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The autumnal Navarātri festival—also called Durgā Pūjā, Dassehra, or Dasain—is the most important Hindu festival in South Asia and wherever Hindus settle. A nine-night-long celebration in honor of the goddess Durgā, it ends on the tenth …
Guest: Ute Hüsken and Astrid Zotter
Date: 12/9/2021
Devotional Hindu Dance: A Return to the Sacred (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) sheds light on the purpose of Hindu dance as devotional. Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall explains the history of Hindu dance and how colonization caused the dance form …
Guest: Sabrina D. MisirHiralall
Date: 12/2/2021
In Elusive Nonviolence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa (Westland, 2021), Jyotirmaya Sharma argues that Gandhi acknowledged the absence of any serious tradition of non-violence in India. His uncompromising …
Guest: Jyotirmaya Sharma
Date: 11/30/2021
Raj Balkaran interviews Atmadarshan Laura Santoro co-owner of Dharma Kshetra Yoga and author of forthcoming book The Song of Your Soul (an original new translation of the Bhagavad Gita) on the role of yoga and Indian spirituality in …
Guest: Laura Atmadarshan Santoro
Date: 11/24/2021
This interview continues the conversation with Martin Gluckman, Researcher at University of Capetown and Director at Sanskrit Research Institute. We discuss his Panini Research Tool, Sanskrit Writer, Text to Speech Sanskrit Tool and …
Guest: Martin Gluckman
Date: 11/18/2021
By studying the history and sources of the Thomas Christians of India, a community of pre-colonial Christian heritage, this book revisits the assumption that Christianity is Western and colonial and that Christians in the non-West are …
Guest: Clara A. B. Joseph
Date: 11/17/2021
In Kali in Bengali Lives: Narratives of Religious Experience (Lexington Books, 2021), Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis' personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous …
Guest: Suchitra Samanta
Date: 11/15/2021
This interview features amazing open-access digital Sanskrit projects spearheaded by Martin Gluckman, Researcher at University of Capetown and Director at Sanskrit Research Institute. We discuss Martin’s Sanskrit and computer science …
Date: 11/11/2021
India’s maharajahs have traditionally been cast as petty despots, consumed by lust and luxury. Bejewelled parasites, they cared more, we are told, for elephants and palaces than for schools and public works. The British cheerfully …
Guest: Manu S. Pillai
Date: 11/4/2021
Kunti, a rare matriarch in the Mahabharata and one of the revered Pancha Satis, holds an unforgettable position in the Indian literary imagination. Yet, little is known about the fateful events that shaped her early life. Taking on the …
Guest: Koral Dasgupta
Date: 10/28/2021