Shiva Sai Ram Urella

Shiva Sai Ram Urella is a Lector of Telugu in the South Asia Studies Council at Yale University. He holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Emory University and an Integrated Master of Arts in Political Science from the University of Hyderabad, India. His current book project is based on his ethnographic fieldwork in Telangana among Telangana-based ritual specialists called Ogguvandlu, who create and sustain vibrant Bahujan religious worlds within which they perform rituals, Telugu oral narratives of sibling deities Mallanna and Yellamma. His research focuses on the relationships between the Telugu language, ritual repertoires, oral narratives, divine embodiment, caste identities, and state-led interventions in contemporary South Indian Hindu traditions. He received the Taraknath Das Memorial Junior Research Fellowship from the American Institute of Indian Studies for 2022-2023 to conduct his fieldwork.

 

He presented his research at the Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, the AIIS Junior Fellows conference, Emory South Asia Seminar Series, Telugu Studies Symposium, and has delivered invited lectures for the Indian Sociological Society and the Telugu Association of North America (TANA). Apart from his book monograph, he is currently working on translating several unpublished Dalit Christian testimonials written between 1877 and 1890 in colonial Andhra Pradesh. He currently serves as a steering committee member for the Hinduism Unit of the American Academy of Religion. He founded and curated The Bandari Project, an audio-visual documentation of his fieldwork focusing on Mallanna-Yellamma jataras of Telangana.