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Against High-Caste Polygamy: An Annotated Translation (Oxford UP, 2023) offers a complete, annotated translation of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar's 1871 tract arguing against the practice of high-caste Kulin marriage in Bengal. Vidyasagar …
Guest: Brian A. Hatcher
Date: 10/4/2023
Middle-Class Dharma: Gender, Aspiration, and the Making of Contemporary Hinduism (Oxford UP, 2023) is a contemporary ethnography of class mobility among Hindus in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Focusing on women in Pulan, an emerging …
Guest: Jennifer D. Ortegren
Date: 9/21/2023
On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand …
Guest: Kerry P. C. San Chirico
Date: 9/7/2023
Religious texts are not stable objects, passed down unchanged through generations. The way in which religious communities receive their scriptures changes over time and in different social contexts. Emilia Bachrach's Religious Reading and …
Guest: Emilia Bachrach
Date: 8/30/2023
In World of Worldly Gods: The Persistence and Transformation of Shamanic Bon in Buddhist Bhutan (Oxford UP, 2023), Kelzang T. Tashi offers the first comprehensive examination of the tenacity of Shamanic Bon practices, as they are lived …
Guest: Kelzang T. Tashi
Date: 8/24/2023
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 …
Guest: Simon Paul Cox
Date: 6/15/2023
In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the same time as transcendent--as a way to reclaim the material world as something real, …
Guest: Loriliai Biernacki
Date: 6/8/2023
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam (Oxford …
Guest: Heike Oberlin and David Shulman
Date: 4/27/2023
Perhaps no category of people on earth has been perceived as more endangered, nor subjected to more preservation efforts, than indigenous peoples. And in India, calls for the conservation of Adivasi culture have often reached a fever …
Guest: Ezra Rashkow
Date: 3/16/2023
Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below …
Guest: Justin W. Henry
Date: 2/16/2023