Watching random TV show and TIL there’s a Mariamman temple in Bangkok that does a big navratri celebration and almost everybody except the senior priests doing the Sanskrit chants looks Thai. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Maha_
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This is surreal. It’s like a scene out of rural south India transposed to Thailand and cast with Thai actors. This is recent stuff, not the 8th-10th century export Hinduism you see in Bali etc. The Mariamman sect is pretty obscure and the Bangkok temple is only from 1870.
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I’d noticed on my one brief visit to Thailand in 2008 that they have a heavily localized version of Hinduism going robustly and adopted by all the locals in parallel with Buddhism, but I didn’t realize it went this deep. I’d assumed it was casual.
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