Vijaya Nagarajan is an associate professor in the Department of Theology/Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco.

"Feeding a Thousand Souls is a beautifully written and richly illustrated book with an abundance of color photos befitting the book's visual subject, the kolam." -- Serinity Young, American Museum of Natural History, Religion

"Feeding a Thousand Souls is at once a smart and sweet book. It is sweet because it winds around the author's own experiences and her scholarly journey back into her culture of origin. It is smart because it carries us along unexpectedly from her life through an ever-expanding Tamil Hindu worldview that is encapsulated but hardly contained in one art-ritual form. Through the exploration of theÂkolamÂwe are treated to a delightful series of thoughtful observations and reflections that reverberate far beyond the Tamil threshold." -- Jack David Eller, Community College of Denver, Reading Religion

"Vijaya Nagarajan ... refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that Hindus have a "karmic obligation" to "feed a thousand souls," or offer food to those that live among us. By providing a meal of rice flour to bugs, ants, birds, and insects, she writes, the Hindu householder begins the day with "a ritual of generosity," with a dual offering to divinity and to nature." -- Rohini Chaki, Gastro Obscura

"The kolam is the most beautiful and evanescent artistic form of the goddess in South India, created ritually each and every day by millions of women. This beautiful book is a treasure, bringing to life for the first time the wealth of meanings of this form of women's religious practice."--Diana L. Eck, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies, Harvard Divinity School

"This is the book of a lifetime, and it represents a lifetime's work on Tamil women's daily ritual practice, the artful threshold designs variously known as kolam, alpana and rangoli throughout much of the Indian subcontinent. Vijaya Nagarajan tells local and diasporic stories of the kolam with passion, sensitivity, and a deep ethnographic identification with the women whose generosity daily feeds a thousand souls."--Kamala Visweswaran, Professor of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego