Archives: Lectures
Osho, spirituality and the politics of national identity: Examining intersecting discourses
Graduate Seminars in Indic Religions
The charismatic New Age mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-1990), otherwise known as Osho, was a highly popular and prolific spiritual figure in the 20th century who counted thousands of individuals, both in India and around the world, as his followers. Born and educated in India, Osho offered his followers an iconoclastic spiritual philosophy that sought to liberate individuals from the shackles of mind and morality. His avowed emphasis on multiplicity, pluralism, anti-authoritarianism, and lack of institutional structure might suggest that his spiritual discourse stands in opposition to the discourse of Hindu nationalism, which stresses singular conformity to a religious ideal. However, I argue that even while emphasizing the apolitical, non-ethical, and transcendental nature of spirituality, Osho’s brand of spiritual discourse surreptitiously incorporates a Neo-Vedāntic worldview. This Neo-Vedāntic understanding always prefigures his commentaries on diverse South Asian texts and traditions. Through an analysis of the genealogy of modern spiritual movements in India, as well as a close reading of some of Osho’s own work, I will argue that Osho betrays his own claim of offering a truly neutral, emancipatory, and universal spirituality by demonstrably employing an epistemological framework conditioned by modern conceptions of Vedānta, and in so doing, effectively helps to consolidate Hindu nationalist discourse.
Hindu Women as depicted in the inscriptions of ancient Deccan: A Paradigm Shift in the Historiographic Perception of Hindu Women
The art of engraving inscriptions was popularised by the Mauryan Emperor Aśoka in India in 3rd century BCE and proliferated thereafter. A mammoth corpus of inscriptions engraved in different scripts and languages is available on a pan-India level covering a span of more than a millennium. Although Hinduism predates the period from which the inscriptions are available, especially the votive epigraphs constitute a significantly tangible source for reconstructing the history of women in India. The inscriptions were always a realm of the epigraphists. They preserve valuable data about women that is well-stacked in the milieu of time and space. Mostly votive, administrative, and eulogistic in nature they hold diverse information not only on the contemporary society and polity but also on the prevalent religious observances and the active involvement of women therein. However the inscriptions were never adequately sifted by historians in their quest for reconstruction of history of women in ancient India. The mythological characters restrained by the laws of the dharma-śāstrawere almost stereotyped as ‘the women of ancient India’. There has been a sustained and fruitful involvement of women in the growth and development of Hinduism in ancient India that was unfortunately never highlighted.
Dr. Mokashi has a Ph.D. from the University of Mumbai in Ancient Indian Culture. She is Associate Professor in the Department of History, R. K. T. College of Arts, Commerce and Science, Ulhasnagar, Maharashtra (affiliated to the University of Mumbai). Among her publications are Alaukikā (Mumbai: Param Mitra Prakashan, 2010) and Women in ancient Deccan: An Epigraphical Perspective 200BC–1200AD (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, forthcoming). She is a column writer for national dailies such as Lokasattā, Sanmitra and Garjana and editor of the monthly ‘Kāyastha Prabodhana’, Mumbai.
Strangers in the temple: An ethnographic study of the Nanakpathi traders in a Chinese textile city
This paper aims to examine the processes by which the collective migrant identity of the Nanakpathi (the followers of Guru Nanak) traders is inhibited even though these traders regularly get together in the Sikh Temple. I will explain this process through an ethnographic study conducted in the Sikh Temple at the Shaoxing county of Zhejiang province in China. Shaoxing is now the largest fabrics wholesale market in Asia, in which over 10,000 Nanakpathi middleman traders are based. These Nanakpathis are mostly Sikhs or Sindhis, specializing in the transnational trades of fabrics and having lived in China for some years. These Sikhs and Sindhis often visit the Sikh Temple for their individual religious needs. Based on my long-term observation in the Temple, I found these traders rarely interact with each other despite their public religious engagement in the temple. In other words, neither collective migrant identity nor substantial form of social organization has been formed among these young Nanakpathis. Drawing light from their business practices in China, I argue that these traders indeed have legitimate reasons not to make local Indian friends in the Temple, thereby enabling their middleman business to thrive.
