All Episodes
Episodes
Gil Ben-Herut, "Ĺivaâs Saints: The Origins of Devotion in Kannada according to Hariharaâs Ragaḡegaḡu (Oxford UP, 2018)
Studies of Hindu saints tend to focus primarily on the saints themselvesâtheir words, teachings, and practicesârather than tending to the often complex and complicated world of texts and traditions about those...
View Episode
Caleb Simmons, "Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia" (SUNY Press, 2018)
Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY Press, 2018), edited by Caleb Simmons, Moumita Sen, and Hillary Peter Rodrigues, is a diverse collection of cutting-edge interdisciplinary essays...
View Episode
B.R. Ambedkar, "Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition" (Verso, 2016)
Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition, edited by S. Anand (Verso, 2016) and with an Introduction âThe Doctor and the Saintâ by Arundhati Roy, is based on a speech by Dr. B.R. Ambedakar who took up the...
View Episode
Mani Rao, "Living Mantra: Mantra, Deity, and Visionary Experience Today" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
What role does mantra play in the lives of Hindu practitioners? Mani Rao takes us on a journey to three sacred sites across Indiaâs Andhra-Telangana region. The practitioners she engages at these sites offer insight...
View Episode
McKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017)
McKenzie Warkâs new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century...
View Episode
Sumantra Bose, "Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Sumantra Bose's new book Secular States, Religious Politics, India, Turkey and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is a fascinating comparison of the rise of religious parties in the...
View Episode
Danna Agmon, "A Colonial Affair: Commerce, Conversion, and Scandal in French India" (Cornell UP, 2017)
People sometimes forgetâif they are even awareâthat Franceâs empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included a colonial presence in South Asia, a presence that at one time rivaled that of the British....
View Episode
Philip Lutgendorf, âThe Epic of Ramâ (Harvard University Press, 2016-)
Dr. Philip Lutgendorf is Retired Professor of Hindi and Modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa. He is currently working on a seven-volume translation of the Hindi devotional text, the RÄmcaritmÄnas written by...
View Episode
Anand Taneja, âJinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhiâ
Anand Tanejaâs Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2017) is a landmark publication that interrogates modes of religious practice and imaginaries...
View Episode
Shyam Ranganathan, âHinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigationâ (Routledge, 2018)
In Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation (Routledge, 2018), Shyam Ranganathan argues that a careful philosophical study reveals telling philosophical disagreements across topics such as: ethics, logic,...
View Episode
Keya Maitra, âPhilosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introductionâ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018)
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts of Hinduism and probably the one most familiar and popular in the West. The moral problem that motivates the text â is it right to kill members of oneâs extended...
View Episode
Sucharita Adluri, âTextual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Puranaâ (Routledge, 2014)
What role, if any, do mythological texts play in philosophical discourse?  While modern Hindu Studies scholars are becoming increasingly attuned to the extent to which Indian narratives encode ideology, Sucharita...
View Episode
