of worship and recognition. It’s important to remember that today this is a World Heritage site: there's no worship going on, or there's not supposed to be worship going on. I was tracing practices and beliefs into the past even though some stories continue to circulate in the present.

From ancient temple carvings and traditional oral performances to television shows and mobile apps, Hindu narratives have constantly evolved across different mediums. How has the rise of mass media and digital technology altered the way Hindu stories are shared and told?

Stories are now shared at the flick of a finger, sending them across space. Or if you ask somebody a mythological question, they might say, “Just go Google it.” This is very different from the time of my childhood. We would often sit down with a person and hear a story. Before, 3 people would say, “This is what I’ve heard,” or “Well, I’ll go ask my grandmother,” or “I’ll ask my local guru.”

The many modes of contemporary transmission are dizzying. For the fieldwork side of this project, I focused more on stories retold within family settings, larger gatherings known as katha events, and various publications produced within communities and shared with us. (The mythologies traced in local publications, in regional languages, are not widely known.) While I tried to mention some of the ways that allusions to Vishwakarma circulate through contemporary social media and digital technology, I frankly do not follow these developments closely and leave that to other researchers. Stories can become recirculated in a certain set form, often for particular sociopolitical agendas, leading to a standardization as regional variations across languages and more local interpretations of deities can fall into the background. It becomes important to ask what agendas are furthered by the intensive circulation of particular versions of stories.

Do you have experience studying Vishwakarma traditions in broader settings across India, beyond the immediate site of the Ellora Caves?

My book grew out of a larger project I did with my husband, Kenneth M. George, who is an anthropologist who has mostly worked in Indonesia. We wanted to undertake fieldwork as a couple so we would not be separated for long periods. I’ve been talking about my book, but we also wrote a few articles about the broader settings for Vishwakarma traditions across India and other parts of Asia, particularly Thailand.

We examined Vishwakarma in relation to technology, and to what Ken calls “technophany.” Technophany refers to how people might perceive the marvels of technology as revelations of divinity.

Vishwakarma, as the God of Making, carries a mythology that treats creation as a marvelous act. Artisan communities in traditional India were not usually seen as high caste, since working with your hands was less prestigious than working with the mind, but they emphasized the sacred nature of their work. Since worship of this god historically belonged to communities dedicated to making things with tools, the god is strongly associated with tools, and worship involves honoring those tools. There is historically a lot of regional variation. In some areas, workers put down their tools on every new moon to rest them; in other places that happens just once a year. People told us that just as human beings need rest, tools need rest; tools then wake up, recharged, and continue to help with daily work.

There is a deep sacredness around tools because they are the source of your livelihood. When we say tools, this also means machines and computers. Tools can also be dangerous if you do not care for or use them properly. Propitiating Vishwakarma is thought to also bring protection while using tools.

Your scholarship focuses on how folklore lives in everyday conversation, from spiritual teachers using parables to village women singing devotional songs to navigate domestic life. How would you contrast these fluid, spontaneous forms of storytelling with the permanent, monumental story panels carved in stone at Ellora?

The story panels may look permanent, but they are actually changing all the time because of how people project meaning onto them.

While looking at the old photos of Cave 10 in archives, we learned that when these caves were actively used for worship, they were maintained with plastering and painting. People applied a hard plaster called vajralep. This plaster could extend features, add ornamentation, or even add a mustache to a deity. This allowed the identity of deities to shift over time. The rock face changed in relation to people’s attribution and sense of wonder.

Drawings from the late 18th century and photographs from the 19th century show that Vishwakarma was recognized in the figure of the Buddha. This happened partly because there were no Buddhists present in the region at that time, as Buddhism had receded from the region around the 8th century. Buddhism made a major comeback in Maharashtra in 1956 when the Dalit leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar led a mass conversion to move beyond the caste system. Around that time, the Archaeological Survey of India had taken charge of the site, and Cave 10 became officially recognized as Buddhist. Today, Buddhist pilgrims and tourists come from all over India and the world to marvel at the first 12 Ellora caves.

Still, people from artisan backgrounds continue to look for their own meaning there. One hereditary carpenter that we interviewed told us you can find two identities in the same image. As he asked, “Why can it not be both? It can be the Buddha and it can be Vishwakarma.” Other artisans now look for the god in a side niche in Cave 10, with a figure holding a lotus, known as Padmapani. Some hereditary carpenters see that lotus as a tool. If you want to see something strongly enough, you will see it that way.

Another interesting thing about evolving traditions involves Vishwakarma’s children. He is seen to have sons to whom he gave all the knowledge and tools for making, and he also has a daughter. She was married to the Sun, who was so hot and bright that she created a double of herself from her shadow. Hereditary carpenters went looking for her among the 34 caves at the World Heritage Site and did not find her. However, upstream among the caves that are not officially protected and are still actively in worship, there is a local goddess named Jogeshwari. Some in the artisan community now visit Jogeshwari as a form of Vishwakarma’s daughter and hike beyond the 34 main Ellora caves to also seek her blessings.