Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India

Anne Feldhaus is a scholar of South Asian religion, and this Palgrave Macmillan book is her scholarly study of regional identity and geographical imagination as expressed through pilgrimage networks in Maharashtra, India. Its strength is that Feldhaus draws on extensive fieldwork and textual sources to show how pilgrimage routes actively construct a sense of regional belonging rather than merely connecting pre-existing sacred sites. Its limit is geographic specificity: the study is grounded in Maharashtra, so a claim about pilgrimage and regional identity elsewhere in India needs a source matched to that region rather than an extension of Feldhaus's Maharashtra-specific findings.