Sunday 26 April – Saturday 20 June 2026
Library opening hours are Monday to Friday, 9.30am-5.30pm.
Weeks 1-8, Thursday 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
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.
Weeks 1-4, Monday 2.00-3.30, Thursday 4.00-5.30, OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood FBA
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.
Weeks 1-4, Tuesday 4.00-5.30, Friday 4.00-5.30, OCHS Library
Dr Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen
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.
Weeks 3 and 7, Wednesday 2.30-4.00, OCHS Library
Dr Jessica Frazier
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
Weeks 1-8, Monday 12.00-1.00, OCHS Library
Professor Gavin Flood FBA
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 Contributions to Philosophy by Heidegger.
Week 4, Thursday 21 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.
Dr Lucian Wong
Bodily Technologies in the Middle Bengali Imaginary (Bloombury Academic, forthcoming) explores the rich repertoire of practices and techniques through which bodies – physical, subtle, and supramundane – are cultivated in pursuit of religious ends within Middle Bengali literature. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, Middle Bengali (madhyayugera bāṃlā), a member of the eastern branch of New Indo-Aryan languages, functioned as a key medium of literary expression within the multilingual ecologies of Bengal and adjacent regions – from Orissa to Assam and Nepal to Arakan. The resulting corpus spans diverse genres and constitutes one of the subcontinent’s most religiously plural premodern vernacular archives, cutting across Śākta, Islamic-Sufi, Vaiṣṇava, Nātha yogic, and Sahajiyā formations, alongside a host of ritual and devotional domains centred on locally inflected pantheons. Across this diversity, these vernacular sources register a sustained thematic concern with the body’s operative force in religious life. Bringing together selected translations and critical discussions of primary sources drawn from across the Middle Bengali corpus, the book foregrounds that somatic preoccupation as a generative site for inquiry into South Asian vernacular religious lifeworlds and embodied religion more broadly.
Week 2, Thursday 7 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Nirajan Kafle
What if true freedom lies not in withdrawal from the world but in seizing and transforming its hidden forces? The Guhyasūtra, a book within the earliest Śaiva tantra called Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā, reveals rituals designed to harness divine power for both worldly dominion (aiśvarya) and ultimate liberation (mokṣa). This lecture explores its bold vision, where maṇḍalas and mantras summon deities like Śiva, subdue adversaries, and reshape reality through ritual action (kriyā). Even materials considered impure—ashes from cremation grounds, blood—become conduits for awakening, reversing conventional ideas of purity and transcendence. Rites such as consecration (abhiṣeka) and fire offerings (homa) not only purify the practitioner but dissolve karmic bonds, forging a new path to spiritual sovereignty. The Guhyasūtra offers a radical challenge to established hierarchies, declaring that anyone, regardless of caste or gender, can attain the highest state. By unravelling its esoteric practices and philosophical depth, this lecture reveals how the Guhyasūtra reimagines human destiny, turning bondage into power and spiritual mastery.
Week 5, Thursday 28 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Nirajan Kafle
A group of eight (sometimes nine) associated lay Śaiva texts, transmitted together in Nepalese manuscripts, developed around two foundational works: the Śivadharmaśāstraand the Śivadharmottara (6th–7th centuries). These early texts reflect an ascetic (Atimārga) milieu and articulate a clearly Śaiva religious vision centered on devotion to Śiva and the ethical formation of lay communities. Even the Śivadharmasaṅgraha, though not directly dependent on the first two works, remains doctrinally exclusive in its Śaiva orientation. A marked shift becomes visible in the fourth text of the collection, the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. Alongside Śaiva teachings, the it incorporates Vaiṣṇava devotional material, extended discussions of Viṣṇu’s avatāras (chapter 22), meditation practices directed toward Viṣṇu and Brahmā (chapter 4), and ethical terminology that echoes Buddhist technical vocabulary. The dialogical framework also changes: instead of the earlier Śaiva interlocutors Sanatkumāra and Nandikeśvara, the text introduces Bhagavān (identified with Viṣṇu) and Devī as speakers.
