These lectures offer a thematic and historical introduction to the sources and development of Hindu traditions from their early formation to the medieval period. We will explore the formation of Hindu traditions through textual sources, such as the Vedas, Upaniṣads and Bhagavad Gītā, along with the practices and social institutions that formed classical Hindu traditions. The lectures will include an introduction to Hindu philosophy.
Lecture tag: Hinduism
From Advaitic Inclusivism to Yogic Pluralism: A New Diachronic Interpretation of Swami Vivekananda’s Views on the Harmony of Religions (TT22)
Past scholars have tended to paint Swami Vivekananda either as a modern-day exponent of Śaṅkara or as a passive colonial subject whose views were largely a reaction to Western hegemony and the British occupation of India. By contrast, I argue in my new book, Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2022), that Vivekananda was a cosmopolitan Vedāntin who developed distinctive new philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with thinkers in both Indian and Western philosophical traditions. This talk is based on the third chapter of my book, which provides a new diachronic interpretation of Vivekananda’s doctrine of the harmony of religions. Most scholars claim that in spite of Vivekananda’s pluralist-sounding statements that the different world religions are equally valid paths to the same goal, he was actually more of an inclusivist, since he affirmed the superiority and uniqueness of Advaita Vedānta and Hinduism vis-à-vis other religions. I argue that these scholars overlook the fact that his views on the harmony of religions evolved from 1893 to 1901. From September 1894 to May 1895, Vivekananda harmonized the world religions on the basis of the “three stages” of Dvaita, Viśiṣṭādvaita, and Advaita, claiming that theistic religions like Christianity and Islam belonged to the Dvaita stage. However, beginning in late 1895, he explained the harmony of all religions not in terms of the three stages of Vedānta but in terms of the four Yogas. According to Vivekananda’s final position, every religion corresponds to at least one of the four Yogas—namely, Karma-Yoga, Rāja-Yoga, Bhakti-Yoga, and Jñāna-Yoga—and each of these Yogas is a direct and independent path to salvation. On this basis, he defended not only a full-blown religious pluralism but also the more radical cosmopolitan ideal of learning from—and even practicing—religions other than our own. On the basis of this diachronic interpretation of Vivekananda’s views, I argue that the vast majority of scholars have seriously misrepresented his mature Vedāntic doctrine of the harmony of religions by taking it to be based on the three stages of Vedānta rather than on the four Yogas.
Swami Medhananda (Ayon Maharaj) is a monk of the Ramakrishna Order and Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education in Mysore, India. His current research focuses on Vedāntic philosophical traditions, cross-cultural philosophy of religion, cross-cultural approaches to consciousness, Indian scriptural hermeneutics, and the philosophies of Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo. He is the author of three books: Swami Vivekananda’s Vedāntic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2022), Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018), and The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is the editor of The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta (2020) and co-editor, with Benedikt Paul Göcke, of Panentheism in Indian and Western Thought: Cosmopolitan Interventions (Routledge, under contract). He is also the editor of two special issues of the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), one on “Vedāntic Theodicies” (December 2021) and one on “Swami Vivekananda as a Philosopher and Theologian” (in progress). Since January 2018, he has been serving as a Section Editor of the International Journal of Hindu Studies (Springer), overseeing submissions in Hindu and Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion. He has published nearly thirty articles in such journals as Philosophy East and West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of Religion, The Monist, Kantian Review, Journal of World Philosophies, Journal of Dharma Studies, Religions, History of European Ideas, PMLA, and Journal of the History of Ideas.
Networks of Power (TT22)
In this talk I shall bring into view modern Hinduism through the prism of power: how can we understand nineteenth-century religious communities in a world of shifting political authorities—the colonial state being just one of them? This question draws from my current book project about the creation of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, a Hindu devotional community, and the new forms of complex authority and subjectivity it advanced in the early nineteenth century in the region of Gujarat in western India. In doing so, the historical study not only understands the Sampradaya’s development in the context of the political-economy, it critically thinks about the political in relation to the devotional, prior to the era of nationalism. Taken together, these lines of analysis broaden the historical conversation beyond the colonial state as sites of power, and outline a more capacious, complex character of modern Hinduism.
