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. We will read classical Theravāda Buddhist discourses from the Pāli Canon such as the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya-sutta) and Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda) as well as passages from the Dhammapadaand the Jātaka tales. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. The course book will be Dines Andersen, A Pāli Reader and Pali Glossary, 2 vols. (1901) supplemented by Rune E. A. Johansson, Pali Buddhist Texts: An Introductory Reader and Grammar (1981). Students of Pali will join the Sanskrit course in Michaelmas Term and for the first four weeks of Hilary Term. From week 5 of Hilary Term and week 1-4 of Trinity Term, Sanskrit and Pali will be taught as two separate courses, i.e. Sanskrit Prelims and Pali Prelims (i.e. Pali for Sanskritists).
Archives: Lectures
Readings in Phenomenology, I (TT22)
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 begin to read The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie). This books recaps much of Being and Time and fills in some of the gaps, especially Part II on time that never appeared. In some ways, the Basic Problems might be seen as a completion of Being and Time that we read last year.
Sanskrit Prelims, I (TT22)
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. The class is designed to introduce students of Theology and Religion to the essentials of Sanskrit grammar, syntax, and vocabulary and its importance for the exegesis of Sanskrit texts. Students will learn to appreciate the interpretative nature of translation as a central discipline for the study of religions. By the end of the course students will have gained a basic competency in translating classical Sanskrit and reading relevant passages from texts such as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the Bhagavadgītā, the Haṭhayogapradīpikā and the Buddhist Heart Sūtra. The course book will be Walter Maurer’s The Sanskrit Language. Sanskrit Prelims continues throughout Michaelmas and Hilary Terms and for the first four weeks of Trinity.
Readings in the Tantrāloka, IV (HT22)
In these lectures Professor Sanderson will read the Tantrāloka of Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025), that author’s monumental exposition of the Śaiva Tantras from the standpoint of the Śākta Śaiva tradition known as the Trika and the philosophical non-dualism of the Pratyabhijñā texts, contextualizing his undertaking within the religious developments of the early medieval period.
Alexis Sanderson began his Indological career as a student of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1969, studying the Kashmirian Śaiva literature in Kashmir with the Śaiva Guru Swami Lakshman Joo from 1971 to 1977. He was Associate Professor (University Lecturer) of Sanskrit at Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1977 to 1992 and then the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College from 1992 to 2015. Since then, he has been preparing a critical edition of the Tantrāloka with a translation and commentary. His field is early medieval religion in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on the history of Śaivism, its relations with the state, and its influence on Buddhism and Vaishnavism.
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).
Readings in the Tantrāloka, III (HT22)
In these lectures Professor Sanderson will read the Tantrāloka of Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025), that author’s monumental exposition of the Śaiva Tantras from the standpoint of the Śākta Śaiva tradition known as the Trika and the philosophical non-dualism of the Pratyabhijñā texts, contextualizing his undertaking within the religious developments of the early medieval period.
Alexis Sanderson began his Indological career as a student of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1969, studying the Kashmirian Śaiva literature in Kashmir with the Śaiva Guru Swami Lakshman Joo from 1971 to 1977. He was Associate Professor (University Lecturer) of Sanskrit at Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1977 to 1992 and then the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College from 1992 to 2015. Since then, he has been preparing a critical edition of the Tantrāloka with a translation and commentary. His field is early medieval religion in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on the history of Śaivism, its relations with the state, and its influence on Buddhism and Vaishnavism.
What is ‘Modern’ Hinduism? (HT22)
While there is no common accord among scholars on the propriety of the use of ‘Hinduism’ as a religion, there is a wider acceptance of the fact that Hinduism gained currency in the writings of British administrator-scholars in the first half of the 19th century. In 1816, the noted Orientalist scholar H.H. Wilson had commented that “Hindu religion has been hitherto employed in a collective sense” to designate ‘a faith and worship of almost endlessly diversified description’. Taking this relatively recent use of Hinduism in administrative and scholarly writings as a point of entry, my talk will query the perceptions and conceptualization of ‘modern’ Hinduism. When and how did Hinduism become modern and in what sense? Is modern tied to ‘scientific’? What are the productive possibilities and grave dangers in calling Hinduism modern? In other words, does it help us understand and analyse the historical processes and their socio-cultural (and political) ramifications that the study of religions is meant to entail?
Ishita Banerjee-Dube is associate professor at the Colegio de México’s Center for Asian and African Studies in Mexico City. She has written Divine Affairs: Religion, Pilgrimage, and the State in Colonial and Postcolonial India (2001); Emergent Histories (Anthem Press, forthcoming); Fronteras del Hinduismo (El Colegio de México, forthcoming); and edited Caste in History (Oxford University Press, 2010). Her articles have appeared in Subaltern Studies, Studies in History, and Estudios de Asia y Africa.
Shaktism and Ethnography: Some Major Styles of Worship and Belief among Practitioners (HT22)
Abstract: The study of Shaktism is a relatively new field, and its primary methodologies have been historical and textual study. In this lecture, we shall examine some modern approaches to Shaktism, from the perspectives of practitioners and devotees. The regional focus will be West Bengal, India. Among practitioners today, there tend to be three strands or styles of Shakta understanding and practice. The first is the folk or tribal strand, which involves possession trance, dream commands and animism; its focus is a goddess immanent within nature. The second approach is the tantric or yogic strand, which involves meditation and spiritual disciplines. The goddess is understood as highest wisdom, brahmajnana; she is encountered in initiations, visualizations, spiritual travel and practice of the three Shakta bhavas. The third type is the devotional or bhakti strand, which involves the intense love of a particular form of the goddess. Shakti/Devi is willing to descend from her paradise to bless her human devotees, and her presence can be felt in religious worship. These types are often found in combined form, like strands of a rope braided together. However, there are tensions which exist within and between these strands. The folk/tribal strand often emphasizes regionalism and competition between local forms of the goddess. The tantric/ yogic strand opposes those goddesses who represent infinite consciousness with those magical goddesses who move through inner worlds and grant supernatural powers. The devotional strand has tensions between goddesses understood as individual living deities and goddesses who exist as symbols of universal principles. We shall also briefly note how traditional Shakta ideas have been incorporated into nationalism by politicians, and into hedonism by modern entrepreneurs.
Prof. June McDaniel: is Professor Emerita in History of Religions
in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. Her PhD was from the University of Chicago, and her MTS was from Emory University. Her research areas include Mysticism, Religions of India, Psychology of Religion, Women and Religion, and Ritual Studies. She did several years of field research in West Bengal, funded by Fulbright and the American Institute of Indian Studies, which focused on religious experience and modern Shaktism. Her books include: Lost Ecstasy: Its Decline and Transformation in Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004), Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to the Brata Rituals of Bengal (State University of New York Press, 2003), and The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (University of Chicago Press, 1989). Edited volumes include: Religious Experience in the Hindu Tradition. Religions (journal, Routledge 2019), and Perceiving the Divine through the Human Body: Mystical Sensuality, edited by Thomas Cattoi and June McDaniel. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Her current work draws comparisons between Bengali and Balinese Hinduism, and examines religious emotion in different traditions.
The Boundary of Laughter: Popular Performances Across Borders in South Asia (HT22)
Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, my new book, The Boundary of Laughter (OUP, 2021) explores how spaces of popular performance have changed with the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. Drawing on a rich and hitherto unexplored archive of Gambhira songs and plays, I trace the making of the popular theater form called Gambhira by Hindu and Muslim peasants and laborers in colonial Bengal, and explores the fate of the tradition after the Partition of the region in 1947. In this talk, I will share some parts of my book in an attempt to rethink our analytical tools for studying religious faith and identity in colonial India, particularly in relation to Hindu-Muslim relations. I hope to work towards a new approach for studying popular performances as shared spaces that can accommodate peoples across national and religious boundaries.
Aniket De is a PhD Candidate in History at Harvard University, USA. His academic and research interests include the political and economic history of the British Empire, the intellectual history of Indian nationalism and cultural history of colonial Bengal. He is keen on inquiring how the idea of the “frontier” developed in British India over the nineteenth century, especially with relation to imperial political economy, colonial anthropology and nationalist thought.
Readings in the Tantrāloka, II (HT22)
In these lectures Professor Sanderson will read the Tantrāloka of Abhinavagupta (fl. c. 975–1025), that author’s monumental exposition of the Śaiva Tantras from the standpoint of the Śākta Śaiva tradition known as the Trika and the philosophical non-dualism of the Pratyabhijñā texts, contextualizing his undertaking within the religious developments of the early medieval period.
Alexis Sanderson began his Indological career as a student of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1969, studying the Kashmirian Śaiva literature in Kashmir with the Śaiva Guru Swami Lakshman Joo from 1971 to 1977. He was Associate Professor (University Lecturer) of Sanskrit at Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College from 1977 to 1992 and then the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford and a Fellow of All Souls College from 1992 to 2015. Since then, he has been preparing a critical edition of the Tantrāloka with a translation and commentary. His field is early medieval religion in India and Southeast Asia, focusing on the history of Śaivism, its relations with the state, and its influence on Buddhism and Vaishnavism.