Sunday 27 April – Saturday 21 June 2025
Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30am-5.30pm.
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
Weeks 1-8, Thursday, 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Vedānta—theology grounded in the systematic exegesis of the Upaniṣads—has for centuries been the primary discourse for Hindu thought. These reading sessions are intended for students who have at least an introductory knowledge of Sanskrit and are interested in Vedānta texts.
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Weeks 1-4, Wednesday, 10.00-11.00, Friday, 10.00-12.00, OCHS Library
The course provides an introduction to Sanskrit for the preliminary paper of the Theology and Religion Faculty in Elementary Sanskrit. A range of relevant Hindu and Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment in the Sanskrit course.
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Weeks 1-4, Tuesday, 4.00-5.30, Thursday, 4.00-5.30, OCHS Library
The Pali course is designed to provide an easy philological introduction to Pali Buddhist texts via Sanskrit and introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Pali grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. A range of relevant Pali Buddhist texts will be chosen for translation and philological comment.
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier
Weeks 2 and 7, Wednesday, 4.30-6.00, OCHS Library
These seminars explore different topics in philosophy through Indian material: there will be discussion of two short presentations on a question, source or idea/argument in Indian Philosophy. All are welcome.
SPEAKERS TO BE ANNOUNCED
Prof. Gavin Flood FBA
Weeks 1-8, Monday, 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Phenomenology is one of the most important developments in philosophy in the twentieth century, and it has also had a deep impact on other theoretical fields more widely conceived. This term we will carry on reading The Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty.
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).
Convened by Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
Week 4, Tuesday 20 May, 2.00-3.45, OCHS Library
This series of termly seminars focuses on current DPhil research in Indic religions with a Study of Religion oriented approach: in each seminar, 2-3 DPhil candidates will present on a topic they are investigating for 20 min and then open it for discussion on key questions. These informal seminars offer an excellent way to discover and learn about current research in the field of Hindu Studies as well as an opportunity for candidates to present and receive valuable feedback on work in progress. All researchers, graduates and finalists in all areas are welcome to join. Tea and biscuits will be served.
An Examination of the Soteriological Role of Yoginīs in Śākta Tantric Śaivism
Gonzalo Fernandez
My thesis investigates the role that yoginīs (semi-divine spirits) have to play in granting liberation to their devotees, a topic that has not been addressed in any detail by scholars. The method is text-historical and philological and involves an analysis of tantras and exegetical materials in order to determine the different ways in which yoginīs liberate. The principal focus of the thesis will be on the Netratantra, an early ninth century work that serves as a prototypical example of yoginīs performing a salvific role and reveals a number of different methods employed to achieve this aim.
The key goals of liberation and the grant of supernatural powers evidenced in the tantras allowed Śākta tantric Śaivism to absorb other traditions and to broaden its appeal. This includes low caste heterodox practices involving possession and the worship of yoginīs. It is argued that this incorporation of popular extraneous religious practices was made possible by interpreting yoginīs as salvific agents of Śiva or as aspects of Śiva’s active power (Śakti). It is further argued that the different methods employed by yoginīs to liberate their devotees came to be understood through the lens of a distinctive Śākta soteriology, that was increasingly congruent with the core teachings of Śākta tantric Śaivism.
Translation, Meaning and Metaphor: Two Śākta Readings of a Pandemic in Calcutta
Utsa Bose
The so-called third bubonic plague pandemic—believed to have originated in southern China— reached British Hong Kong in 1894, from where it travelled to Bombay in 1896. From Bombay, it soon spread to other cities in British India. In April of 1898, Calcutta, the capital of British India, was declared infected with plague. While the pandemic saw a great scramble for diagnosis, changes in medical management and general administration, it also brought to the fore fundamental questions regarding causation, life, and suffering.
While the plague pandemic has been looked primarily through the lens of medical and scientific history, the philosophical and theological challenges it engendered have received comparatively lesser attention. Calcutta, while being the capital of British India, was also undergoing a strong Śākta revivalism in this period, and these religious undercurrents inflected narratives about the plague. My presentation looks at two such Śākta readings of the plague, analysing the similarities, divergences and methods through which the pandemic was understood, explained and translated.
The Transfer of Energy Among Goddesses: Codification and Transformation in Bhaktapur’s Śākta Traditions
Sharvi Maheshwari
This presentation examines how goddess figures in Bhaktapur, Nepal, engage in dynamic processes of transformation and energy transfer within the city’s rich Śākta traditions. Rooted in the cultural and religious history of the Newar community, these practices reflect a fusion of local tantric rituals with broader pan-Indic and Brahmanical influences. To analyze this ritual complexity, I introduce a conceptual model—referred to as The Codes—which helps deconstruct and reassemble tantric practices by identifying the logics behind ritual absorption, symbolic exchange, and the layering of traditions. The model reveals how goddess systems in Bhaktapur evolve through a process of ritual codification, absorbing elements from other traditions to gain legitimacy and broader appeal.
The presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis of the Navadurgā festival cycle to illustrate these patterns. Through three case studies, I explore how energy is transferred among goddesses and between divine and human actors, highlighting the polyvalent nature of these figures. Ultimately, this research contributes to understanding how peripheral Śākta traditions both preserve and adapt their identities in response to historical and cultural shifts, offering a new lens on ritual transformation in South Asian religious practice.
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.
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.
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.
Dr Parashar Kulkarni
Week 2, Thursday 8 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
This book-length project examines the role of cow protection in resisting labour struggles in Bombay’s cotton mills from the birth of industrialization in the 1850s to its eventual decline in the 1990s. Relying on public discourse in newspapers, government reports, and union documents, it shows that cows, sacred to Hindus, became a symbol of identity and a basis for elective affinity between mill owners, political/religious leaders, and a pro-capital city government. Mill owners funded cow protection societies, political/religious leaders supported cow protection and mediated directly with mill owners, and the state offered legitimacy, further resisting the negotiating power and innovations of labour unions to demand better living and working conditions. By implicating cow protection (identitarianism/ communalism more broadly) in the political economy of industrial capitalism, this essay shifts attention from its primarily nationalist, majoritarian, and often agrarian discourse.
Parashar Kulkarni specializes in the political economy of religion in colonial and contemporary South Asia and the British Empire. He is currently visiting the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at UCL. Previously, he has taught at Yale-NUS College and has a PhD from New York University. (https://sites.google.com/view/parasharkulkarni/)
Dr Ranjamrittika Bhowmik
Week 3, Wednesday 14 May, 2.30-4.00, OCHS Library
My documentary film, Goddess Durga Unveiled: The Timeless Power of Emotion, was produced by the Berlin University Alliance and is an output for my postdoctoral research for our project, Museums and Society:Mapping the Social at the department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. It is on the journey of Goddess Durga as a museum object in Europe and as a living Goddess in India, affective associations, Durga puja traditions in India, postcolonial museology, while telling her story through living traditions. It has been screened at the Babylon theatre in Berlin and will be screened at King’s College, London on 13 May.
You can read a little more about it and watch the trailer here:
Ranjamrittika Bhowmik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. She received her DPhil in South Asian Studies from the University of Oxford in 2023. Her doctoral research explores esoteric yoga traditions in northeastern India through shared Buddhist and Hindu lineages, focusing on the Rājbaṃśī community and their oral literature in the Rājbaṃśī lect. Her work engages with mysticism, tantric traditions, metaphor, and the politics of alternative social imaginaries, examining concepts of the subtle body and the literary and performative expressions of dissent. Trained in Cultural Anthropology and Comparative Literature, her postdoctoral project—at Humboldt University and the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin—investigates the history of emotions, forgotten object histories, memory, decolonization, AI ethics, and intersectionality. She has held fellowships from Jadavpur University, the Government of India, the European Union & the Universities of Milan, University of Lausanne, University of Oxford, and the OCHS. Ranjamrittika is committed to conserving and promoting intangible cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, and the oral traditions of marginalized communities.
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.
Dr Ashwini Mokashi
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).
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier and Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
Week 5, Friday 30 May, Trinity College, University of Oxford
The Sanskrit Traditions Symposium is a forum for the discussion of the Sanskrit traditions of South Asia, and the texts and cultures that have risen out of them. It brings together established and rising academics for the focused examination of research pertaining to various aspects of South Asia’s rich Sanskrit religious and intellectual culture. It thereby seeks to sustain and build upon the long history of scholarship in this important area of study.
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier
Week 6, Monday 2 June, Trinity College, University of Oxford
A Global Phenomenology
Indic philosophical traditions are full of striking states of consciousness that often bend or break the usual ways our minds function. 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 the structures of the ego, 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 us other ways of existing as minds.
Where standard phenomenology in the West running through Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger used introspection to examine the structures of everyday consciousness, Indian traditions were rich in creative technologies of the self, as Foucault put it. As such, they have the potential to vastly expand our sense of what consciousness – and phenomenology – can be.
One-Day Conference In and Beyond Oxford
This day-conference brings together phenomenologists and scholars of Indic traditions to discuss the expanded picture of consciousness and phenomenology itself that we get from exploring these traditions. Papers will be 30min, in short panels focused on discussion. Contributions are welcome on meditative traditions across Asia more broadly; online presentations possible.
All are welcome.
Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
13 – 15 Magdalen Street, Oxford OX1 3AE.
UK Tel: 01865 304300
Regd Charity No. 1074458