South Asian Studies

In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians …

Today I talked to Patrick Olivelle about his book Grhastha: The Householder in Ancient Indian Religious Culture (Oxford UP, 2019). For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate …

What is the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions all about? Who is it for? What is it’s past, present, and future? Find out as Raj Balkaran speaks with Symposium organizers Karen O'Brien-Kop (University of Roehampton), Brian Black …

In The Hindu Nation: A Reconciliation with Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2021), M. K. Raghavendra examines what being a Hindu means and asks whether its practices are reconcilable with global modernity and compatible with justice and …

Vivekananda, Swami Vivekananda's Vedantic Cosmopolitanism (Oxford UP, 2022) argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and …

Baba Padmanji: Vernacular Christianity in Colonial India (Routledge, 2020) is a critical biography of Baba Padmanji (1831-1906), a firebrand native Christian missionary, ideologue, and litterateur from 19th-century Bombay Presidency. This …

Samuel Wright's A Time of Novelty: Logic, Emotion, and Intellectual Life in Early Modern India, 1500-1700 C.E. (Oxford UP, 2021) argues that a philosophical community emerges in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century India that crafts an …

The first book on alcohol in pre-modern India, James McHugh's An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian Religion and History (Oxford UP, 2021) uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore intoxicating drinks and styles …

Diana Dimitrova's book Rethinking the Body in South Asian Traditions (Routledge, 2020) analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in …

Today I talked to Jarrod Whitaker about his book Strong Arms and Drinking Strength: Masculinity, Violence, and the Body in Ancient India (Oxford UP, 2011). The Rgveda contains over a thousand hymns, addressed primarily to three gods: the …