New Books in Indian Religions
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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551
Anway Mukhopadhyay, "The Goddess in Hindu-Tantr...
Why is the Indian Goddess sometimes figured as a corpse in Tantric Traditions?
75 min
552
A. M. Ruppell, "The Cambridge Introduction to S...
Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so?
74 min
553
Raj Balkaran, "The Goddess and The King in Indi...
Why are myths of the Indian Great Goddess couched in a conversation between a deposed king and forest-dwelling ascetic?
43 min
554
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, "In Dialogue with Clas...
Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts?
51 min
555
David V. Mason, "The Performative Ground of Rel...
To what extent may we say that religion is a theatrical phenomenon, and that theatre is a religious experience?
51 min
556
Brad Stoddard and Craig Martin, “Stereotyping R...
Our culture is full of popular stereotypes about religion, both positive and negative...
42 min
557
Borayin Larios, "Embodying the Vedas: Tradition...
Larios probes the backbone of what makes Hinduism the world’s oldest living tradition: the unbroken chain of transmission of Vedic texts composed over 3,000 years ago, originating circa 1750-1200 BCE...
64 min
558
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Op...
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic...
29 min
559
Nathan McGovern, "The Snake and The Mongoose: T...
Nathan McGovern draws on ancient texts to problematize the distinction between Brahman and non-Brahman in this era, shedding light on the presence of various Buddhist, Jain and Vedic groups who equally identified as Brahmans.
51 min
560
Prakash Shah, "Western Foundations of the Caste...
The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it?
58 min
561
Gil Ben-Herut, "Śiva’s Saints: The Origins of D...
Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselves—their words, teachings, and practices—rather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions about those saints...
68 min
562
Caleb Simmons, "Nine Nights of the Goddess: The...
This work maps manifestations of the festival across historical periods and local celebrations over the regions of West Bengal, Odish...
39 min
563
B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Anno...
This landmark speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar is the pinnacle of his scholarly work and cements his legacy alongside Mahatma Gandhi in Indian politics...
67 min
564
Mani Rao, "Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Vi...
What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners?
61 min
565
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One ...
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...
61 min
566
Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Polit...
Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties...
55 min
567
Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conv...
People sometimes forget—if they are even aware—that France’s empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British.
54 min
568
Philip Lutgendorf, “The Epic of Ram” (Harvard U...
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the Rāmcaritmānas written by the sixteenth-century North Indian...
62 min
569
Anand Taneja, “Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Eco...
Anand Taneja’s Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries of time that disrupt dominant claims...
54 min
570
Shyam Ranganathan, “Hinduism: A Contemporary Ph...
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic, epistemology, moral standing,
50 min
571
Keya Maitra, “Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: ...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text – is it right to kill members of one’s extended family if they are on the other side in...
62 min
572
Sucharita Adluri, “Textual Authority in Classic...
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse? While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita Adluri’s Textual Authority in Classical...
36 min
573
Lavanya Vemsani, “Modern Hinduism in Text and C...
Dr. Lavanya Vemsani is Distinguished Professor of India History and Religions at Shawnee University and the editor of the new volume entitled Modern Hinduism in Text and Context (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
36 min
574
Elaine Fisher, “Hindu Pluralism: Religion and t...
Elaine Fisher’s Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017) sheds light on the variegated, pluralistic texture of Hinduism in precolonial times. Drawing on Sanskrit, Telugu,
34 min
575
Walter N. Hakala, “Negotiating Languages: Urdu,...
For many people language is a central characteristic of their social identity. In modern South Asia, the production of Urdu and Hindi as national languages was intricately tied to the hardening of religious identities. South Asian lexicographers,
70 min