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JHS - Recent Issues (OUP)
JHS - Recent Issues (OUP)The Truth, the Way, the Life: Christian Commentary on the Three Holy Mantras of the Srivaisnava Hindus. By Francis X. Clooney.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Art of Loving Krishna: Ornamentation and Devotion. By Cynthia Packert.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Womb of Tantra: Goddesses, Tribals, and Kings in AssamThis article examines two central but controversial themes in the early development of Tantra in South Asia: the relationship between Tantra and kingship and the role of non-Hindu, indigenous traditions in Tantric practice. As its primary focus, the article will examine the relationship between goddess-worship, kingship, and tribal religions in Assam, which has long been regarded by both Sanskrit texts and Western scholars as the symbolic and/ or literal heartland of Tantra. Using Sanskrit texts from the tenth to the seventeenth centuries as well as vernacular histories and archeological evidence, the article will discuss the complex negotiations between Hindu brahmans and the non-Hindu tribal kings who adopted the worship of Kamakhya, Kali, and other Sakta Tantric goddesses. Assamese Tantra, I suggest, represents a complex negotiation between Sanskritic brahmanic traditions and local indigenous rituals, which we see most clearly in the offering of animal and human sacrifice. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Encountering the Other: Tantra in the Cross-cultural ContextThis article focuses on the cultural appropriation of Tantra in India and the West. The term ‘Tantra’ evokes one sentiment in contemporary India, the birthplace of Tantra, and a widely divergent meaning in the West. In these contrasting understandings of Tantra as the black magic or as sex, the sacred of some has been turned into an object for appropriation and commodification for others. This shift relies on identifying Tantra as the ‘other’, in relation to what the mainstream culture defines itself as the ‘self’. Due to secretive nature of Tantric tradition since the classical times, Tantra has never found its own voice, and with the mainstream culture claiming the power over truth, marginal voices repressed within the rubric of Tantra have never been heard. The emergence of religious consumerism has assisted in peeling off this secretive Tantric body, bringing the heart of sacred practices from India to the consumers in the West. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Siva's Demon Devotee: Karaikkal Ammaiyar. By Elaine Craddock.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Resounding Field of Visualised Self-Awareness: The Generation of Synesthetic Consciousness in the Sri Yantra Rituals of Nityasodasikarnava TantraIn this article, I utilise current scholarship on synesthetic experience as a lens for evaluating the multi-layered cognitive and artistic processes by which Sri Vidya practitioners construct, visualise, and embody the primary symbol of their clan, the Sri Vidya diagram. This diagram is simultaneously a multi-hued visual image and a resounding symphonic field of luminous, reverberating graphemes. By constructing externally and visualising internally a sound field that is not just heard but perceived, the sadhaka generates an embodied poly-sensualised consciousness that is the ritualised means for achieving the aim of his Sakta practice: the recognition of one's self as non-distinct from that supreme goddess, Mahatripurasundari, she whose self-emanation as the resounding, luminous Sri Yantra, is itself the emergent cosmos. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Secret Garland: Antal's Tiruppavai and Nacciyar Tirumoli. Translated with Introduction and Commentary by Archana Venkatesan.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Tantric Studies: Issues, Methods, and Scholarly CollaborationsThis introduction will briefly consider some of the major themes and issues that have been central to Tantric Studies, as the formation of the Society for Tantric Studies (STS) has very much been a response to addressing these issues. It will then provide an overview of the development of the STS since 1984, and conclude with some comments on the four essays in this volume. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] New Homelands Hindu Communities in Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Fiji, and East Africa. By Paul Younger.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Towards a Tantric Nondualist Ethics through Abhinavagupta's Notion of Rasa{dagger}In a famous pronouncement on the defects of India’s monistic traditions, the German scholar Paul Hacker declared that advaita, or nondualist, traditions could never achieve the ethical pre-eminence of Christianity since in the ultimate analysis, in a world where all is ultimately the ‘absolute one’, there is no room for the ethical engagement inspired by the Other. This article explores what I suggest is a highly nuanced and compelling understanding of the ethical relationship between a self and the other within the context of a nondualist Indian thinker. Specifically, I propose that the writing of the tenth century Tantric philosopher, Abhinavagupta, on aesthetics, offers a way into understanding how a nondualist philosophy might address the ethical complexity of human interrelations. I suggest that the link he makes between the emotional and subjective experience of art to a process of universalisation is especially compelling as the basis for ethical relations towards others. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Gender, Religion, and Modern Hindi Drama. By Diana Dimitrova.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Mark Singleton and Jean Byrne.