Puran Singh and the Sikh Critique of Singh Sabha Theology
Graduate Seminars in Indic Religions
The beginning of the twentieth century is a crucial moment for Sikhs. The colonization of Pañjāb in 1849 and the subsequent ascendency of colonial discourse placed a demand upon Sikhs to modernize their culture and traditions, and to define their religion in terms of a theology, or as Arvind Mandair has argued, as ‘ontotheology’. One prominent Sikh response to this demand is exemplified in the approach of Singh Sabhā, a late nineteenth century Sikh socio-religious reform movement centered in Pañjāb. Through intellectual activity, such as the wide scale publication of theological tracts and essays in Pañjābī, as well as missionary activity, Singh Sabhā sought to preserve Sikh tradition whilst simultaneously redefining and translating that tradition to fit the modernist ontotheological schema. Pūran Singh (1881–1931), a contemporary of Singh Sabhā scholars, resists the interpretation of Sikhī as a theology, and offers an alternative, non-discursive way of expressing Sikh experience. This paper argues that while Pūran Singh’s critique of Singh Sabhā’s theological definition of Sikhī resonates with a variety of different movements, particularly German Romanticism, he ultimately grounds his alternative vision of Sikhī in Sikh tradition itself, ultimately furnishing an indigenous critique of a colonial formation.
The Roots of Early Hindi Literary Culture
The theoretical framework of Hindi literature today is still defined by the almost century-old History of Hindi Literature (1929) of Ramchand Shukla. This History, written at the time of the Indian freedom struggle, created the image of a national literature extended in time and space. Rejecting claims for a 1000–1500 year old history, my talk examines the emergence of vernacular literature in the Gangetic Plain in the fourteenth century,and argues for continuity in poetic genres, forms and language between the Jain-inspired Maru Gurjar literature and the poetic idioms of Avadhi and Brajbhasha. Using reliably dated literary material, it documents the spread of Maru Gurjar literature beyond Gujarat and Rajasthan into Central North India (Madhyadesha) and presents how non-Jains used this trans-regional literary idiom to develop it into more localised ones that in modern times came to be considered literary dialects of Hindi. Dr. Bangha is a Lecturer in Hindi. His research has focused on early modern Hindi poetry and he has produced editions and translations of early modern Hindi texts. His research interests include the emergence of Hindi as a literary dialect in various scripts, textual transmission and Hindi manuscript culture, riti poetry and the continuity of classical Sanskrit aesthetics in court literature and individual poets such as Vishnudas, Kabir, Tulsidas, and others. He publishes his work in both English and Hungarian. Among his publications are Hungry Tiger: Encounter between India and Central Europe – the case of Hungarian and Bengali Literary Cultures(Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2007) and a translation of Indian short stories into Hungarian (E. Greskovits ed., Tehén a barikádon: Indiai elbeszélések (The Cow of the Barricades: Indian Short Stories) Pallas Akademia, M. Ciuc/Csíkszereda, 2008). He is currently working on several editions and translations of early modern Hindi texts including ‘Love, Scorpion in the Hand’: Late Brajbhasha Court Poetry from Bundelkhand: Th?kur-kabitt?vali (critical edition accompanied with an introduction and English translation of selected poems).
From Under the Tamarind Tree: Hereditary Performance and Sectarian Identity in South India
The temple of Alvar Tirunagari in the deep south of India is a unique archive of hereditary performance traditions in India. Whereas the seismic shift in patronage that occurred in the post-Independence period ensured the rapid erosion of temple-centered performance cultures, the insularity of Alvar Tirunagari ensured the preservation of multiple hereditary performance traditions—liturgical recitation, gestural interpretation, and ritual singing are just three examples—into the present century. But the performers of Alvar Tirunagari have not been untouched because of the shift in patronage, from local, elite landowners to State supported funding. Many performers have left temple service for more lucrative employment, while others supplement their meager temple income with white-collar jobs in major cities. In this paper I take up the example of Araiyar C?vai, just one of Alvar Tirunagari’s several performance traditions, to explore the ways in which members from both within and from outside the hereditary families have sought to reshape it for a contemporary, urban audience. Dr. Archana Venkatesan is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and in Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. She completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. She has worked mainly on Andal, the female Alvar poet-saint, and published an award-winning translation of her poetry with OUP in 2010 (The Secret Garland: Antal’s Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli). She is currently working, with Prof. Francis X. Clooney (Harvard), on a translation of the Tiruvaymoli, one of the most important collections of Tamil devotional poetry.