New Books in Indian Religions

Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi was an Italian Jesuit who worked in South India from 1710 to 1747. A brilliant scholar of Tamil, his works include hymns, instructions for catechists, and a robust defense of the Catholic missionary approach. His most famous work is Tēmpāvaṇi (The Unfading Garland), an epic re-telling of the early life of Jesus, set in the context of the whole Biblical story, and surprisingly focused on St. Joseph, spouse of Mary and foster-father of Jesus. St. Joseph in South India argues that Beschi’s distinctively Catholic approach draws on methods already familiar in the Jesuit ethical and dramatic literature in post-Reformation Europe. Francis Xavier Clooney's Saint Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi's Tēmpāvaṇi (Brill, 2022) includes a fresh translation of about 300 verses from Tēmpāvaṇi. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians’ location between Hindus and Muslims. South Asia's Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2023) begins with a discussion of south India’s ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia’s Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. He then underscores the efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavors, but rarely succeeded in yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of postcolonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today. Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford UP, 2019) focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges--in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Rajiv Ranjan discusses his second language acquisition journey, open educational resources, and teaching philosophy. You can study with him at Yogic Studies. Rajiv Ranjan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University (MSU). At MSU, Rajiv is associated with the Asian Studies Program and Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching (MAFLT) Program. He is also the mentor for the Fulbright Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs). Before joining MSU, Rajiv Ranjan taught as a graduate teaching assistant at The University of Iowa, Iowa City (2010-2015) where he received his PhD in Second Language Acquisition in 2015. Learning resources: Hindi-Urdu Basic Hindi Basic Urdu Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Brahma-sutra, attributed to Badaraya (ca. 400 CE), is the canonical book of Vedanta, the philosophical tradition which became the doctrinal backbone of modern Hinduism. As an explanation of the Upanishads, it is principally concerned with the ideas of Brahman, the great ground of Being, and of the highest good. The Philosophy of the Brahma-sutra: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first introduction to concentrate on the text and its ideas, rather than its reception and interpretation in the different schools of Vedanta. Covering the epistemology, ontology, theory of causality and psychology of the Brahma-sutra, and its characteristic theodicy, it also: - Provides a comprehensive account of its doctrine of meditation - Elaborates on its nature and attainment, while carefully considering the wider religious context of Ancient India in which the work is situated - Draws the contours of Brahma-sutra's intellectual biography and reception history. By contextualizing the Brahma-sutra's teachings against the background of its main collocutors, it elucidates how the work gave rise to widely divergent ontologies and notions of practice. For both the undergraduate student and the specialist this is an illuminating and necessary introduction to one of Indian philosophy's most important works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Senior scholar John Brockington discusses his scholarship, his role in establishing key conferences, and his work on an online research archive on the spread of the story of Rāma. Professor John Brockington graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1963 and joined the Sanskrit Department at Edinburgh in 1965. In 1968 Professor Brockington completed his D.Phil with a thesis on the language and style of the Rāmāyaṇa. He remained at Edinburgh throughout his teaching career and is now emeritus Professor of Sanskrit in the School of Asian Studies, of which he was the first Head (1998-1999); he was also the first Convenor of the Centre for South Asian Studies (1989-1993). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001. He was the Secretary General of the International Association of Sanskrit Studies from 2000 to 2012 (and is now a Vice President) and he was the chair of the organising committee of the 13th World Sanskrit Conference, held at Edinburgh in July 2006. Professor Brockington has given lectures by invitation at many universities in India and Europe and was awarded the honorary Vidyāvācaspati degree by Silpakorn University, Bankok, in 2015. He was a founder member the Executive Committee of the Dubrovnik International Conferences on the Sanskrit Epics and Puranas. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Nishant Kumar's Religious Offense and Censorship of Publications: An Enquiry Through the Prism of Indian Laws and the Judiciary (Routledge, 2022) analyzes the role of laws and the judiciary in the process of censorship in India. It examines the rationales and observations produced by the judiciary when demands for censorship are directed against publications that allegedly offend religious sentiments. Focusing on a micro-level analysis of censorship of publications, it presents a hard case to understand the limitations of freedom of expression and the role played by the judiciary in defining its boundaries. The volume traces the evolution of laws governing freedom of expression since the colonial period and the context in which these laws were amended after Independence. It also explicates how the legal process – the structural and functional aspects of working of judiciary – affects the fate of freedom of expression in India. Employing comparative legal analysis, it tries to understand and situate the Indian case within the larger discourse of censorship and freedom of expression around the world, thereby marking its similarities and differences. In unravelling the politics of censorship, the author also examines the interaction among different stakeholders like government, non-state actors and the judiciary. A tract for our times, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of law, especially constitutional law and fundamental rights, politics, especially political theory and Indian politics, modern India and South Asian studies. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on Indigenous Religion and Christianity at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pīr katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (U California Press, 2019), Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal. This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and about yoga practitioners and spiritual tourists who visualize peace through yoga. Practitioners' aspirations for peace situate them at the heart of an international movement that has captured the imagination of cosmopolitans the world over, with its purported benefits to mind, body, and spirit. Yoga is thought to offer health, vitality, and relief from depression through control of body and breath. Yet, the vision of peace in this institution is a partial vision that obscures the important but seemingly peripheral others of its self-conception. Through in-depth ethnographic analysis, this book explores the processes through which global spiritual movements can have peace front and center in their vision and yet condone and perpetuate cycles of injustice and social inequality that form the critical and problematic foundations of our global economy. The book privileges the experiences and hardships faced by Indian wageworkers--most of them women --but it also offers a sympathetic portrayal of international yoga practitioners and of the complex patterns of work and worship central to a global mission. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Today I talked to Ching Keng about his book Toward a New Image of Paramartha: Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha Buddhism Revisited (Bloomsbury, 2022). Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha are often regarded as antagonistic Indian Buddhist traditions. Paramartha (499-569) is traditionally credited with amalgamating these philosophies by translating one of the most influential Tathagatagarbha texts in East Asia, the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, and introducing Tathagatagarbha notions into his translations of Yogacara texts. Engaging with the digitalized Chinese Buddhist canon, Ching Keng draws on clues from a long-lost Dunhuang fragment and considers its striking similarities with Paramartha's corpus with respect to terminology, style of phrasing, and doctrines. In this cutting-edge interpretation of the concept of jiexing, Keng demystifies the image of Paramartha and makes the case that the fragment holds the key to recovering his original teachings. Further readings mentioned in our interview: Funayama, Toru 船山徹. The Work of Paramārtha an Example of Sino-Indian Cross-cultural Exchange. Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies; 2009; 31, pp. 141-83. Radich, Michael. The Doctrine of *Amalavijñāna in Paramārtha (499–569), and Later Authors to Approximately 800C.E. Zinbun; 2008; 41, pp. 45-174. Listeners and readers interested in further discussions, please feel free to contact Prof. Ching Keng, [email protected] Jessica Zu is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist studies. She is an assistant professor of religion at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Merchants of Virtue: Hindus, Muslims, and Untouchables in Eighteenth-Century South Asia (U California Press, 2022) explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that also reconfigured Muslims in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others. This book is the winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences. Divya Cherian is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. She is a historian of early modern and pre-colonial South Asia, with interests in social, cultural, and religious history, gender and sexuality, ethics and law, and the local and the everyday. Her research focuses on western India, chiefly on the region that is today Rajasthan. Sanjukta Poddar is Assistant Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University. She is a cultural and social historian of modern South Asia with an interest in examining cultural contestations within colonial and postcolonial societies. Her research focuses on northern India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly, in understanding identities that are expressed and debated at the intersection of print culture and urban history in provincial cities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Tantra, Magic, and Vernacular Religions in Monsoon Asia: Texts, Practices, and Practitioners from the