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] 'Natural Supernaturalism?' The Tagore-Gandhi Debate on the Bihar EarthquakeThis article is a study of the confrontation between Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948) on the Bihar earthquake of January 1934. Gandhi who was then campaigning against untouchability in South India called the earthquake ‘a divine chastisement for the great sin we have committed and are still committing against those whom we describe as untouchables ... ’. Reading this statement in the press, Tagore wrote to Gandhi pointedly disagreeing with him: ‘I am compelled to utter a truism in asserting that physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combinations of physical facts’. This article examines the differences in their position over this topic and discusses the implications of their contrasting stands on it. In addition, I also look at Gandhi’s other statements on the earthquake as I do at Tagore’s exchanges with Einstein on the relationship between the observer and the phenomenal world. Perhaps no other disagreement between Gandhi and Tagore better illustrates the differences in their attitudes to life, their notions of what constitutes the relationship between physical phenomena and the realm of human morals, or between nature and God, within a broadly Hindu framework of understanding. But departing from the conventional view that Tagore’s position is rational–scientific–modern, while Gandhi’s is religious–superstitious–traditional, I argue that the contestations are not as much between rationality and faith, science and superstition, or modernity and tradition as between two kinds of rationality, two ideas of science, and two approaches to modernity. I try to show how both Tagore’s and Gandhi’s positions are intellectually more complex, nuanced, and compelling than might appear at first. Ultimately, both Gandhi and Tagore contributed, even with their contrasting perspectives, to the richness that made up Indian modernity, with its unique attempts to integrate rationality with a spiritual view of the world. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Tracing Vaishnava Strains in TagoreThe religio-cultural milieu of urban and rural Bengal within which Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) lived was variegated and dynamic with multiple Indian and foreign streams converging on Calcutta, then the capital of British India. One of the more popular but also more refined of the indigenous Bengali Indian streams was the religio-literary Vaishnava tradition of devotion (bhakti) to God Krishna and his human manifestation Chaitanya (1486–1533). Although Rabindranath was exposed to this tradition from his childhood, scholars, especially those writing in English, have tended to neglect this aspect of his experience and formation. The present article provides a corrective to this neglect by showing how Rabindranath treats Vaishnava matters in his fictional and non-fictional prose writings, including personal correspondence, and by examining how passages from his poetry resonate with basic Vaishnava themes, sentiments, and values. In summation, the article confirms that Rabindranath was well informed about the Vaishnava tradition in Bengal and that at the level of aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, especially as expressed in poetry and song, he shared much with that tradition despite being critical of its restrictive dogmatic tendencies and alleged organisational distortions of the genuine spirituality that he would call the ‘religion of man’. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Father, Son and Holy Text: Rabindranath Tagore and the UpanisadsThe intellectual and spiritual world of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was infused with the spirit of the ancient Upanisads. His love for the Upanisads was shaped in large part by his father, Debendranath Tagore, who had been an influential figure in re-invigorating the Vedantic theology of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist movement founded by Rammohan Roy in 1828. While the trajectory of Brahmo-inspired Vedantic thought from Rammohan to Rabindranath is well-known, the particular story of Rabindranath’s response to his father’s Upanisadic legacy merits greater attention for the window it provides into the existential factors shaping the religious views of modern India’s greatest poet. On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth, this essay offers an interpretation of the father-son dynamic that lies at the heart of Rabindranath’s Upanisadic vision. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Hermeneutics and Hindu Thought: Toward a Fusion of Horizons. Edited by Rita Sherma and Arvind Sharma.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The History of Vegetarianism and Cow-Veneration in India. By Ludwig Alsdorf. Translated from the German by Bal Patil. Revised by Nichola Hayton.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Unifying Hinduism: Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History. By Andrew Nicholson.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] 'Where he lies, I lie': Tagore meets KabirWhat drew Rabindranath to Kabir? Although a poet’s purpose is never entirely transparent, the enquiry here is necessary to understand the ‘myriad-minded’ reach of Rabindranath’s art. In India’s cultural history as well, it is worth asking the question because One Hundred Poems of Kabir represents the merger of two of India’s foremost cultural institutions, Kabir and Rabindranath, within the global institution of English. From his early teens, Rabindranath had displayed the spiritual power of his poetic imagination, which progressed from awe at the distant father figure of the upanisads to an intense relationship with the personal godhead of vaisnava poetry, especially as in Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda. But it was when he came upon Kabir’s poems that he found an answering echo to his growing attraction for a philosophically more sophisticated idea of an abstract, nirguna deity who could nonetheless be a viably and personally realised presence. His English versions of Kabir’s poems are necessarily, then, approximations of that resonance, which explains their closeness in form to Rabindranath‘s own expression of spirituality, most notably in his Gitanjali. My aim here is to understand the Kabir–Rabindranath unity by viewing Rabindranath’s translations in the light of his own poetry of spiritual self-affirmation. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One: A Study and Translation of the Virupaksapancasika with the Commentary of Vidyacakravartin. By David Lawrence.