In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with the translator’s own transformative journey rending into English the meaning, emotion, cadence and kaleidoscopic brilliance proper to this Tamil masterpiece...

Cecil weaves together material from the Sanskrit text Skandapurāṇa, physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons to provide groundbreaking insight into the earliest known community of Śiva devotees: the Pāśupatas...

Newcombe charts the trajectory of how yoga in became mainstream in Britain to the point of being taught to thousands of middle-class women in adult education classes...

Jain offers a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries..

Jacobsen examines the Kāpil Maṭh, a Sāṃkhyayoga institution emerging in the late nineteenth century Bengal...

"Faithful Fighters" is a powerful and brilliant meditation on the impossibility of modern colonial power to canonize religion and religious identity...

Did modern Hinduism truly emerge due to the “reforms” instigated by “progressive” colonial figures such as Rammohun Roy?

According to Cook, a paradox paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick...

Ollett argues that Prakit is “the most important Indian language you’ve never heard of.”

How does the world of book reviews work?

Saunders tells the story of the Gupta family through the personal and religious narratives they tell as they create and maintain their extended family and community across national borders..

If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change...

What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics?

While typically circulating as a separate text, The Harivamsha forms the final part of the Mahabharata storyline...

This is the first sustained study of an important figure in Hindu narrative, one largely obscure to readers and scholars alike: Kṛṣṇa's son Pradyumna...

We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at?

Gurumaa’s syncretic approach innovates Hindu religiosity, as does her progressive attitudes towards treatment of women...

What do university presses do, and how do they do it?

The things that make people academics do not necessarily make them good teachers...

The Hindu great epic, Mahābhārata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India...

Was ancient India ruled by politics or religion?

Beginning in the mid 19th century, thousands of indentured laborers traveled from India to the Caribbean, and many settled in Trinidad...

Arik Moran examines three Rajput kingdoms during the transition to British rule (c. 1790-1840) and their interconnected histories and court intrigues.

Elison explores how slum residents, tribal people, and members of other marginalized groups use religious icons to mark urban spaces in Mumbai...

The Bhagavad Gītā remains to this day a mainstay of Hinduism and Hindu Studies alike,..

This book features an investigation of men donning a women’s guises to impersonate female characters...

This book represents the very first study of a fascinating Hindu phenomenon: the Svasthanivratakatha (SVK), a sixteenth-century narrative textual tradition native to Nepal surrounding the Goddess, Svasthānī...

What is the relationship between religion and power?

Is “Vedic” fire sacrifice at odds with “Hindu” image worship?

Burchett re-examines what we assume about the rise of devotionalism in North India, tracing its flowering since India’s early medieval “Tantric Age” to present day...

Moodie examines the history of the Kalighat temple of Kolkata...

Why is the Indian Goddess sometimes figured as a corpse in Tantric Traditions?

Why would anyone want to study Sanskrit, an ancient complex tongue? What’s the best way to go about doing so?

Why are myths of the Indian Great Goddess couched in a conversation between a deposed king and forest-dwelling ascetic?

Why does the narrative motif of ‘dialogue’ pervade Hindu texts?

To what extent may we say that religion is a theatrical phenomenon, and that theatre is a religious experience?

Our culture is full of popular stereotypes about religion, both positive and negative...

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...

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic...

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.

The Indian caste system is an ancient, pervasive institution of social organization within the subcontinent – or is it?

What happens after you die? The book brings together fascinating theological and religious studies perspectives on a controversial yet pervasive idea: reincarnation...

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...

This work maps manifestations of the festival across historical periods and local celebrations over the regions of West Bengal, Odish...

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...

What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners?

McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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,

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...

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...

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).

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,

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,

Many contemporary spiritual movements are characterized by denial of material pleasures, subjugation of the self, and focus on transcendence. A spiritual program that cultivates embodied satisfaction is often seen as inauthentic and fraudulent.

Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synthesizing narrative.

Amar Akbar Anthony is a film like no other. When you see it you cannot forget it. Filled with music, comedy, drama, and love it captures audiences in multiple ways. But what can we learn from a deeper look at this classic of Hindi cinema?

The so called “Pariah Problem” emerged in public consciousness in the 1890s in India as state officials, missionaries and “upper”caste landlords, among others, struggled to understood the situation of Dalits (those subordinated populations once called ...

Roman Sieler’s

 Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots, a South Indian practice that encompasses both martial and...

Arie L. Molendijk is Professor of the History of Christianity and Philosophy in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has written Friedrich Max Muller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford ...

Sangay Mishra is the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mishra is an assistant professor of political science at Drew University. While the number of South Asian Americans living...

Waiting several hours in line for a hug is well worth it for thousands of people, the devotees of the Guru, Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi. In Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace (University of California Press, 2014), Amanda Lucia,

New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited by Alf Gunvald Nilsen and Srila Roy, is a wonderfully rich and theoretically coherent collection of texts that critically as...

Joyce B. Flueckiger‘s new bookWhen the World Becomes Female: Guises of a South Indian Goddess (Indiana University Press, 2013) is a rich and colorful analysis of the goddess Gangamma’s festival and her devotees.

Is yoga religious? This question has not only been asked recently by the broader public but also posed in the courts. Many argue that of course it is. The story of yoga in the popular imagination is often narrated as an ancient wisdom tradition that in...

When did religion begin in South Asia? Many would argue that it was not until the colonial encounter that South Asians began to understand themselves as religious. In Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (Oxfor...

Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and small team of collaborators – Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar,

If you’re going to teach a broadly themed survey course, you’ll probably need to assign some readings. One option is to assemble one of those photocopied course readers, full of excerpts taken from different sources. However,

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity.

Bombay (Mumbai), India, is a city that has never lacked chroniclers from Rudyard Kipling to Salman Rushdie to Suketu Mehta, bards of pluralism have written about Bombay’s divers religions and peoples and the interactions between them.