New Directions in South Asian Religions

This paper explores how women ājīvan sevaks (lifelong volunteers) within the transnational devotional Hindu movement known as the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) interpret and utilize the socio-religious practice of sevā (service) in their everyday lives. While these women come from a broad age, educational, and vocational spectrum, they still collectively understand service as the central means to achieve theological ideals and virtues, such as vairāgya (worldly detachment), niṣkāma bhakti (desireless devotion), and saraltā (simplicity). This paper indicates broader implications of this lifelong dedication as being the establishment of spatial and social agency. More specifically, these women eschew established local and regional familial expectations of women and establish female-dominated spaces within BAPS, an organization characterized in academic and public narratives as structurally male-dominated.

In this paper, I study an acerbic public debate around the “true” nature of the deity Jagannātha in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The contention began when pedagogical authorities of both Indology and Odisha suggested that the temple of Jagannātha was a Buddhist shrine that Hindus later appropriated. The Hindu upper caste/class elite boisterously refuted these claims, inundating periodicals and authoring voluminous monographs to disprove the Buddhist past of Jagannātha. The paper asks: Why did the presence of Buddhism in Puri, cause this significant disquiet for upper caste/class authors at the time? I argue that, while most articulations were couched in regional terms (in Bengali and Odia), the debate was symptomatic of a broader concern about the type of religious history writing that could serve the purpose of the “Hindu nation.” Through this debate we notice some of the earliest articulations of  Hindu nationalist claims over contested sacred sites, which later morphed into the Hindutva history writing projects around Babri Masjid. 

In this paper, I analyze the first and second chapters of Madhusūdana Sarasvati's encyclopedic sixteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, the Gūḍhārthadīpikā, arguing that the text represents an important intervention in the reception history of the Bhagavad Gītā, from the perspective of Madhusūdana's unusually rich focus on questions of narrative and human conduct. While there is a great deal of scholarship that engages with Madhusūdana's writing in general, much secondary literature has focused on his Advaitin ideas and his novel commitment to bhakti. In this paper, I read sections of Madhusūdana's text with a view to asking how his reading of the Bhagavad Gītā, while drawing from those of his predecessors, extends Advaitin scholastic concerns to more closely considering the place of the text in the epic, drawing out questions of the Gītā's relationship to dharmaśāstra debates that were likely to have been ongoing in sixteenth-century scholastic circles.

Religious biographies are an indispensable part of a religious tradition. These normative texts exhibit exemplary lives that become the blueprints of how a practitioner should act, how they should think, and how they should feel. By examining recent biographies by BAPS, a denomination of the Swaminarayan community, and interviewing living authors, this paper discusses the relationship between virtue and the biographical image and the author’s role in teaching virtue to motivate practice. In other words, I move the discussion from what emulation is to how it can occur. To do this, I engage with applied virtue ethics heuristically to argue that hagiographers make the narratives into action-inducing stories by building the thick conceptual nature of a virtue so that narratives from a saint's life can be applicable to the reader.

The sovereignty debate as it relates to caste in colonial South India is the focus of this essay. The paper focuses on two key conjunctures in order to move beyond the dichotomy of ritual and political in the study of sovereign practices in the South Indian state of Travancore. The first is the debate of state spending on Brahmin feeding in the nineteenth century. The critique of spending, which was sparked by the newly formed coalition between Christian missionaries and lower caste communities, presupposed a "secular poor class" as the condition of its political demands. The second is the debate surrounding the administration of temple charity, which viewed the state as a trust. In both episodes, Brahmins were seen as a "poor class" as a condition for sovereignty, until replaced by "people" later in nineteenth century. The paper inquires the transformative trajectory of sovereignty of Travancore in both of these debates.