New Books in Hindu Studies

This roundtable features four first monographs that offer new theoretical interventions in Hindu studies. The authors are grouped in pairs to respond to each other's books and to discuss how these new works may be incorporated into their own scholarship and pedagogy. The first pair features literary studies of figures and texts central to any idea of Hinduism: the Upanishadic figure of Yajnavalkya on one hand, and the multitude of regional language tellings of the Mahabharata on the other. The second pair turns to the social and cultural history of Hinduism in the early modern period. One book traces the emergence of the "Hindu" in a northwestern Indian kingdom; the other develops a new approach to the study of south Indian temple murals. Spanning diverse locations from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu and a variety of methodologies, the panel displays the breadth and diversity of Hindu studies.