Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India

Vikash Singh's Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India, published by Stanford University Press in 2017, is a scholarly study examining Hindu pilgrimage, particularly to Amarnath and other sites, as a form of moral protest by marginalized groups against social and economic exclusion. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed monograph from a major university press grounded in fieldwork among pilgrims themselves. Its limit is that its argument centers on the specific pilgrimages it studies closely, so a claim generalizing its moral-protest framework to a different pilgrimage tradition elsewhere in India needs to be checked rather than assumed to transfer directly.