This raises a broader historical question: what does this theological reconfiguration tell us about the religious landscape of the eighth century? Rather than treating these developments as signs of doctrinal dilution, this talk proposes to understand the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as evidence of a transformed religious and social environment in which sectarian boundaries were being renegotiated. The inclusion of Vaiṣṇava, Brahmā-related, and Buddhist elements suggests a model of lay Śaivism operating within an increasingly interconnected religious field. By situating the the text within its broader political and intellectual context, this talk explores how Śaiva authors participated in shaping a shared theological universe that would come to characterize early medieval Hindu religious discourse.
Nirajan Kafle is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Sanskrit at Ashoka University (2022–present). From 2019 to 2022, he was a research associate at the University of Naples L’Orientale, working within the ERC SHIVADHARMA Project. Prior to this, he was part of the NWO project From Universe of Viṣṇu to Universe of Śiva at Leiden University. His research focuses on lay religious practices in Early Medieval India, particularly the historical development and exchanges between the main branches of Hinduism, Śaivism, and Vaiṣṇavism. His key publications include Niśvāsamukhatattvasaṃhitā (2020), A Śaiva Utopia (2021), Paṇḍitarājaśataka (2024) and Śaiva Rites of Fasting and the Gift of Cattle: A Study in Purāṇic and Tantric Appropriation (2025).
Week 3, Thursday 14 May, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Ayesha Irani
This paper focuses on Prabhāta Saṃgīta, a corpus of devotional song composed by Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921–1990), the charismatic spiritual master and founder of Ananda Marga. One of the many streams of Prabhāta Saṃgīta centers around Kṛṣṇa, who occupies a prominent place in Sarkar’s theology. In order to understand the devotional work that these songs perform in fostering interiority, and absorption in the divine, I study the ways in which they purport to bring together language (bhāṣā) and melody (sūra) to awaken bhāva, states of longing for and absorption in the divine. I show how the lyrical sensorium (the five senses and their objects as represented through the medium of song) activates the devotee’s hagiosensorium via lyrical and musical cues that can metonymically conjure the entire net of memories of Kṛṣṇa in the devotee’s mind, the manovṛndāvana, “the Vṛndāvana of the mind” where he is said to eternally reside.
Week 7, Thursday 11 June, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Dr Ayesha Irani
Saiyad Sultān’s seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa, “The Prophet’s Lineage”—a universal history of the Prophet Muhammad—was the first major text to present Islamic doctrine to Bengalis in their mother-tongue. The greater part of Book One of the Nabīvaṃśa translates into Bengali the thirteenth-century Qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ attributed to a certain Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Kisāʾī; in Book Two, the author appends a full-blown biography of the Prophet Muḥammad, most likely a translation of an unknown source. Sultān reconstitutes Islamic prophetology to include Hindu divinities and sacred texts, tacitly enlarging the Qurʾānic category of People of the Book to uniquely embrace the Hindus of Bengal. Specific Hindu deities, identifiable as Śiva and various avatāras of Viṣṇu, including Rāma, make their advent to eradicate evil from the earth. Their abysmal failure brings forth the creation of Ādam, and after him a line of prophets, including Śiś, Idris, Nūh, Ibrāhim, Musā, Dāud, Solemān, and Īsā, whose stories are told in some detail, culminating with the Prophet of Islam. Hari (Kr̥ṣṇa) is the only Hindu god who punctuates the line of traditional Islamic prophets after Ādam. In this workshop, I shall share a draft-translation of the Hari cycle of the Nabīvaṃśa, which I am currently working on for the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press), and open up a discussion on the peculiarities of the Nabīvaṃśa’s Account of Hari in the context of the Vaiṣṇava corpus.
Ayesha A. Irani is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a scholar of Islam in South Asia and a specialist in the early modern literature of Bengal. Her first monograph, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press, New York, 2021), examines the role of translation in the Islamization of Bengal, through a close reading of the seventeenth-century Nabīvaṃśa (“The Prophet’s Lineage”), the first major work to translate Islamic doctrine for Bengalis into their mother-tongue. She is currently translating the Nabīvaṃśa for the Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, and is also working on two major research projects. The first involves writing a literary history of Sufism in early modern and colonial Bengal. The second explores Prabhāta Saṃgīta, a corpus of modern devotional songs composed by the charismatic spiritual master, Shri Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990), who is the founder of the global spiritual organization, Ananda Marga. In addition to these projects, she is co-editing with Lucian Wong a volume tentatively entitled, The Vaiṣṇava Sensorium. This volume brings together the cross-disciplinary work of a group of international scholars drawn from the fields of textual studies, philosophy, anthropology, history of religions, art history, and ethnomusicology to examine how the senses mediate the experience of the divine in Vaiṣṇava praxis in eastern India and beyond.
