Carter Higgins

Carter Hawthorne Higgins is an interdisciplinary scholar of Hinduism and globally connected social changes in 20th and 21st-century North India and Nepal. His current research interests lie at the intersection of pilgrimage, religiocharitable development, and the bureaucratic management of devotional sites in India. He has conducted nineteen months of fieldwork in Rajasthan, India, and eight months in Kathmandu, Nepal, predominantly exploring temple networks and lay communities associated with the Nath Sampraday, whose forebears once served as the foremost lineages of heterodox Shaiva ascetics in northern South Asia. He is particularly fascinated by the ways in which socioeconomic and political shifts on interpenetrating local, regional, national, and global scales are registered in devotional subjectivity and changing senses and articulations of inheritance and belonging.  

Building on research supported by the Social Science Research Council and other grants, Carter Higgins’s first book manuscript, entitled Saintly Investments: Pilgrimage, Development, and Contemporary Hinduism in India, offers a close-range ethnographic analysis of the intersection of developmental charity and Hinduization in a pluralistic religious milieu—a milieu which is marked by a focus on divine miracles, the bureaucratization of religion, ongoing market reforms, and the welfare and historiographic strategies of actors associated with the Hindu nationalist movement. The project works outward from eleven months of fieldwork at the popular but little-studied pilgrimage site of Gogameri, Rajasthan, where Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh pilgrims—especially from the lower strata of North Indian society—worship at the architecturally Islamic tomb of the oral-epic hero-deity, Gogaji, and the politically influential monastic temple of the medieval yogi, Gorakhnath. Told through the perspectives of pilgrimage priests, the religiocharitable trusts of pilgrims, and low-level bureaucrats in the Rajasthan government, the project illustrates the decentralized, multiply motivated, and sometimes conflictual ways in which Gogameri is being delinked from older epic narratives and commemorative ritual practices—which now strike many as partially and illegitimately Islamic—and tied instead to broader configurations of contemporary Hinduism.