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Replying to
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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They seem to do syncretic religiosity in a remarkably healthy way. The Thai dancers seem to be doing some harmonious blend of Thai dance and bharatnatyam or something. Now I’m curious to learn the details of the localization of Hinduism to Thailand.
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Thai guys in dhotis (look like junior priests) doing aarti and archana like pros. I wonder how they finessed the caste requirements (no longer legal even in India but de facto still entrenched… only Brahmins get to be priests).
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Trad Hinduism is also generally not exactly welcoming to non-Indian practitioners and doesn’t really have a notion of “conversion” in. Which is partly why hippie editions in the west anchor on to fringe evangelical cults like Hare Krishnas that do proselytize and recruit.
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Hindus are paradoxically both flattered by external attention and resistant to actually letting outsiders in. It’s like read-only half-open. Most diaspora temples are only visited by Indians with the occasional random non-Indian spouse or hippie. Which is why this is unusual.
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Hinduism is like halfway between Judaism/Zoroastrianism and Islam/Christianity. Not a genetically gated People but not a free-entry religion either. I think because it’s vertically integrated with India the geography
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So even though there are no strong entry rules, the system doesn’t grok an “outside” and is ontologically puzzled by outsiders rather than hostile to them. You have to go Indianish to go Hindu. By contrast you don’t have to go Arabish to go Muslim or Roman to go Catholic
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Replying to
I'm not sure this is fair (maybe it wasn't meant to be). Hinduism has had the Mlechha categorisation since forever. I feel ancient Hinduism was quite xenophobic.
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Replying to
I will have to look up sources but the motivation was religious (non-Vedic) - but like your tweet says, the religion is sort of intertwined with the geography so hard to pry them apart.
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