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Beyond Black and White: The Italian Reception of the Debate on Native Indian Commentaries in Nineteenth-century Vedic Studies
This article discusses the nineteenth-century debate between German and British Indologists on ancient Indian commentators, shedding light on how...
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Toward a New Dharma of Peace, Health, and Global Well-Being
Peace is generally seen as absence of conflict, like health is seen as absence of disease. However, when we review Vedic literature, peace, and...
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Orthodoxy, Reform, and Protest: Brahmanas and Virashaivism
This paper attempts to analyze the debate between the scholars concerning the nature of Virashaivism. While one category of scholars characterizes...
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Snāna in Early India: a Socio-religious Perspective
Scholars of the religious studies of India have long been intrigued by the seminal roles of rituals in diverse strands of the Hindu tradition. The...
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Spectres of Violence and Landscapes of Peace: Imagining the Religious Other in Patterns of Hindu Modernity
Across multiple Hindu traditions, the motifs of violence and peace have been modulated both by scriptural templates and by context-specific factors....
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Art of Living and Transcendental Meditation: Eastern Practices for the “Scientifically Minded Westerner”
Art of Living (AoL) and Transcendental Meditation (TM) are two of the most successful global Hindu-inspired or Hindu-derived meditation movements in...
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Red: An Ethnographic Study of Cross-Pollination Between the Vedic and the Tantric
This essay explores the connections between Tantric rites and those of Indian tribal religions with “blood” as the central subject. Rooted in...
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Hindu Apologist or Modern Reformer? Arvind Sharma on Hindu Women
Using a case study of Arvind Sharma’s thinking on striyaḥ (women), a subject he claims he has not written about aside from the topic of sati , this...
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Violence and Peace in the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa
This chapter introduces the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa in the contexts of South Asian culture and Sanskrit literary history. Both texts narrate great...
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Chanting Liberation: Overcoming Pain and Death Through Hindu Deathbed Mantra Recitation
This study considers the usage of mantra for and by the dying, addressing a lacuna in Hindu death studies. This topic is approached by examining a...
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Sex, Gender, and Devotional Desire: Refiguring Bodily Identities in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Discourse
Many of the debates among theorists of the body in feminist and gender studies center on the gendered body and its relation to the sexed body, with...
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Purity and Power: Jesus as a Tantric Vīra
For the past 2000 years, Christians have been using terms such as “Messiah,” “Christ,” and “Son of God,” to reflect on the nature of the divinity of...
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Hinduism
In Vedic religion, the body (including its fluids and hair) are sources of pollution that require cleansing and, at certain times, removal. In some...
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A Most Uncommon Task: Arvind Sharma and the Construction of Hindu Missiology
In this essay, I offer a critical, appreciative assessment of Arvind Sharma’s vision of missionary Hinduism, as developed in his 2011 monograph Hinduis...
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The Stage of Arahantship
This chapter does not trace the historical development of the concept of Arahant. Instead, it presents Arahantship as found in the early Buddhist...
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Relationship Between State and Religion in India: A Sphere of Indifference, Contradictions, or Engagement?
While religious liberty has become one of the frequently deliberated and contested categories in our contemporary global world, its public presence...
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Shifting Śāstric Śiva: Co-operating Epic Mythology and Philosophy in India’s Classical Period
This study accounts for disparate portrayals of divine destroyer Śiva in the normative Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata as opposed to Kālidāsa’s amatory Kumārasaṃbhava...
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Reason, Death, and the Animal: The Mahābhārata and the Eruption/Interruption of the Ethical
The article attempts to deal with the proposition that human being’s incapacity to imagine its own death, the state of non-being necessitates the...