Divine Retribution & Justice in Anthropocene: A Study on the Iskcon’s Religious Subjects in Hinduism.

Extant scholarship on Hinduism and ecology states that Hinduism is intertwined with ecology. But the notion that Divine retribution as flood, cloud burst and pandemics is justice in popular Hinduism remains under researched. This paper is informed and is inspired by the forms of alternative modernity which refrains from the ills of modernity and discusses the nature of modernity in which new religious movements are social reality. The paper examines the efforts made by the ISKCON, an internationally acclaimed religious movement. Despite being labeled as ‘not authentic’ form of Vaishnavism, ISKCON is gaining prominence as the religious movement in India also. The author looks beyond the debates of the suitability of concepts and categories to label the ISKCON as sect or a movement in sociology of religion. Rather, the paper discusses the religious subjectivity that is formed through the corporeal, kinesthetic, didactic ways of learning and unlearning. The followers undergo transformation in order to lead a life which is more adaptive to nature and restores the world. The paper blends Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’ and Saba Mahmood’s rendition of Foucaultian ‘technology of self’ to explain the rationale behind the strict lifestyle which the ISKCON followers adapt to lead a life to lessen the consequences of divine retribution. Ethnographically, the study has taken place in Bhubaneswar, a South Asian city in the modern democratic India. The frameworks adopted above focuses on the intricacies, complexities and challenges of the religious subjecthood in the contemporary times of anthropocene era. This paper will benefit the students of sociology of religion, urban modernity food studies and social movements