All Episodes
Episodes
N. S. Hawley and S. S. Pillai, "Many Mahābhāratas" (SUNY Press, 2021)
Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai's book Many Mahābhāratas (SUNY Press, 2021) is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins...
View Episode
Ayesha A. Irani, "The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam" (Oxford UP, 2021)
The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History, Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (Oxford University Press, 2021) reveals the powerful role of vernacular translation in the Islamization of Bengal.Its focus is on...
View Episode
Ian Whicher, "The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga" (SUNY Press, 1998)
Join Raj Balkaran as he discusses yoga philosophy with Ian Whicher. We begin with a discussion on how he began his journey towards yoga philosophy before probing his assertion that the Yoga-Sūtras do not advocate...
View Episode
Daniel Raveh, "Daya Krishna and 20th-Century Indian Philosophy: A New Way of Thinking about Art, Freedom, and Knowledge" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Daya Krishna and Twentieth-Century Indian Philosophy: A New Way of Thinking about Art, Freedom, and Knowledge (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) by Daniel Raveh introduces contemporary Indian philosophy as a unique...
View Episode
Lokesh Ohri, "Till Kingdom Come: Medieval Hinduism in the Modern Himalaya" (SUNY Press, 2021)
Hinduism, as is well known, has taken a multitude of shapes and forms. Some Hindu "little traditions" have remained obscure or understudied to this day due to their regional remoteness. One such offshoot is the...
View Episode
Douglas Osto, "An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism" (Routledge, 2020)
In An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism (Routledge, 2020), Douglas Osto analyses the contemporary global revival of Nondual Śaivism, a thousand-year-old medieval...
View Episode
Vanessa R. Sasson, "Yasodhara and the Buddha" (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
By combining the spirit of fiction with the fabulism of Indian mythology and in-depth academic research, Vanessa R. Sasson shares the evocative story of the Buddha from the perspective of a forgotten woman: Yasodhara,...
View Episode
Steven Collins, "Wisdom as a Way of Life: Theravāda Buddhism Reimagined" (Columbia UP, 2020)
This wide-ranging and powerful book argues that Theravāda Buddhism provides ways of thinking about the self that can reinvigorate the humanities and offer broader insights into how to learn and how to act.
Steven...
View Episode
Arvind Sharma, "Religious Tolerance: A History" (Harper Collins, 2019)
Religion has become a vital element in identity politics globally after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States of America. And so the question of how religious tolerance may be secured in the...
View Episode
Francis X. Clooney, "Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters" (U Virginia Press, 2019)
We live in an era of unprecedented growth in knowledge. Never before has there been so great an availability of and access to information in both print and online.
Yet as opportunities to educate ourselves have...
View Episode
Christopher Key Chapple, "Yoga in Jainism" (Routledge, 2015)
Jaina Studies is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field of inquiry for scholars of Indian religion and philosophy. In Jainism, "yoga" carries many meanings, and this book explores the definitions, nuances, and...
View Episode
Bibek Debroy, "The Mahabharata" (Penguin, 2015)
Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins the Pandavas and the Kouravas but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular...
View Episode