Shruti Patel is Assistant Professor of History at Salisbury University, USA. She is an American Association of University Women American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow (2021-22) and a Visiting Scholar at Tufts University, completing her book project, The Play of History. Her publications investigate religious institutionalization, material culture and issues of historiography.
Panel Discussion: Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity by Julian Strube (TT22)
Tantra has formed an integral part of Asian religious history for centuries, but since “Arthur Avalon” introduced the concept to a global readership in the early twentieth century, Tantric traditions have exploded in popularity. While it was long believed that Sir John Woodroffe stood behind Avalon, it was in fact mainly a collaboration between learned South Asians. Julian Strube considers Tantra from the Indian perspective, offering rare insight into the active roles that Indians have played in its globalization and re-negotiation in local Indian contexts. In the early twentieth century, Avalon’s publications were crucial to Tantra’s visibility in academia and the recognition of Tantra’s vital role in South Asian culture. South Asian religious, social, and political life is inexorably intertwined with various Tantric scriptures and traditions, especially in Shaiva and Shakta contexts. In Bengal, Tantra was central to cultural dynamics including Vaishnava and Muslim currents, as well as universalist tendencies incorporating Christianity and esoteric movements such as New Thought, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. Global Tantra contextualizes struggles about orthodoxy and reform in Bengal, and explores the global connections that shaped them. The study elides boundaries between academic disciplines as well as historical and regional contexts, providing insights into global debates about religion, science, esotericism, race, and national identity.
Julian Strube is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Vienna. His work focuses on the relationship between religion, science, and politics since the nineteenth century from a global history perspective, concentrating on exchanges between Indian and Western intellectuals. His publications include Socialism, Catholicism, and Occultism in Nineteenth Century France, New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism (with Egil Asprem), and Theosophy across Boundaries (with Hans Martin Krämer).
Sadvidyā: Sanskrit Knowledge Production in the Swaminarayan Tradition (TT22)
In a sermon transcribed in 1824, Swaminarayan (1781-1830) emphasized the centrality of texts to the growth and development of his nascent religious community. Although the majority of the Swaminarayan sampradāya comprised Gujarati-speaking laypeople, Swaminarayan instructed his monastic disciples to compose texts not only in Gujarati, but also in Sanskrit. He subsequently mandated that pāṭhaśālas be set up for Sanskrit education and the dissemination of “sadvidyā.” His immediate followers composed hymns, sacred biographies, philosophical treatises, and scriptural commentaries, considering the composition and teaching of these texts to be a profoundly devotional endeavor. Today, the Swaminarayan sampradāya is rapidly-growing, transnational, and comprised of discrete denominational sects. This talk examines the Sanskrit knowledge production of one of these sects, the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS), which established itself as a distinct community in 1907. I will first explore the historical trajectory of Sanskrit education amongst the monastic order within the tradition, and then examine the textual output from these monastic-scholars. While the sudden appearance of a series of Sanskrit texts in a modern Gujarati religious community may seem at first to be an anachronistic, tangential scholastic project, I argue that it is reflective of a sustained endeavor to substantiate and corroborate the novel theological tenets of the community on a classical Sanskrit register, broadly conceived. Further, though this appeal to Sanskrit tradition seems directed to an external audience of Sanskrit scholars, we must also consider how a substantial internal audience of faithful laypeople—with varying degrees of Sanskrit fluency—engage with these Sanskrit materials.
Prof. Arun Brahmbhatt is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Religious Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. He received his PhD from the Unversity of Toronto in 2018 and studied at Harvard University and Tufts University prior to that. His research is centred on Sanskrit textual practices in Gujarat during the late colonial period and on Sanskrit commentaries in the Swaminarayan Sampraday. Arun also explores sectarian and community formation and the manner in which regional religious movements negotiate interregional publics. Together with Dr. Lucian Wong (Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies) and Dr. Avni Chag (British Library), he directs the Rethinking Hinduism in Colonial India research project, hosted at the OCHS.