Margins (Routledge, 2022) explores the cross- and trans-cultural dialectic between Tantra and intersecting 'magical' and 'shamanic' practices associated with vernacular religions across Monsoon Asia. With a chronological frame going from the mediaeval Indic period up to the present, a wide geographical framework, and through the dialogue between various disciplines, it presents a coherent enquiry shedding light on practices and practitioners that have been frequently alienated in the elitist discourse of mainstream Indic religions and equally overlooked by modern scholarship. The book addresses three desiderata in the field of Tantric Studies: it fills a gap in the historical modelling of Tantra; it extends the geographical parameters of Tantra to the vast, yet culturally interlinked, socio-geographical construct of Monsoon Asia; it explores Tantra as an interface between the Sanskritic elite and the folk, the vernacular, the magical, and the shamanic, thereby revisiting the intellectual and historically fallacious divide between cosmopolitan Sanskritic and vernacular local. The book offers a highly innovative contribution to the field of Tantric Studies and, more generally, South and Southeast Asian religions, by breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries. Its variety of disciplinary approaches makes it attractive to both the textual/diachronic and ethnographic/synchronic dimensions. It will be of interest to specialist and non-specialist academic readers, including scholars and students of South Asian religions, mainly Hinduism and Buddhism, Tantric traditions, and Southeast Asian religions, as well as Asian and global folk religion, shamanism, and magic. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Where does the concept of “community” come from? How does it shape the lives of Hindus and Muslims in metropolitan Yangon? And how do these people navigate between their ethno-religious and other cosmopolitan identities? In this episode, Prof. Judith Beyer, a Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz, joins Dr. Mai Van Tran, a postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, to discuss her latest book Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation Among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon (NIAS Press, 2022). In it, she offers the first anthropological monograph of Muslim and Hindu lives in contemporary Myanmar. The book introduces the concept of “we-formation” as a fundamental yet underexplored capacity of humans to relate to one another outside of and apart from demarcated ethno-religious lines and corporate groups. Her argument also provides an alternative lens to understand the dynamics of the ongoing Myanmar Spring Revolution. The work on this episode was supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement No 101079069. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever pitch, especially amongst urban middle-class activists and global civil society groups. But are India’s ‘tribes’ really endangered? Do they face extinction? And is this threat somehow comparable to the threat of extinction facing tigers and other wildlife? Combining years of fieldwork and archival research with intensive theoretical interrogations, Ezra Rashkow's book The Nature of Endangerment in India: Tigers, 'Tribes', Extermination and Conservation, 1818-2020 (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a global intellectual history of efforts to ‘protect’ indigenous peoples and their cultures, usually from above. It also offers a critique of the activist impulse to cry ‘Save the tigers!’ and ‘Save the tribes!’ together in the same breath. It is not a history or an ethnography of the tribes of India but rather a history of discourses—including Adivasis’ own—about what is perceived to be the fundamental question for nearly all indigenous peoples in the modern world: the question of survival. Examining views of interlinking biological and cultural (or biocultural) diversity loss in western and central India—particularly in regard to Bhil and Gond communities facing not only conservation and development-induced displacement but also dehumanizing animal analogies comparing endangered tigers and tribes—the book problematizes the long history of human endangerment and extinction discourse. In doing so, it shows that fears of tribal extinction actually predated scientific awareness of the extinction of non-human species. Only by confronting this history can we begin to decolonize this discourse. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

It’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the approach. Guest Tulasi Srinivas, associate professor of anthropology at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society and the Indian Sociological Society. Author of Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism, among other books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In her layered and theoretically astute new book The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Muslim Rule (Columbia UP, 2021), Audrey Truschke documents and analyzes a range of Sanskrit texts in premodern India invested in narrating and making sense of Indo-Persian political rule and governance. In a study at once ambitious and razor sharp in execution, Truschke demonstrates the importance of taking seriously the enterprise of Sanskrit historical writing in the premodern period. Historically and geographically expansive, Truschke takes her readers through a delightful tour of Sanskrit texts from a variety of genres to show their incongruity with modern conceptions of religious difference and antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Through her close readings of Sanskrit historical texts often saturated with poetry and a keen poetic sensibility, Truschke achieves no less than a fundamental reorientation of how we imagine and approach the discipline of history. This meticulously researched and lyrically written book will be of tremendous interest to scholars of South Asia, Religion, and the wider Humanities. SherAli Tareen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College. His research focuses on Muslim intellectual traditions and debates in early modern and modern South Asia. His book Defending Muhammad in Modernity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) received the American Institute of Pakistan Studies 2020 Book Prize and was selected as a finalist for the 2021 American Academy of Religion Book Award. His second book is called Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire (Columbia University Press, 2023). His other academic publications are available here. He can be reached at [email protected]. Listener feedback is most welcome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Vinayaka Mahatmya is a late Puranic text which contains myths of eight of Gaṇeśa’s avatāras. It presents Gaṇeśa as the supreme deity who empowers Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva to perform their traditional activities of creation, preservation and destruction. It offers descriptions of many darśanas of Gaṇeśa and several stotras praising his worship. This book contains the first translation of this text into a modern European language and also includes a transliterated version of the Sanskrit text. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

'How do gender constructions transform religious experiences?' 'What is the role of bodily materiality in ethics and epistemology?' 'How does rethinking gender and sexuality force us to reconceptualise settled ontological frameworks?' The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (Bloomsbury, 2019) provides the first research resource to Indian philosophical gender issues, exploring a variety of texts and traditions from Indian philosophy where the treatment of gender is dynamic and diverse. Organised around three central themes - the gender dynamics of enlightenment in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions; the simple binary opposition of genders in Indian traditions; the ways in which symbolic representations of gender differ from social realities in Hindu and Buddhist practice - a team of respected scholars discuss feminist readings, examinations of femininity and masculinity, as well as queer and trans identities, representations, and theories. Beginning with the Vedic tradition and ending with sections on Sri Ramakrishna and Gandhi, this wide-ranging handbook encourages fresh inquiry into classic philosophical questions. Offering critical analyses relevant to literary, cultural and religious studies, The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender opens up new ways of understanding gender and South Asian philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Rick Repetti's Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (Routledge, 2022) provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of the state of the field of the philosophy of meditation and engages primarily in the philosophical assessment of the merits of meditation practices. This Handbook unites novel and original scholarship from 28 leading Asian and Western philosophers, scientists, theologians, and other scholars on the philosophical assessment of meditation. It critically assesses the conceptual and empirical validity of meditation, its philosophical implications, its legitimacy as a phenomenological research tool, its potential value as an aid to neuroscience research, its many practical benefits, and, among other considerations, its possibly misleading interpretations, applications, and consequences. Following the introduction by the editor, the Handbook's chapters are organized in six parts: - Meditation and philosophy - Meditation and epistemology - Meditation and metaphysics - Meditation and values - Meditation and phenomenology - Meditation in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions A distinctive, timely, and invaluable reference work, it marks the emergence of a new discipline therein, the philosophy of meditation. The book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience in the fields of philosophy, meditation, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, theology, and Asian and Western philosophy. It will serve as the textbook in any philosophy course on meditation, and as secondary reading in courses in philosophy of mind, consciousness, selfhood/personhood, metaphysics, or phenomenology, thereby helping to restore philosophy as a way of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Anthony Cerulli and Sarah Beckham share the history, mandate and vision for the UW-Madison Center for South Asia, especially its vibrant annual conference. Find out more about the conference (which takes place this year from October 18-21) here. Anthony Cerulli, CSA Director Sarah Beckham, CSA Associate Director Andrea Fowler, CSA Assisant Director and ACSA Coordinator (not present) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Buddhists are famous for their thesis that selves do not exist. But if they are right, what would that thesis mean for our apparent sense of self and for ordinary practices involving selves—or at least persons? In Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu’s Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022), Monima Chadha answers these questions by considering Vasubandhu’s arguments against the self. She argues that he—and Abhidharma philosophers like him—denies the existence of selves as well as persons and should take a strongly illusionist stance about our apparent senses of agency and ownership. The book also investigates how Vasubandhu ought to explain episodic memory and synchronic unity of conscious experiences without a self. Chadha weaves together philosophers from a range of traditions, drawing on contemporary and premodern interpreters of Buddhism as well as analytic philosophy, phenomenology and continental philosophy, and modern cognitive science. