Inter-Asian Hinduism in East Asian diasporic nodes through a material lens

East Asia has arguably received the least attention from scholars in comparative and transregional studies of Hinduism and Hindu diasporas. While the Hindu population continues to increase in East Asia, there is still a lack of understanding about the broader analytical significance of this shift. This chapter aims to address this knowledge gap by centring the studies of Hinduism and Hindu diasporas in East Asia in an Inter-Asian research paradigm. Following anthropologist Engseng Ho’s call for reconceptualizing Asia as an Inter-Asian space that is regionally expansive, trans-historical in terms of time, as well as cross-communally interactive, I seek to map out the East Asian diasporic nodes, such as Hong Kong, Yiwu, and Kolkata, in which the material meanings of Inter-Asian Hinduism have been created, transformed, disrupted, and mutated, largely because of the ongoing changes in diasporic flows that could neither be foreseen nor avoided. Precisely due to the transient nature of such diasporic flows, the chapter strategizes a material lens in documenting and analysing the changing meaning of Inter-Asian Hinduism in East Asia, given that concrete materials—including, for example, an abandoned Hindu temple in Hong Kong and made-in-China plastic idols that can be ritually transformed into sacred Hindu objects—are some of the most trackable material objects in the East Asian diasporic nodes