Introduction to the Journal of Hindu Studies

Abstract

Every Italian schoolboy knows the famous opening verse of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Nel mezzo del camin de nostra vita/ mi ritrovia per una selva oscura,/ che la diritta via smarrita’ which we might render ‘halfway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood for I had gone away from the straight path’ .A s we move into the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, some of us feel that we have gone away from the straight path in the sense that the academic study of religions and the study of South Asian religions in particular, has become fragmented into area specialisms to such an extent that any discussion that cuts across disciplinary boundaries is rendered difficult if not impossible. While the development of specialisms is to be welcomed as a corrective measure to earlier overgeneralisations and vague pronouncements about ‘Hinduism’ that do not stand up to critical scrutiny, there is nevertheless a need for a forum or space where we can step out of our subject areas and talk to one another in a non-polemical, supportive environment which nevertheless promotes rigour in discussion and judgement. This is particularly needed in the post 9–11 world in which we live. Religion has become centre stage in public discourse, closely linked to cultural or identity politics, and now perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, there is a need for critical evaluation and discussion. The Journal of Hindu Studies is intended to provide such a forum for the study of South Asian religions that fall within the category ‘Hindu’. We hope that discussion can take place across disciplinary boundaries and that questions raised in one area might be relevant to another. Anthropological concerns about kinship are surely relevant to textual concerns about plot, character, and narrative while textual prescriptions are surely relevant to fieldwork. Our new journal, then, intends to raise questions and allow experimentation in the sense of looking at issues from new perspectives. We know how philological tools developed in the context of classical Greek and Latin texts have rendered incredibly fruitful results when applied to India, so it might be that theatre studies has something to tell us about dramatic performance in Kerala, narratology has something to tell us about the epics, or pragmatics has something to tell us about ritual. Similarly, the intellectual traditions of India have something to say to western philosophy, linguistics, and even mathematics and science. We feel that it is now time when more theoretical tools developed in literary theory, semiotics, phenomenology, or linguistics might be of use in the broad field of Hindu Studies. Our journal is intended to allow the application of theory and to provide a space in