New Books in Indian Religions

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate the political and social structures that incarcerate and degrade? In Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Farah Godrej explores the tension between narratives of quiet contemplation and social or political liberation in meditative and yogic practice that the carceral condition exacerbates or exposes. Godrej resists the impulse to treat personal wellbeing and systemic critique as if they are in a binary relationship. By leveraging her own knowledge of yogic philosophy and practice of yoga, and drawing on Gandhian political theory, she offers an account of how incarcerated people in the United States can and do sometimes practice meditation or yoga subversively by going beyond the palliative logics of prison officials and the organisations that train and bring volunteers to teach them. The meaningful question, she shows, is not whether meditation and yoga should be taught inside, but how they are taught. By describing how, her book reveals the contingent possibilities that meditation and yoga provide incarcerated people to cope with degrading coercive conditions and also sometimes hinder mass incarceration, while deferring or foreclosing other possible freedoms.Farah Godrej joins this episode of New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science to discuss access, ethics and risk in prisons research; ethnographic observation and scholarly activism inside; the character of resistance to physical and structural violence in the carceral state; the nexus between activism and academic work; joys of co-authorship with research participants; the delicacy of checking research participants’ meanings; and the importance of self-care in research on violent and opaque institutions.Nick Cheesman is associate professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University where he co-convenes the Interpretation, Method, Critique network. He is also a committee member of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Andrea Farran and Julie Vig discuss the fast approaching first in-person Canadian South Asian Studies Association hybrid conference. This hybrid conference welcomes global participation. Join the List Serve for updates and offers.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

A candid conversation with Ramdas Lamb about his experiences as a sadhu, his journey to academia and his professorial pedagogy.Ramdas Lamb received a Bachelor of Arts degree with high honors in 1980 and a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Religion in 1986 from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He also studied at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1991.Ramdas Lamb began his academic career at the University of Hawaii as an Associate Professor of Religion from 1989 to 1991. Presently, he is a Professor of Religion there. Ramdas teaches introductory religion courses as well as courses dealing with contemporary religion and society, fieldwork, and mysticism. The focus of his current research is on monastic traditions and religion among the low castes in central and northern India.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The newly-elected first female president of the The International Association of Sanskrit Studies, Dr. Dipti Tripathi discusses Association’s genesis, mandate, and potential in honour of its 50th year.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi was an Italian Jesuit who worked in South India from 1710 to 1747. A brilliant scholar of Tamil, his works include hymns, instructions for catechists, and a robust defense of the Catholic missionary approach. His most famous work is Tēmpāvaṇi (The Unfading Garland), an epic re-telling of the early life of Jesus, set in the context of the whole Biblical story, and surprisingly focused on St. Joseph, spouse of Mary and foster-father of Jesus. St. Joseph in South India argues that Beschi’s distinctively Catholic approach draws on methods already familiar in the Jesuit ethical and dramatic literature in post-Reformation Europe. Francis Xavier Clooney's Saint Joseph in South India: Poetry, Mission and Theology in Costanzo Gioseffo Beschi's Tēmpāvaṇi (Brill, 2022) includes a fresh translation of about 300 verses from Tēmpāvaṇi.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In this broad, accessible overview of South Asian Christianity, Chandra Mallampalli shows how the faith has been shaped by Christians’ location between Hindus and Muslims.South Asia's Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim (Oxford UP, 2023) begins with a discussion of south India’s ancient Thomas Christian tradition, which interacted with West Asia’s Persian Christians and thrived for centuries alongside their Hindu and Muslim neighbors. He then underscores the efforts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to understand South Asian societies for purposes of conversion. The publication of books and tracts about other religions, interreligious debates, and aggressive preaching were central to these endeavors, but rarely succeeded in yielding converts. Instead, they played an important role in producing a climate of religious competition, which ultimately marginalized Christians in Hindu-, Muslim-, and Buddhist-majority countries of postcolonial South Asia. Ironically, the greatest response to Christianity came from poor and oppressed Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and tribal communities who were largely indifferent to missionary rhetoric. Their mass conversions, poetry, theology, and embrace of Pentecostalism are essential for understanding South Asian Christianity and its place within World Christianity today.Byung Ho Choi is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Ecumenics program at Princeton Theological Seminary, concentrating in World Christianity and history of religions. His research focuses on the indigenous expressions of Christianities found in Southeast Asia, particularly Christianity that is practiced in the Muslim-dominant archipelagic nation of Indonesia. More broadly, he is interested in history and the anthropology of Christianity, complexities of religious conversion and social identity, inter-religious dialogue, ecumenism, and World Christianity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

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 UP, 2019) focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? In Religion and Empire in Portuguese India: Conversion, Resistance, and the Making of Goa (SUNY Press, 2022), Ângela Barreto Xavier examines these questions through a reading of the relevant secular and missionary archives and texts. She shows how the twin drives of conversion and colonization in Portuguese India resulted in a variety of outcomes, ranging from negotiation to passive resistance to moments of extreme violence. Focusing on the rural hinterlands rather than the city of Goa itself, Barreto Xavier shows how Goan actors were able to seize hold of complex cultural resources in order to further their own projects and narrate their own myths and histories. In the process, she argues, Portuguese Goa emerged as a space with a specific identity that was a result of these contestations and interactions. The book de-essentializes the categories of colonizer and colonized, making visible instead their inner-group diversity of interests, their different modes of identification, and the specificity of local dynamics in their interactions and exchanges--in other words, the several threads that wove the fabric of colonial life.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Rajiv Ranjan discusses his second language acquisition journey, open educational resources, and teaching philosophy. You can study with him at Yogic Studies. Rajiv Ranjan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University (MSU). At MSU, Rajiv is associated with the Asian Studies Program and Master of Arts in Foreign Language Teaching (MAFLT) Program. He is also the mentor for the Fulbright Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs). Before joining MSU, Rajiv Ranjan taught as a graduate teaching assistant at The University of Iowa, Iowa City (2010-2015) where he received his PhD in Second Language Acquisition in 2015.Learning resources:  Hindi-Urdu Basic Hindi Basic Urdu Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Brahma-sutra, attributed to Badaraya (ca. 400 CE), is the canonical book of Vedanta, the philosophical tradition which became the doctrinal backbone of modern Hinduism. As an explanation of the Upanishads, it is principally concerned with the ideas of Brahman, the great ground of Being, and of the highest good. The Philosophy of the Brahma-sutra: An Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2022) is the first introduction to concentrate on the text and its ideas, rather than its reception and interpretation in the different schools of Vedanta. Covering the epistemology, ontology, theory of causality and psychology of the Brahma-sutra, and its characteristic theodicy, it also:- Provides a comprehensive account of its doctrine of meditation- Elaborates on its nature and attainment, while carefully considering the wider religious context of Ancient India in which the work is situated- Draws the contours of Brahma-sutra's intellectual biography and reception history.By contextualizing the Brahma-sutra's teachings against the background of its main collocutors, it elucidates how the work gave rise to widely divergent ontologies and notions of practice. For both the undergraduate student and the specialist this is an illuminating and necessary introduction to one of Indian philosophy's most important works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions