Author: user

11 June: Talk on As the Monks Have Always Lived: The Mūlācāra and Monastic Conduct in Digambara Jainism by Kshitij Jain

Posted on June 6, 2025June 6, 2025 by user

As the Monks Have Always Lived: The Mūlācāra and Monastic Conduct in Digambara Jainism

by Kshitij Jain

The Mūlācāra of Vaṭṭakera (est.2nd century CE) is the earliest monastic lawbook in Digambara Jainism. Composed at a time when Jain samghas were acquiring distinct sectarian identities, the Mūlācāra laid the foundation for Digambara monastic conduct, providing a source of authority to the later Digambara authors. My presentation will discuss the early history of this text to underline its significance in the Jain tradition. I will look at some facets of monastic conduct that Vaṭṭakera uses as “identity markers” of a Digambara monk to understand theMūlācāra’s role in the formation of Digambara sectarian identity as a historical context.

The second, and the more elaborate part of this presentation will focus on the Mūlācāra in the medieval period: which witnessed the reproduction of monastic conduct in new socio-political backdrops. I will introduce the Ācāravṛtti of Vasunandi, the earliest commentary on the Mūlācāra (11th century CE) and analyse a few case studies where Vasunandi exhibits commentarial reinterpretations which signify that rather than being a fossilised text, the Mūlācāra was being reinterpreted and adapted to the new circumstances of medieval India. I will then look at a fifteenth century monastic lawbook – the Mūlācārapradīpa of Sakalakīrti wherein the author maintains a conscious association with the Mūlācāra to achieve socio-political legitimacy and monastic authority. My presentation will attempt to highlight what did the Mūlācāra mean for medieval Digambara authors and how did they associate with it to further their projects of identity-building in north-western Digambara communities.

Kshitij Jain is a second year MPhil student reading Classical Indian Religion at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford. He holds an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit (Hons.) Kshitij’s research primarily focuses on medieval Digambara monastic lawbooks and aims at studying them to understand the socio-cultural history of medieval Digambara Jainism. Kshitij is also interested in the Dharmashastra tradition and Classical Sanskrit Literature.

29 May: POETRY AT THE GARAGE

Posted on May 27, 2025May 27, 2025 by user

29th May 2025 18:30-19:30

FRONT ROOM: POETRY AT THE GARAGE
Anelog, a poetry project attached to the letterpress printer at the Garage, is hosting an evening of poetry reading and acoustic music.

BACK ROOM: A RESPONSE
3 OCHS Associate Artists (Dorsett, Flexen, Gupta) contribute a quote from Roberto Calasso’s Ka: ‘Every brick, baked and squared, was a thought. Its consistence was the consistency of their attention. Every thought had the outline of a brick. It wouldn’t disappear, wouldn’t let itself be swallowed up in the mind’s vortex. Rather it became something you could lean on. Something you could place a next thought on – and slowly, crisscrossed with joints, a wall was raised.’

All are welcome!

30 May: 41th Sanskrit Traditions Symposium hosted in partnership with the High Commission of India, London

Posted on May 26, 2025June 3, 2025 by user

The 41st Annual Sanskrit Traditions Symposium was hosted by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in collaboration with the High Commission of India, London on 30 May 2025 at Trinity College, Oxford.

This years panels
Sanskrit and the Digambara Jaina bhaṭṭāraka traditions
Dr Tillo Detige
Respondent: Prof. James Mallinson

Ritualising Passion: The Tantrification of Rāgānugā Bhakti
Dr Lucian Wong
Respondent: Dr Lubomír Ondračka

‘The Blood-Soaked Grace of the Goddess’: Contestations of Power in and around the Devīmāhātmya
Dr Mikel Burley
Respondent: Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen

An Examination of the Soteriological Role of Yoginīs in Śākta Tantric Śaivism
Gonzalo Fernandez
Respondent: Dr Ruth Westoby

OCHS Bursaries now open for applications. Close date: 6 June

Posted on May 23, 2025May 23, 2025 by user

The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies is proud to invite applications for its annual programme of bursaries and scholarships, supporting outstanding students engaged in the academic study of Hindu traditions and related fields.

With a total fund of almost £15,000 available for distribution, these awards are designed to recognise academic excellence and enable focused research within one of the world’s most intellectually rich university environments.

OCHS Bursaries and Scholarships:

We are honoured to support the next generation of scholars in Hindu Studies through this distinguished programme, and extend our heartfelt thanks to all the generous donors for their commitment to learning, scholarship, and the enduring value of education.

For detailed information on eligibility criteria, application procedures, and deadlines, please visit the official OCHS Bursaries and Scholarships page.

5 June: Talk on “The Human and the Divine in Rabindranath Tagore” by Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri FBA

Posted on May 22, 2025May 23, 2025 by user

Lectures of the J.P. and Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow

First Talk: My Lord, My Love

By Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri FBA

Week 1, Thursday 1 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

A well-known Tagore song begins ‘Prabhu āmār, priya āmār’ (My lord, my love). Tagore’s default mode of conceiving the divine is highly personal and often intimate, frequently viewing the deity as a lover or beloved.

A prominent source for this last development is Vaishnav poetry, celebrating the love of Krishna and Radha. But across the range of his writings, the love-relationship with the divine branches out in a variety of ways. In one direction, the divine presence embraces all nature and the cosmos. In another, it assumes an intimately human and even everyday dimension. Tagore subdivides his songs of devotion and worship (pujā) into a number of categories, but they overrun one another’s bounds and exceed them all. At the same time, his songs of human love (prem) expand to take on deeply philosophic and spiritual implications.

Tagore’s love-poetry and his spiritual poetry thus meld to provide a uniquely rich compound, enriching the notions of both the divine and the human.

Second Talk: The God Within

By Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri FBA

Week 6, Thursday 5 June, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

One of Tagore’s most celebrated tropes is the jiban-debatā or ‘god of life’, specifically the subject’s life. This divine presence is antaratama (innermost), embedded in the subject’s deepest being yet distinct from the latter’s familiar identity. It embraces human paradigms yet is immeasurably beyond them. The human condition partakes of its divinity within the contours of its own being.

The jiban-debata can be male or female, casting the human subject in the opposite gender. It seeks and desires the human entity it has created, fulfilling itself thereby: the divine needs the human no less than the human the divine. In the totality of its aspects, the jiban-debata thus becomes a universal entity: deeply personalized and interiorized yet manifesting itself in all nature and the cosmos. Humanity too thereby exceeds its accustomed bounds to become a universal force.

Here Upanishadic concepts blend with the Vaishnav in the combination Tagore declared as his core spiritual chemistry. There is also organic use of the poetic register of human love. The divine and the human are in rare conjunction, not to say identification, in the concept of the jiban-debata.

Sukanta Chaudhuri, FBA, is an Indian literary scholar, now Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and the University of Oxford. He taught at Presidency College from January 1973 to December 1991 and at Jadavpur University thereafter till his retirement in June 2010. At Jadavpur, he was founding Director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, a pioneering centre of digital humanities in India. His chief fields of study are the English and European Renaissance, Rabindranath Tagore, translation, textual studies and digital humanities. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Rabindranath Tagore and the Oxford Tagore Translations, and chief coordinator of Bichitra, the online Tagore variorum. He has held visiting appointments at many academic institutions, including All Souls College, Oxford; St John’s College, Cambridge; the School of Advanced Study, London; University of Alberta, University of Virginia; and Loyola University, Chicago. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Asiatic Society, Kolkata and, in July 2021, was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

27 May: Talk on “Medical Humanities, History, and Hindu Studies: Two Views on Vaccination During the Plague Pandemic in Calcutta” by Utsa Bose

Posted on May 22, 2025May 23, 2025 by user

A talk by Utsa Bose

Week 5, Tuesday 27 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

My lecture is based on a recent submission to the Monash Bioethics Review (Springer), for the volume “Medical Humanities in the 21st Century: their meaning, value and place in academic and societal discussion.’ What is the relationship between history, public health, and Hindu Studies? As an interdisciplinary subject that studies the relationship between medicine, health and the humanities, medical humanities has emerged as a highly fertile, plural field of studies, receiving particular fillip since the advent of COVID-19. However, this plurality, while generative, often lends itself to asking the question: what exactly can each individual/particular subject in the humanities bring to discussions on health and medicine? The aim of this lecture is to show how perspectives from history and Hindu Studies may both contribute to and draw from this field. The focus of this lecture is a collection of essays titled “Plague-Sanhitā ba Aryaswasthyabidhān” (“The Plague-Sanhita or The Aryan Hygiene”) written by a certain Tarini Prasad Jyotishi, a Bengali Hindu astrologer during the height of the plague pandemic in Calcutta. Published in 1899 and running over 150 pages, Tarini Prasad’s text contained prophecies, essays on astral influences, ways of protecting oneself from the disease, health guidelines, and social commentary. It thus straddled the worlds between the medicinal, the divine, the astral, the cultural and the sociopolitical. Within this collection, while one essay was critical of the plague vaccine, another essay, in a later section of the same collection, celebrated the vaccine and its developer Waldemar M. Haffkine. The first part of the lecture situates the context of the text’s production, as well as the background of the author, and analyses the reasons why the plague vaccine was criticised. The second part of this lecture looks at how the author celebrated the plague vaccine in a later section of the collection. In the third section, it attempts to answer why the astrologer changed his view on vaccination. Finally, by extrapolating certain key questions this case study asks, the lecture concludes by suggesting ways in which a historical perspective and Hindu Studies may contribute to and draw from the field of medical humanities.

Utsa Bose is a second year DPhil student in History at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on infectious diseases and pandemics in colonial South Asia between the late-19th/early 20th centuries. His research area(s) include histories of science, medicine and technology, histories of health and religion, environmental and medical humanities, science and technology studies (STS) and bioethics.

Conference: Radical Phenomenology in India | 2nd June, 2025 | Trinity College, Oxford

Posted on May 22, 2025June 16, 2025 by user

Radical Phenomenology in India: Extreme structures of consciousness in Indic philosophies

Conference

Monday 2nd June, 2025 – Trinity College, Oxford – Garden Room

Indic philosophical traditions are full of striking states of consciousness that often bend or break the usual ways in which the mind functions. Partly rooted in distinctive yogic methods of self-reflection, these Indic philosophies and soteriologies aim at some of the most extreme re-structurings of conscious known to history. Some advise destroying our egoic structure, some train us to see the world free of all reification or desire, others advise re-identifying as other selves through possession, while still others flood all experience with intense emotion that is itself the target of a uniquely refined enjoyment. Viewed together, these philosophies offer alternative ways of existing as minds, and creative technologies for manipulating the very nature of the self.

All welcome – queries to: jessica.frazier@theology.ox.ac.uk

Conference Schedule

10-11.30am

Gavin Flood, University of Oxford
Is there an Indian Phenomenology?

Aamir Kaderbhai, University of Oxford
All Things are Sublime: A Phenomenology of jīvanmukti in the Mokṣopāya

11.45am-1.15pm

Jessica Frazier, University of Oxford
‘Otherwise…’; Phenomenological Plasticity in Classical Yoga

Ankur Barua, University of Cambridge
How To Be Out Of Your Mind: The Phenomenology of Perplexity in South Asia

2-3.30pm

Ruth McNeil, King’s College London
Experiences of śūnya in the Vijñānabhairava

Hrvoje Cargonya, University of Zagreb
Expansiveness and Bhakti Aesthetics in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism

3.45-5.15pm

Geoffrey Ashton, University of San Francisco
Revitalizing Samkhya through Phenomenology: Reading the Samkhya Karika through Goethe’s Organics

Daniel Ruin, University of Oxford
“[L]’autre, sans manger, contemple”: Henry Corbin and the Phenomenology of the Witness in the Śvetāśvatara– and Kaṭha–upaniṣad-s

5.15pm CLOSING DISCUSSION

4 June: Talk on “The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbours: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes” by Dr Ankur Barua

Posted on May 22, 2025May 23, 2025 by user

Shivdasani Visiting Fellow talk

by Dr Ankur Barua

Week 6, Wednesday 4 June, 2.30-3.30, OCHS Library

Various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated across Hindu and Muslim borderlines in Bengal and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The characterization of relations between Hindus and Muslims either in terms of an implacable hostility or of an unfragmented peace is historically inaccurate, for these relations have been modulated by a shifting array of socioeconomic and sociopolitical parameters. From within these crucibles, we witness the “indigenization” of Islam – that is, the attempt to speak the multiple languages of Islam by using local idioms, subjectivities, and institutions. Thus, certain processes of sociocultural otherization are concurrent with conscious efforts at highlighting everyday forms of exchanges across the milieus of Hindus and Muslims.

Dr Ankur Barua has a B.Sc. in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, and read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedāntic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality.

He researches the conceptual constellations and the social structures of the Hindu traditions, both in premodern contexts in South Asia and in colonial milieus where multiple ideas of Hindu identity were configured along transnational circuits between India, Britain, Europe, and USA.

12 June: Talk on “Mysticism Through the Lens of Comparative Philosophy” by Dr Ashwini Mokashi

Posted on May 21, 2025May 23, 2025 by user

Week 7, Thursday 12 June, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

This paper examines R.D. Ranade’s contributions to mysticism through a comparative philosophical lens, focusing on his synthesis of Indian and Western philosophical traditions. Ranade, a prominent Indian philosopher, described mysticism as an intuitive, direct apprehension of the divine, grounded in meditation, devotion, and ethical living. Ranade’s philosophy also emphasizes the importance of ethical conduct, including selflessness and detachment, as essential preparation for mystical experience. By integrating these insights, the paper highlights Ranade’s unique, rational mysticism and its universal relevance across cultures and philosophical traditions.

Ashwini Mokashi is a lecturer in Hindi and a tutor in Marathi at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Oxford University. She is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a Member of Wolfson College, Oxford. Her academic focus is on Comparative Philosophy, exploring the intersections between Ancient Indian and Classical Greek thought. Among her publications is Sapiens and Sthitaprajna (2019), which examines the parallels between Seneca’s Stoicism and the Bhagavad-Gita. She has also translated the book in Hindi ‘Sapiens aur Sthitaprajna (2024).

22 May: Talking About OCHS Publications “Encounters with the Inconceivable: Experience and Inclusivism in Early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Theology” with Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Posted on May 13, 2025May 13, 2025 by user

Dr Rembert Lutjeharms

Week 4, Thursday 22 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library

These seminars will focus on books published by members of the OCHS. This will be an opportunity for students to engage with OCHS faculty on books they have written and to promote discussion and research on topics that are important to the books’ authors. This term’s seminar will discuss Dr Rembert Lutjeharms’ ‘Encounters with the Inconceivable: Experience and Inclusivism in Early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Theology’, in Pluralism and Plurality in Classical and Contemporary India, edited by Brian Black and James Madaio (London: Routledge, 2025).