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Biographiesview article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Erratumview article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Who were the Tarkikas? The Place of Polemic in Samkara's BrhadaranyakopanisadbhasyaLike other Indian commentators, the great Advaitin Samkara (eighth century CE) engages throughout his works with ‘fictive opponents’ and their ideas, considering their views, subjecting them to criticism and establishing his final position in response to them. Normally he does this with politeness if with vigour. However, in his commentary on the voluminous Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, there is one set of opponents whom he treats rather differently, subjecting them to invective at every turn. It seems, at first sight, that they are the tarkikas (logicians). This gives us a puzzle. The most obvious reference of the term ‘tarkika’ is to members of the Nyaya school, which specialised in forms of argument and pramana theory. Indeed, some translators and commentators assume that this is who Samkara has in mind here. But this is not how he normally treats Naiyayikas. In this article, I subject Samkara’s texts to close reading to try to discover who these elusive people might be, using clues from register theory to help develop my argument. I suggest a particular identification for them which helps us to understand the context in which Samkara was teaching, a context in which rivalries between ritualist brahmins and growing devotional movements may well have affected the way he was trying to position his Advaitin tradition. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Temples of the Indus: Studies in the Hindu Architecture of Ancient Pakistan. By Michael W. Meister.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Penance and Punishment: Marking the Body in Criminal Law and Social Ideology of Ancient IndiaThis article deals with the twin systems of penance and punishment for offences against the moral and the penal codes found in the ancient Indian legal treatises, the Dharmasastras. The two systems parallel each other and often overlap and present one of the central legitimations of social structures. Both systems often mark the body of the sinner/criminal in ways that parallel the marking of the body by the rebirth process within the ideology of karmic retribution. Thus, the legal/moral codes and the religious/criminal justice systems are presented as anchored in the very working of cosmic law rather than as contingent and humanly created systems subject to historical changes. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India. By Parimal G. Patil.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Kings of the Forest: The Cultural Resilience of Himalayan Hunter-gatherers. By Jana Fortier.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Bollywood Weddings: Dating, Engagement, and Marriage in Hindu America. By Kavita Ramdya.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century. By Geoffrey Samuel.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Interpreting Indian Rational TraditionsThis article argues that the contemporary intellectual engaging with India’s philosophical traditions is situated within a tradition of inquiry into the form of truth-governed rational practices, but outside of a tradition of metaphysical and ethical speculation; that is, he or she is both participant and witness to the Indian rational traditions. The article suggests that the require-ment of objectivity in interpretation is that the situated interpreter achieves positional objectivity in his or her interpretations, and that immersed inter-pretation is positionally objective to the extent that the interpreter’s situation is one of participation rather than observation. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Reason and Rationality in Hindu Studiesview article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Dayananda Sarasvati as Irascible Rsi: The Personal and Performed Authority of a TextScholarly discussions of a Christianised (Nandy 1983), modernised (Radice 1998), Semiticised (Hansen 1999), Orientalised, or middle class (Fuller 2009) Hinduism have emphasised the wide-ranging changes in south Asian religion in the colonial period. While these analyses have moved beyond earlier binaries of reform and revival in some ways, they simultaneously echo common themes of Protestant historiography, especially in their stress on the effects of modern textuality on Hindu notions of scripture. This article examines the case of Dayananda Sarasvati, often called the ‘Luther of India’ because of his use of the Veda in the cause of ‘reform’. In contrast, I argue that close reading of his Satyartha Prakasa reveals neglected dimensions of mythic, personal, and traditional authority that work performatively to authorise both him and his text. These dimensions are best captured in the image of Dayananda as a ‘Maharsi’, precisely the title his followers gave him. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration. By Yigal Bronner.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Dharma. By Alf Hiltebeitel.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] From Craft to Art: The Aesthetic Ends of Technique in Sanskrit Texts of Classical Indian DanceFor performers of Indian classical dance, the necessity of mastering its technique is so pressing that it often inhibits attention to its underlying aesthetic principles. The textual accounts of dance technique originating with Bharata’s Natyasastra and mainly followed by his successors are so elaborately detailed that questions about the nature of the distinct type of beauty generated by dance tend to be overlooked, especially as aesthetic concepts relating particularly to dance are stated cryptically. Though this may appear confusing, it can actually benefit the dancer by allowing her flexibility in using her technical skill. But it also requires the dancer to undertake the critical study of aesthetic concepts as an essential part of her training. view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Poetry of Kabir. By Linda Hess, with contributions by U. R. Ananthamurthy and Ashok Vajpeyi.view article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Biographiesview article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] Erratumview article | [The Journal of Hindu Studies - recent issues] |