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Stephanie Corigliano discusses TARKA, a quarterly journal published by Embodied Philosophy that explores yoga philosophy, contemplative studies, and the world’s wisdom and esoteric traditions. TARKA call for papers here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below (Oxford UP, 2022), Justin W. Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people-a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka-a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Andrea Acri and Peter Sharrock's The Creative South: Buddhist and Hindu Art in Mediaeval Maritime Asia (2 volumes; Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2022) examines the creative contribution of Maritime Asia towards shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In most mainstream traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, women have for centuries largely been excluded from positions of religious and ritual leadership. However, as this volume shows, in an increasing number of late-20th-century and early-21st-century contexts, women can and do undergo monastic and priestly education; they can receive ordination/initiation as Buddhist nuns or Hindu priestesses; and they are accepted as religious and political leaders. Even though these processes still take place largely outside or at the margins of traditional religious institutions, it is clear that women are actually establishing new religious trends and currents. They are attracting followers, and they are occupying religious positions on par with men. At times women are filling a void left behind by male religious specialists who left the profession, and at times they are perceived as their rivals. In some cases, this process takes place in collaboration with male religious specialists, in others against the will of the women's male counterparts. However, in most cases we see both acceptance and resistance. Whether silently or with great fanfare, women are grasping new opportunities to occupy positions of leadership. Ute Hüsken's Laughter, Creativity, and Perseverance: Female Agency in Buddhism and Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2022) offers ten in-depth case studies analysing culturally, historically, and geographically unique situations in order to explore the historical background, contemporary trajectories, and impact of the emergence of new and powerful forms of female agency in mostly conservative Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

A Radical Pluralist Philosophy of Religion: Cross-Cultural, Multireligious, Interdisciplinary (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a unique introduction to studying the philosophy of religion, drawing on a wide range of cultures and literary sources in an approach that is both methodologically innovative and expansive in its cross-cultural and multi-religious scope. Employing his expertise in interdisciplinary and Wittgenstein-influenced methods, Mikel Burley draws on works of ethnography and narrative fiction, including Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, to critically engage with existing approaches to the philosophy of religion and advocate a radical, pluralist approach. Breaking away from the standard fixation on a narrow construal of theism, topics discussed include conceptions of compassion in Buddhist ethics, cannibalism in mortuary rituals, divine possession and animal sacrifice in Hindu Goddess worship and animism in indigenous traditions. Original and engaging, Burley's synthesis of philosophical, anthropological and literary elements expands and diversifies the philosophy of religion, providing an essential introduction for anyone interested in studying the radical plurality of forms that religion takes in human life. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (U Washington Press, 2020), Padma Kaimal deciphers the intentions of the monument’s makers, reaching back across centuries to illuminate worldviews of the ancient Indic south. By focusing on the material form of the complex—the architecture, inscriptions, and sculptures, along with the spaces they carve out that guide light, shadow, sound, and footsteps—Kaimal offers insights that complement what surviving texts tell us about Shaiva Siddhanta ideas and practices, providing a rare opportunity to walk in the distant past. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are also pilgrimage destinations, centres of learning, political hotspots, and foci of economic activities. In these temples, not only the human and the divine interact, but they are also meeting places of different members of the communities, be they local or coming from afar. Hindu temples do not exist in isolation, but stand in multiple relationships to other temples and sacred sites. They relate to each other in terms of architecture, ritual, or mythology, or on a conceptual level when particular sites are grouped together. Especially in urban centres, multiple temples representing different religious traditions may coexist within a shared sacred space. Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives (HASP, 2022) pays close attention to the connections between individual Hindu temples and the affiliated communities, be it within a particular place or on a trans-local level. These connections are described as temple networks, a concept which instead of stable hierarchies and structures looks at nodal, multi-centred, and fluid systems, in which the connections in numerous fields of interaction are understood as dynamic processes. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata reflects on the theology of time in this early Hindu text and poses the key question: why does the Krishna avatāra inaugurate the worst yuga? The Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes a massive war facilitated by God and the gods. That war took place between the third and the last ages of a 12,000-year cycle; within the cycle, moral behaviour and human lifespan always decrease in steps before being rebooted for the next cycle (initial lifespan 400 years). Divine Descent and the Four World-Ages in the Mahābhārata-Or, Why Does the Krsna Avatāra Inaugurate the Worst Yuga? (Cardiff UP, 2022) describes and discusses this cycle and tries to explain why God and the gods are said to have descended and acted at that particular point within it. The trigger was the complaint of the Earth, who was suffering on account of the human beings upon her. This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

"The close attention required for editing and translating gives Olivelle an unparalleled understanding of the texts and inspires numerous articles and essays contained in this volume that draw out key ideas and insights from those same sources. Only careful philological editing and the hard, interpretive choices of translation enable progress in our historical understanding of India. Among the advances that philology makes possible is an improved sense of chronology in ancient India. Although uncertain chronologies still pose challenges for this period, readers are invited to note how often Olivelle makes arguments based on historical simultaneity or sequence. His feel for the texts and his scrutiny of the historical markers in them enables him to place ideas, institutions, and authors in plausible chronological contexts. Taken together, Olivelle’s many editions and translations function as both the foundation and the justification for the shorter writings in this volume. In addition to questions of social history and material culture, the volume also addresses the subject of law, affirming that law in India has a history. Olivelle practices enabling scholarship, a form of academic work that makes other scholarship possible. It opens conversations rather than closing them, and it invites instead of concluding." ̶̶ Donald R. Davis, Jr. Patrick Olivelle is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and a past President of the American Oriental Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of transhumanist ideas in India, Robert M. Geraci's book Futures of Artificial Intelligence: Perspectives from India and the U.S. (Oxford UP, 2021) reveals how the nexus of religion and technology contributes to public life and our modern self-understanding while suggesting that the apocalyptic approach to AI should be tempered by other visions. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In this episode, we focus the use of religious myths, icons and deities in Hindu nationalist politics in India. More specifically, we discuss the political invocation of Lord Parshuram, a deity in the Hindu pantheon who has, in recent years, become more visible as a mobilizing political symbol for the Hindu nationalist movement. But who is Lord Parshuram? Why has he now become politically salient? And what does his politicization tell us about Hindu nationalist politics in India today? We look for answers to these questions in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Goa, where Lord Parshuram has recently been a focal point for political contestation and conflict along caste and religious lines. Solano da Silva, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani in Goa. Jigisha Bhattacharya, The Faculty of English at Cambridge University. Kenneth Bo Nielsen is an Associate Professor at the dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, University of Helsinki, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical, and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Today I talked to Mani Rao about her translation Saundarya Lahari: Wave of Beauty" (HarperCollins, 2022) Saundarya Lahari is a popular Sanskrit hymn celebrating the power and beauty of Sakti, the primordial goddess. In one hundred verses, it underlines the centrality of the feminine principle in Indian thought. Attributed to Adi Sankaracarya, Saundarya Lahari is a valuable source for understanding tantric ideas. Every verse is associated with yantras and encoded mantras for tantric rituals, and specific verses in the hymn are considered potent for acquiring good health, lovers, and even poetic skills. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke UP, 2022) Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation. Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Today I talked to Holly Walters about her new book Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam UP, 2020). For roughly two thousand years, the veneration of sacred fossil ammonites, called Shaligrams has been an important part of Hindu and Buddhist ritual practice throughout South Asia and among the global Diaspora. Originating from a single remote region of Himalayan Nepal, called Mustang, Shaligrams are all at once fossils, divine beings, and intimate kin with families and worshippers. Through their lives, movements, and materiality, Shaligrams then reveal fascinating new dimensions of religious practice, pilgrimage, and politics. But as social, environmental, and national conflicts in the politically-contentious region of Mustang continue to escalate, the geologic, mythic, and religious movements of Shaligrams have come to act as parallels to the mobility of people through both space and time. Shaligram mobility therefore traverses through multiple social worlds, multiple religions, and multiple nations revealing Shaligram practitioners as a distinct, alternative, community struggling for a place in a world on the edge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built. In A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard UP, 2015), John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource. A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive. Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist based in Bangalore, India. She tweets at @twitatreyee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

McComas Taylor discusses the upcoming 18th World Sanskrit Conference January 9-13, 2023. The conference is held online. All are welcome to register here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The mission of The Dharma Academy of North America (DANAM) "is to identify strategies for, and undertake, the recovery, reclamation and reconstitution of Dharma traditions for the contemporary global era, with initial focus on Hindu Dharma and subsequently on other Dharma traditions." Where did DANAM come from? What is its future? Listen into this candid discussion with Rita D. Sherma about DANAM past and future. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

This book addresses the recent transformations of popular Hinduism by focusing upon the religious cum artistic practice of Ramkatha, staged narratives of the Ramcharitmanas. Focusing on the sensory and media experiences, the author examines the aesthetics and dynamics of the Ramkatha ethnoscape through participant-observation in everyday practices, and how it particularly, translates politics from the realm of religion. Besides being socially constructed, the Ramkatha heavily relies on technologies for its production and continuation. Negotiated through a telling of Hindu religious stories, the mediated voice of Morari Bapu, a former school-teacher turned narrator, is a major medium of performance transposed into multiple media such as theatre, stage, music and spectacle. The book engages with voice as a vehicle of meaning to scrutinize its discursive production, imagination and re-production across mobile contexts. It investigates how the transnationally disseminated practices re-contextualize religious subjectivities of an affective community enmeshed in spatio-sensorial modes. Mrinal Pande's Popular Hinduism, Stories and Mobile Performances: The Voice of Morari Bapu in Multiple Media (Routledge, 2022) will be of interest to academic audiences in the fields of South Asian Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, as well as Performance Studies and Religious Studies. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname (U Toronto Press, 2021) explores how ideas of self-knowledge and identity arise from a unique set of rituals in Suriname, a postcolonial Caribbean nation rife with racial and religious suspicion. Amid competition for belonging, political power, and control over natural resources, Surinamese Ndyuka Maroons and Hindus look to spirit mediums to understand the causes of their successes and sufferings and to know the hidden minds of relatives and rivals alike. But although mediumship promises knowledge of others, interactions between mediums and their devotees also fundamentally challenge what devotees know about themselves, thereby turning interpersonal suspicion into doubts about the self. Through a rich ethnographic comparison of the different ways in which Ndyuka and Hindu spirit mediums and their devotees navigate suspicion, Suspect Others shows how present-day Caribbean peoples come to experience selves that defy concepts of personhood inflicted by the colonial past. Stuart Earle Strange investigates key questions about the nature of self-knowledge, religious revelation, and racial discourse in a hyper-diverse society. At a moment when exclusionary suspicions dominate global politics, Suspect Others elucidates self-identity as a social process that emerges from the paradoxical ways in which people must look to others to know themselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India (Princeton UP, 2022) is a captivating treasury of emotion terms drawn from some of India’s earliest classical languages. Inspired by the traditional Indian genre of a “treasury”—a wordbook or anthology of short texts or poems—this collection features 177 jewel-like entries evoking the kinds of phenomena English speakers have variously referred to as emotions, passions, sentiments, moods, affects, and dispositions. These entries serve as beautiful literary and philosophical vignettes that convey the delightful texture of Indian thought and the sheer multiplicity of conversations about emotions in Indian texts. An indispensable reference, Words for the Heart reveals how Indian ways of interpreting human experience can challenge our assumptions about emotions and enrich our lives. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In Human Being, Bodily Being: Phenomenology from Classical India (Oxford UP, 2021), Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad offers illuminating new perspectives on contemporary phenomenological theories of body and subjectivity, based on studies of diverse classical Indian texts. He argues for a 'phenomenological ecology' of bodily subjectivity in health, gender, contemplation, and lovemaking. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Russell McCutcheon shares his views on the academic study of religion, and the path ahead for religion graduates and the field itself. McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama and a contributor to the Religious Studies Project podcast. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. With fine paintings and leading science, Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. Yet after circulating for centuries, first in Arabic and Persian, then in Turkish and Urdu, Qazwīnī's compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance. In Wonders and Rarities: The Marvelous Book That Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos (Harvard UP, 2023), Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. From the Mongol conquests to the rise of European imperialism and Islamic reform, Zadeh shows, wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of the world--at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through the course of colonial modernity, Qazwīnī's universe of marvels helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or the earth's rotation around the sun. Recovering Qazwīnī's ideas and his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation. Travis Zadeh revives the work of the thirteenth-century Persian scholar Qazwīnī, whose Wonders and Rarities was for centuries one of the most influential natural histories in the world. Inviting us to embrace anew Qazwīnī’s rationalized study of nature and magic, Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic thought. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Given the popularity and success of the Hindu-Right in India’s electoral politics today, how may one study ostensibly ‘Western’ concepts and ideas, such as the secular and its family of cognates, like secularism, secularisation and secularity in non-Western societies without assuming them simply as derivative, or colonial legacies or contrast cases of Western societies? While recognizing that the dominant language of political modernity of Western societies is not easily translatable in non-Western societies, The Secular Imaginary elaborates upon an intellectual history of secularity in modern India by focusing on the two most influential political leaders – M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. It is an intellectual history of both idea(s) and intellectuals, which sheds light on Indian narratives of secularity – the Gandhian sarva dharma samabhava, Nehruvian secularism, and unity in diversity. It revisits this dominant narrative of secularity of the twentieth century that influenced and shaped the imagination of the modern nation-state. Tiatemsu Longkumer is a Ph.D. scholar working on ‘Anthropology of Religion’ at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong: India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (Oxford University Press, 2022) collects excerpts from a massive encyclopedic work of the late period of Buddhism in India. Translator Charles Goodman has selected sections of this Sanskrit text which cover debates over the existence of prime matter, God, and an immaterial soul, as well as controversies around the cause and effect, karma, and Jain perspectivalism. Within these chapters, through a translation of the verses of the Tattvasaṃgraha as well as the canonical commentary the Tattvasaṃgrahapañjikā by Kamalaśila, the book showcases Buddhists debates with a wide range of interlocutors. Śānatarakṣita and Kamalaśila, from their vantage point late in the history of Indian Buddhism, collect a range of arguments against their historical opponents: Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, Advaita Vedānta, Jainism, and even a group of Buddhists known as the Vātsīputrīyas. The book also includes an introductory chapter by the translator which explains the sophisticated underlying epistemological framework of this massive and massively influential text. Malcolm Keating is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale-NUS College. His research focuses on Sanskrit works of philosophy in Indian traditions, in the areas of language and epistemology. He is the author of Language, Meaning, and Use in Indian Philosophy (Bloomsbury Press, 2019) and host of the podcast Sutras & Stuff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation (U California Press, 2022) provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia. This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Today I talked to Jame Malinson about The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: The Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition (Institut français de Pondichéry, 2021), a critical edition and translation of the Amṛtasiddhi, the earliest Haṭhayoga text. The book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions