New Books In Hindu Studies

Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2018), edited by Caleb Simmons, Moumita Sen, and Hillary Peter Rodrigues, is a diverse collection of cutting-edge interdisciplinary essays looking at the most ubiquitous festival across the Hindu world: the nine-night autumnal celebration of the Great Goddess, Durgā. This work maps manifestations of the festival across historical periods and local celebrations over the regions of West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal. Spanning the spheres of ritual, myth, history, politics, sociology, anthropology, the essays collected herein examine both massive public events as well as private, domestic celebrations, broaching themes of Indian royal power, conquest over demonic forces, worship of young girls and married women as manifestation of the Goddess, the use of social media for festival participation.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction ‘The Doctor and the Saint’ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar who took up the anti-caste struggles for the Untouchables in India. S. Anand’s work with thoroughly researched annotations alongside the speech and introduction by Arundhati Roy makes this a must-read book for anyone who wants to understand India, its society, politics and the caste system. This landmark speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar is the pinnacle of his scholarly work and cements his legacy alongside Mahatma Gandhi in Indian politics. In this speech, Dr. B.R. Ambedakar makes arguments against Hinduism, how reforming the Hinduism will not solve the issues of centuries of oppression of Untouchables - the depressed and oppressed castes in India. He argues that Indian society and culture that preaches the spirituality to the world cannot provide liberty, equality, and fraternity until she completely annihilates th

What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners? Mani Rao takes us on a journey to three sacred sites across India’s Andhra-Telangana region. The practitioners she engages at these sites offer insight into their transformative embodied experience of mantra. Rao dovetails scholarship and practice to grapple with the captivating, eye-opening, mind-blowing narratives of the practitioners she engages. Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)broaches compelling questions such as: what is the relationship between mantras and deities? Texts? Gurus? Do practitioners relate to mantra as vehicles of meaning, or as aesthetic entities? What is the relationship to sound and visions in mantra practice? What is the role of imagination here? Celebrating lived experience, Living Mantra documents the modern-day existence of seers (rishis), thus underscoring the open, ongoing nature of divine revelation in Hindu traditions.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century (Verso, 2017) introduce readers to important work in Anglophone cultural studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, media theory, speculative realism, science studies, Italian and French workerist and autonomist thought, two “imaginative readings of Marx,” and two “unique takes on the body politic.” There are significant implications of these ideas for how we live and work at the contemporary university, and we discussed some of those in our conversation. This is a great book to read and to teach with! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties in the non-Western world’s two major attempts to establish a post-colonial secular state. The secular experiments in Turkey and India were considered success stories for the longest period of time but that has changed with the rise of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in Turkey and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in India and the capture of state power by political forces with an anti-secular vision of nationhood. In his ground-breaking book, Bose attributes the rise of secularism to the fact that non-Western states like Turkey and India never adopted the Western principle of separation of state and church and instead based their secularism on the principle of state intervention and regulation of the religious sphere. In doing so, Bose distinguishes between the e

People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British. Danna Agmon’s A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India (Cornell University, 2017) zooms in on the 1716 arrest and conviction of a Tamil commercial agent and employee of the French East India Company, a legal case that resonated throughout the empire for decades, even centuries, afterward. The “Nayiniyappa Affair” at the heart of this microhistory is Agmon’s way into a complex web of interests and fractures: the aims and actions of French traders, missionaries, and administrators, as well as the roles and agency of indigenous subjects and intermediaries. Moving from colonial Pondicherry to metropolitan France and back again, A Colonial Affair focuses on a local story and context with much broader implications for how we think about the workings of imperial power, authority,

Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian poet, Tulsīdās. The first four volumes of the translation, entitled The Epic of Ram (Harvard University Press, 2016-), are currently available as part of the Murty Classical Library of India Series published by Harvard University Press and distributed in India by Penguin Books. Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims and narratives of the post-colonial state about religion and religious identity. Centered on the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla in Delhi, this book brings into view visions of sovereignty, ethics, hospitality, and inter-communal encounters that rescue Islam in modern South Asia from the suffocating pressures, anxieties, and amnesias of nationalist politics and historiographies. Conceptually bold, ethnographically vivacious, and historically grounded, this book masterfully carries a tragic sensibility while also offering provocative avenues of hope and optimism. Written with poetic eloquence and lyrical command, this book will not only be widely read and debated by scholars of South Asia, Islam, and religion, it also cries out for adoption as what will surely become

In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. His analysis offers an innovative stance on the very study of Hinduism, and tensions between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in a war? – leads to an extended discussion of such themes as rebirth and reincarnation and the personal paths to unity with the universe through the yogas of action, knowledge, and devotion. In Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), Keya Maitra presents a new translation aimed at those who are interested in themes that cross-fertilize with Western philosophical debates regarding the nature of morality, the relation between body and self or mind, the roots of character, and the goal of a well-lived life. Maitra, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina – Asheville, aims at a middle ground of accessibility with recognition of the multiple and context-dependent meanings of Sanskrit terms, an

What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana (Routledge, 2014) explores the extent to which the great medieval Hindu thinker Rāmānuja himself looked to the Viṣṇu Purāṇa (a 1st-4th century narrative work extolling the glories of the great god Viṣṇu) to bolster his theistic stance on the nature of truth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).  The essays in this volume look at a variety of topics ranging from Shaivite religious texts to biographies, novels, and dance forms to show how Hinduism cannot be understood only through texts, but also through the way its lived traditions are informed by changing socio-economic and political conditions. Shandip Saha is associate professor of Religious Studies at Athabasca University, the world leader in the realm of distance education and open learning. His research interests focus on religion and politics in pre-modern North India and on the changing performance practices in devotional music in India and Pakistan.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in precolonial times. Drawing on Sanskrit, Telugu, and Tamil sources, Fisher argues for a uniquely South Asian form of religious pluralism, evidenced by religious performances in the public space.  Her work is crucial for considering the development of Hinduism in the early modern era, and that era’s legacy on modern constructions of Hinduism, calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term ‘sectarianism’.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers, those folks who were most intimately working with language, were at the center of this political realignment. In Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia (Columbia University Press, 2016), Walter N. Hakala, Associate Professor of South Asian languages and literature at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, traces the long history of the construction of Urdu as a language of cultural and national identity. Dictionaries are the key source for understanding the changing social and political landscape of South Asia. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Negotiating Languages offers an episodic genealogy of the ideological underpinnings and political consequences of dictionary production. In our conversation we discuss South Asia’s multilingu

Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfaction is often seen as inauthentic and fraudulent. These public understandings of new religious movements are part of the reason why the Indian Guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or Osho, is so controversial. In Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement (University of California Press, 2016), Hugh Urban, Professor of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, explores the Osho Movement as a case study on the intersection of religion, capitalism, sexuality, and globalization. Urban traces the social contexts of the Osho-Rajneesh transnational religious movement as it extends from its local origins in India, across to America, and back to South Asia. He puts textual and ethnographic sources to use in producing a rich account of Osho, his followers, and the social worlds that shape them.

Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synthesizing narrative. But how was Hinduism defined by Vivekananda and how was it understood by his American audience? How did it relate to the various South Asian religious practices and beliefs that are subsumed under this term Hinduism? In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Michael J. Altman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, tackles literary and visual accounts of religion in India to understand the production of the category Hinduism in America. He provides an episodic genealogy of the ways in which South Asians were constructed in the American imaginary. Instead of reclassifying the various terminology used by missionaries, columnists, or Transcendentalists as Hinduism Altman care

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema? William Elison, Assistant Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara, Christian Lee Novetzke, Professor at the University of Washington, and Andy Rotman, Professor at Smith College offer a layered analysis of the 1977 blockbuster in Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2016). The authors examine the film through each of the narratives three brothers, as well as their mother. All four perspectives offer a new vision of modern India. Through their investigation they explore questions of religion and secularism, Indian nationalism, cinematic genres and Bollywood, politics, urban architectural space, and gender. They also examine the film as a powerful allegory of the nation, where differing religious identities, specifi

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation of Dalits (those subordinated populations once called untouchables). In The Pariah Problem: Caste, Religion, and the Social in Modern India (Columbia University Press, 2014) Rupa Viswanath unpacks the creation and application of this so called “problem.”The interview explores the ways in which land, labour and ritual combined in producing the Pariah and the affect Protestant missionaries had in reshaping Pariah-ness, as well as the role of the colonial state and changes in house site ownership among other issues. Amazingly rich in detail and theoretically dynamic throughout, the book is relevant to numerous discussions in present day India and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and medical activities. The interview explores how varmakkalai relates to the wider field of manual therapies and martial traditions in the subcontinent, the theories that inform the practice, the relationship between healing and fighting, as well as the role of secrets. A truly fascinating study that raises questions about topics such as categorisation, concealment and learning that go way beyond the confines of South India, Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to many.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford University Press, 2016) to study how this seminal series of translations had started a novel way of understanding religions through a comparative study of texts and how it led to the shaping of the Western understanding of Eastern faith-traditions. Molendijk critically analyzes this rise of “big science” and also discusses the problems inherent in this approach of “textualisation of religion.” He revisits the limitations of translation and questions the assumptions behind them. He also looks into the person of Max Muller, specifically his scholarly aspect.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices