Alice Tilche is a Lecturer in Anthropology, Museums and Heritage at the University of Leicester and an associate researcher in the Anthropology Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Trained in anthropology at SOAS and Oxford, Alice has conducted extensive research in rural India, among its indigenous groups and among India’s diaspora communities in the UK. Her recent work speaks to one of the most pressing issues of our times, the use of culture in the name of religious nationalism. Alice has also worked extensively on indigenous art, and on issues related to agrarian change and migration. Her work has been published in several top academic journals and her manuscript on Art and Hindu Nationalism is in production with the University of Washington Press. Broken Gods is Alice’s second documentary film and collaboration with Dakxin Bajranje Chhara.
As India’s indigenous people join Hindu religious organisations, their gods are literally being broken. While conversion to Hinduism offers the allure of a better life, those who continue to follow their old ways have become ostracized by their communities. Their broken gods have lost the power to protect them from illness and scarcity.