Indian Religions Podcast

Michael Baltutis' book The Festival of Indra: Innovation, Archaism, and Revival in a South Asian Performance (SUNY Press, 2023) details the textual and performative history of an important South Asian festival and its role in the development of classical Hinduism. Drawing on various genres of Sanskrit textual sources--especially the epic …

Brenda Beck discusses her lifelong work on a Tamil folk legend, resulting in a graphic novel, an English translation and Hidden Paradigms: Comparing Epic Themes, Characters, and Plot Structures (U Toronto Press, 2022) which identifies important symbolic patterns connecting this tale to other epic stories. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit …

In Indian philosophical traditions, a reflection in a mirror frequently serves as a metaphor, suggesting that just as a face in a mirror appears where it is not, so does consciousness. Mirror of Nature, Mirror of Self: Models of Consciousness in Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Advaita Vedānta (Oxford UP, 2023) utilizes this metaphor to address metaphysical, …

Ankur Barua's book Exploring Hindu Philosophy (Equinox Publishing, 2023) points to some of the diverse tapestries of Hindu worldviews where scriptural revelation, logical argumentation, embodied affectivity, moral reasoning, and aesthetic cultivation constitute densely interwoven conceptual threads. It begins with an exploration of some classical …

Daniel J. Soars and Nadya Pohran's book Hindu-Christian Dual Belonging (Routledge, 2022) focuses on dual belonging within Hindu-Christian contexts. Written by experts in a variety of fields, the chapters explore the theological, philosophical, and cultural anthropological debates relating to religious pluralism, religious language, and social …

Geared toward modern Westerners and presented in the original poetic rhythm, Hearing the Song of Your Soul is an approachable, beautiful new translation of the Bhagavad Gita that can be powerfully shared aloud. Author Laura Atmadarshan Santoro studied in Indian ashrams and lived each verse of the Bhagavad Gita for a day as part of a decades-long …

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal …

Why is religion today so often associated with giving and taking offense? To answer this question, Slandering the Sacred: Blasphemy Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India (U Chicago Press, 2023) invites us to consider how colonial infrastructures shaped our globalized world. Through the origin and afterlives of a 1927 British imperial law …

Sanjaya Singhal discusses Sangraha, an ambitious digital enterprise cataloguing India's millions of decaying Sanskrit manuscripts. Sangraha is a detailed, descriptive catalogue allowing users to find relevant manuscripts with a wide range of search terms. Eventually it will have 2.5 million entries. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit …

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the …