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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. In Pradyumna: Lover, Magician, and Scion of the Avatara (Oxford University Press, …
Guest: Christopher Austin
Date: 12/12/2019
Angela Rudert's Shakti's New Voice: Guru Devotion in a Women-Led Spiritual Movement (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) is the first academic study of the popular contemporary North Indian female guru Anandmurti Gurumaa. In drawing from, e.g., …
Guest: Angela Rudert
Date: 11/20/2019
The Hindu great epic, Mahābhārata, exists today in hundreds of variant manuscripts across India. These manuscripts were painstakingly examined, sorted and reconstituted into the official Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata. Is the …
Guest: Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee
Date: 10/21/2019
Was ancient India ruled by politics or religion? In The History of the Arthaśāstra: Sovereignty and Sacred Law in Ancient India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Mark McClish explores the Arthaśāstra (ancient India’s foundational …
Guest: Mark McClish
Date: 10/9/2019
What role did women play in securing power in colonial Himalayan kingdoms? Kingship and Polity on the Himalayan Borderland (Amsterdam University Press, 2019) specifically documents the key roles played by women - especially queen regents …
Guest: Arik Moran
Date: 8/28/2019
William Elison's The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai (University of Chicago Press, 2018) explores how slum residents, tribal people, and members of other marginalized groups use religious icons to …
Guest: William Elison
Date: 8/21/2019
The Bhagavad Gītā remains to this day a mainstay of Hinduism and Hindu Studies alike, despite the profusion of books written on it over the centuries. While the Gītā’s profundity is evident, its meaning most certainly is not. Is there a …
Guest: Ithamar Theodor
Date: 8/12/2019
Harshita M. Kamath's new book The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance (University of California Press, 2019) features an investigation of men donning a women’s guises to impersonate female characters – most notably …
Guest: Harshita M. Kamath
Date: 8/8/2019
Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz's Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (Oxford University, 2018) represents the very first study of a fascinating Hindu phenomenon: the Svasthanivratakatha (SVK), a …
Guest: Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz
Date: 8/6/2019
What is the relationship between religion and power? With this important overarching theme in mind, Bhakti and Power: Debating India's Religion of the Heart (University of Washington Press, 2019), edited by John Stratton Hawley, Christian …
Guest: John Stratton Hawley
Date: 7/30/2019