“A Quarrelsome Foe”: Late Colonial Negotiations of Vaidikatva (TT22)
At the turn of the twentieth century, the 100 year-old Swaminarayan Sampraday found itself in a dispute with the powerful Shankaracharya of Dwarka, Madhavatirtha. Madhavatirtha took exception to a laxity in caste-based practices in the Swaminarayan Sampraday and deemed the latter to be “avaidika.” This dispute, set in colonial modernity, is one whose characters complicate binaries between the “traditional” and “modern.” It is the story of how a smaller religious community attempted to mediate local conflict through a translocal appeal to what I call a “scholastic public.” I suggest that the relative “modernity” of these debates about orthodoxy must be understood alongside two considerations: the reliance on external associational bodies of pandits to adjudicate the debates as well as the use of modern genres of print to amplify the debates. I argue that there are two very different deployments of “orthodoxy” at play: the associational bodies were pursuing trans-sectarian agendas of defining orthodoxy as a response to colonial critiques of Hinduism. On the other hand, Swaminarayan agents defended the legitimacy of their community through recourse to the symbolic purchase of vaidikatva. Crucially, they viewed this vaidikatva not as narrowly defined, but rather pluralistic in nature. This case thus reveals the dynamic negotiations of orthodoxy, sectarianism, and pluralism at play in late colonial India.
Prof. Arun Brahmbhatt is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Religious Studies Department at St. Lawrence University. He received his PhD from the Unversity of Toronto in 2018 and studied at Harvard University and Tufts University prior to that. His research is centred on Sanskrit textual practices in Gujarat during the late colonial period and on Sanskrit commentaries in the Swaminarayan Sampraday. Arun also explores sectarian and community formation and the manner in which regional religious movements negotiate interregional publics. Together with Dr. Lucian Wong (Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies) and Dr. Avni Chag (British Library), he directs the Rethinking Hinduism in Colonial India research project, hosted at the OCHS.
Margins, Meanings, Modernity: Satnampanth, Hinduism, and Colonial Questions (HT22)
This talk shall address some of the salient issues informing the project on “Rethinking Hinduism in Colonial India”. It shall do so through two overlapping steps. On the one hand, I shall seize upon a few critical concerns of my historical anthropology of the Satnamis of Chhatisgarh: a subaltern and heretical caste-sect that variously challenged, negotiated, displaced, and reproduced formations of meaning and power encoded in dominant Hinduism and colonial authority. On the other hand, I will bring into view aspects of my more recent forays into understandings of modernity, colonialism, and their subjects. Taken together, I seek to ask: How are we to understand heterogenous articulations of the margins and meanings of Hinduism? What is the place of authority and alterity in expressions of caste and sect, gender and office in these arenas? What presumption and privilege are reproduced in familiar projections of modern Hinduism, bearing which traces of liberal-progressivist subjects-settlements? Can the study of apparently marginal subjects engage the widest questions of power and meaning turning upon caste and religion, colonial cultures and modernity’s makeovers, including by carefully querying formidable anthropological assumption(s) and developmental historical premise(s)?
Saurabh Dube is Professor-Researcher, Distinguished Category, at El Colegio de México, and also holds the highest rank in the National System of researchers (SNI), Mexico since 2005. Apart from around 140 essays and book-chapters, his authored books include Untouchable Pasts (1998, 2001); Stitches on Time (2004); After Conversion (2010); Subjects of Modernity (2017, 2018, 2019); as well as a quintet in historical anthropology in the Spanish language published by El Colegio de México (2001-2018). A 600 page anthology/omnibus of Dube’s Spanish writings of the last two decades was published recently. Among his more than fifteen edited volumes are Postcolonial Passages (2004, 2006); Historical Anthropology (2007, 2008); Enchantments of Modernity (2009, 2010); Crime through Time (2013); Unbecoming Modern (2006, 2019); and Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South (2019, 2021). Dube is the founder-editor of the international innovative series, “Routledge Focus on Modern Subjects.” He has been elected Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York; the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick; the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa; the Max Weber Kolleg, Germany; and the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna. Dube has also held visiting professorships, several times, at institutions such Cornell University, the Johns Hopkins University, University of Iowa, and Goa University (where he occupied the DD Kosambi Visiting Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies).
Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism VIII (HT22)
This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.
Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism VII (HT22)
This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.
Hinduism 2: Modern Hinduism VI (HT22)
This paper traces the development of Hinduism from the medieval period through to modernity. The course will examine Hindu scholasticism, devotional and tantric traditions, and modern Hindu thought. The lectures will explore themes of liberation, the soul and the divine, Tantra and meditation, devotional literature and the formation of modern Hindu identity.