In the study of Jainism, it has become a truism to say that Jainas were interested in knowing the religious other. This is not a novel argument. What is less studied are the social identities that structure these encounters in stories, not to mention the literary methods used to write about the religious other. Put simply, when Jainas write stories about the religious other, who are the characters involved? And what motivates these characters to talk about non-Jaina religions?
In the Śvetāmbara suttas, it is usually the Jaina ascetic who encounters non-Jainas while on the road searching for alms. This makes for a narrative focused entirely on a conversation between Jaina ascetic and his other—a rather dry story devoid of any plotline because the ascetic has renounced all familial and sexual ties. But that is not the case for the Vasudevahiṇḍī, a fifth century CE Śvetāmbara narrative. There, it is sons who are looking for their long-lost fathers. And kings and nuns who try to justify incest and adultery. Such stories about day-to-day dramas inside the home become, I argue, the site for talking about non-Jaina religions. In this talk, I showcase such narratives, and answer how and why they use familial and sexual relationships to talk about unfamiliar religions.
Seema K. Chauhan is an Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Trinity College Dublin. Prior to this appointment, she completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago Divinity School and held the Asoke Kumar Sarkar Early Career Fellowship in Classical Indology at Balliol College. She specialises in the history of early Jainism, Hinduism, and Sanskrit and Prakrit literature.
Week 6, Thursday 4 June, 2.00-3.00, OCHS Library
Professor Shaman Hatley
In the second millennium CE, a particular vision of the Hindu tantric body became ubiquitous, appearing in accounts of yoga from across the subcontinent. This body featured six lotus-like wheels (ṣaṭcakra), from the mūlādhāra at the base of the torso to ājñā in the forehead, crowned by a lotus of a thousand petals; linking these is a central channel through which traverses the serpentine, lightning-like kuṇḍalinī, when awakened through yoga. Early-twentieth century intellectuals of colonial Bengal established this as “the tantric body” in both popular and scholarly discourse, though it is now well-known that this is one of many cakra systems. Less well-known are its murky genealogy and fascinating variations. This lecture focuses on three formative moments: the purported coalescence of ṣaṭcakra teachings in the Kubjikāmata (circa 10th-century), which close examination shows to be problematic; the appearance of a haṭhayogic practice called yonimudrā in Śrīkula tantric sources of the twelfth century that appears surprisingly important to the development of kuṇḍalinī yoga; and unexpected sources for Pūrṇānandagiri’s so-called Description of the Six Cakras (Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa) of sixteenth-century Bengal, which was central to the modern construction of the Hindu tantric body.
Shaman Hatley is Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He studied Indology and Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Harunaga Isaacson, completing his doctoral thesis in 2007 and then teaching at Concordia University until 2015. His research is primarily in the areas of Śaiva tantric traditions in India’s early-medieval period, the history of yoga, and goddess cults.
Week 4, Friday 22 May, Trinity College, University of Oxford
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier and Dr Rembert Lutjeharms
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.
Week 8, Saturday 20 June, Venue to be announced
Convened by Dr Jessica Frazier
This day conference brings together scholars interested in the way Gadamer and Hermeneutics sought to advance on the history of philosophy up to the Heideggerian tradition, bringing forward new insights and possibilities. This will be a lively day of panel-led discussions among specialists. Under the broad rubric of Gadamer and the Task of Philosophy, four discussion panels across the day will address the themes of
Together we aim to explore innovative, often-unrecognised ways that Gadamer and the hermeneutic approach were advancing on classic tasks of philosophy, and bringing fresh ideas into play.
Confirmed Speakers
Prof. Theodore George, Texas A&M University
Dr Carolyn Culbertson, Florida Gulf Coast University
Prof. Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Radboud University
Dr Facundo Bey, Instituto de Filosofía “Ezequiel de Olaso”, CONICET
Dr Tobias Keiling, University of Warwick
Prof. Carsten Dutt, Technische Universität Darmstadt
For further information, please contact Dr Jessica Frazier: Jessica.frazier@theology.ox.ac.uk