Modern Hindu Research Articles

Escaping from Rama: Portraits of Indian women

This study examines visual, post-colonial portraits of the Indian women of the Sanskrit epics, in order to show the sociocultural, historical-ideological roots of this aesthetic. After independence, Hindu movements found in the epics a female archetype, who stands for the Hindu community. Post-colonial visual representations maintained this idealistic characterisation within a binary system, according to which women can be angelic guarantors of the social order or devilish, sexually uncontrolled creatures. This ambiguity derives from the double nature of the female principle of the world, shakti, and the visual storytelling tradition or chitrakatha. Using the same Indian storytelling tradition, female points of view have begun to criticise this nationalistic, ‘male gaze’. In the graphic novel Sita's Ramayana, Rama and male activities, particularly war, are secularised and criticised as selfish by female characters, foremost of whom is Sita, a model of the devoted and pure bride or pativrata.

Defending Hinduism or Fostering Division? The Decision to Introduce Hindu Religious Instruction in Indian Schools in South Africa during the 1950s

AbstractThis paper examines the debates and tensions that emerged during the 1950s, when the South African Hindu Maha Sabha approached education authorities about permitting Hindu religious instruction in selected primary schools. While important to the Maha Sabha, this move brought strong opposition from many quarters. Hindu reformers aimed to promote a ‘monolithic Hinduism’ and recreate it. However, given the heterogeneity of South African Hindus, who were divided by class, caste, language, region of origin, and the presence of Christian and Muslim Indians, many critical voices feared that teaching religion at school would foster divisions within the ‘Indian community’, which was considered anathema when it was perceived as necessary to unite against the racist policies of the white minority apartheid government. The deep-seated fears that were exposed by this debate reveal interesting insights about the multifaceted nature of Indian identity and Hindu identity in South Africa.

Indian View of Peace and Development Leading to Global Harmony and Unity

The Indians think in a different way. Their philosophy, value systems, culture are different from the western counterparts. The political history of the Occident bore evidences that the centre of their life was the achievement of power. Thus, to the west, State attained a pivotal role and the system of power revolved round the State. In India, the centre of life was the society and not the state. In pre British India we can find a ruling power like a king or emperor but he was only a ruler .The development and the welfare of the common people were vested only on the society. Arthasastra and Manusamhita bore evidences of some specific duties and general duties to be performed by the people for the all round development of the society. S.K.Mitra in his book The Ethics of the Hindus stated that Manu distinguished between relative duties (varṇāśrama dharmas), i.e., duties relative to one‟s station of life, and common duties (sādhāraṇadharmas), i.e., duties of universal scope and validity. The relative duties are the specific duties relating to one‟s station in life, i.e., one‟s station as determined by one‟s varṇa or caste and one‟s āśrama or particular stages of life. The universal duties are the duties irrespective of one‟s age, caste, or creed, i.e., duties obligatory on man as man and not as a member of a particular community or social class. Manu enumerated that there are ten sādhāraṇadharmas or common duties of men. They are steadfastness(Dhṛti),Forgiveness(Kșamā),Application(Dama),Avoidance of theft(Cauryābhāva),Cleanliness(Śauca),Repression of sensibilities and sensuous appetites(Indriyanigraha),Wisdom(Dhĩ),Learning(Vidyā),Veracity(Satya),Restraint of Anger(Akrodha).Every individual residing in society needs to follow them. These duties were ascribed to them to maintain the peace, prosperity, and harmonious development of the society. We could find mentioning of such ethical virtues in the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Gita and in the different schools of Indian philosophy. In this chapter, we would discuss how these ethical virtues and principles lead to the development of peace and harmony of Indian society and their influences on global harmony as a whole. The earliest manifestation of Indian spirituality is found in the Vedas. The Modern Hinduism defines itself as the religion of the Vedas; they regarded Vedas as the foundation, and essence of the Hindu way of life. The Vedas and Upanishads speak of the ways of attaining spirituality by establishing a harmony with all beings. In the Upanishads repeated emphasis has been given on the fact that peace and harmony can be attained not by refraining oneself from activities but by establishing a living connection with all objects. Vedic literature as mentioned in the book Indian Religions is divided into two main categories, the saṁhitās or “collections”, most of which are in verse, and the commentaries or brāmaṇas, most of which are in prose. The three main saṁhitās are the Ṛg Veda, and Yajur Veda and the Sāma Veda; and Atharva Veda, a later text, is sometimes listed as fourth. The brāmaṇas consists primarily of explanations of the elements of the sacrifice; appended to them as the most esoteric āraṇyakas (forest books) and upanisads.The word Upanisads is made of word elements upa, ni, and sad, which are generally explained as meaning as “sitting down near”. The picture thus evokes is a group of students at the feet of the instructor in a secret “teaching session.” In the Upanisads themselves, the term denotes „secret knowledge‟ or „secret teachings‟. “Śaṁkara derives the word upanisad as a substantive form the root sad, „to loosen‟, „to reach‟ or „to destroy‟ with upa and ni as prefixes and kvip as termination. If this derivation is accepted, upanisads means brahma-knowledge by which ignorance is loosened or destroyed. The treatise that deals with brahma-knowledge is called the upanisads and so pass for the Vedanta. The different derivations together make the upanisads give us both spiritual vision and philosophical argument.” The Upanisads teaches us that the world of multiplicity is in fact reducible to one single primary reality that reveals itself to our senses in different forms. This reality is hidden from senses but is discernible to reason. The question that is repeatedly asked in the upanisads is that what is the reality that remains identical and persists through all changes? The answer is given in the upanisads themselves as that supreme reality is

A Modern Hindu Monotheism: Indonesian Hindus as 'People of the Book'

This article studies the remaking of Indonesian Hinduism into a monotheism with a sacred text, a prophet, and universal ethical system. These are the requirements for all nationally accepted religions in Indonesia. This adaptation of Hinduism has resulted in the only situation in the modern world in which there is a single, universal exposition of Hinduism for a national community. This article will postulate three types or strands of Indonesian Hinduism, and examine the ways that the most modern strand has been organised and implemented. We shall also describe the school curriculum through which Hinduism is taught in standardised religion classes throughout Indonesia, a curriculum which has been accepted and funded by a Muslim majority national government, and which encourages culture and cohesion in the Hindu community. It demonstrates a unique ability to compromise and adapt on the part of both Hindus and Muslims, a compromise based on progressive theology and new interpretation of doctrines.

Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal by Parna Sengupta (review)

Reviewed by: Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal by Parna Sengupta Kelly Elliott Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. By Parna Sengupta. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. 222 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper and e-book). How might a pluralistic society—one historically fractured by tensions across differences of religion, culture, and political privilege—create a modern, unified national identity, while maintaining the integrity of communal religious identity? Both the Bengali Hindu bhadralok and the Muslim ashraf contemplated this question in the early twentieth century as Indians imagined a postcolonial future. As Parna Sengupta demonstrates in Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, nineteenth-century Indian religious leaders had already begun to explore answers to this question as they lobbied the colonial state on behalf of local vernacular primary education that included religious instruction. Ultimately, Sengupta finds, the efforts of both Hindu and Muslim leaders in Bengal to craft a modern religious subjectivity through education in their communities made it possible “to imagine how separate religious curricula (and religious communities) could be folded into a single school system or nation”—in other words, Indians had already begun to forge a “pedagogy for tolerance” (p. 152) in a plural society. Pedagogy for Religion challenges the assumption that religion and religious education are “backward-looking” or antimodern, and also counters the common belief that the Western imperial project in India had a primarily secularizing influence. Instead, Parna Sengupta comes to the surprising conclusion that nineteenth century Western Protestant mission schools in Bengal provided a model of education designed [End Page 721] to create a distinctively modern religious subject—a model that was then taken up by both Hindu and Muslim advocates for religious instruction in vernacular schools. As both bhadralok and ashraf sought to define modern Hindu and Muslim identities in the late nineteenth century, Bengalis “had to learn to possess and inhabit their religiosity in recognizable and acceptable ways” (p. 151). Their adoption of a modern religiosity played a key role, first, in obtaining the funding and support of the colonial government, and, second, in the formation and policing of community identities. Following the example of Western mission schools that privileged written over oral education, emphasized the creation of a moral, “civilized” individual, and embedded specific gender expectations into the curriculum, often with separate teaching for girls and boys, Bengali leaders sought to create vernacular schools that—far from inculcating reactionary loyalty to a static faith—taught Hindu and Muslim children how to behave as modern, “civilized” religious subjects who would themselves function as cultural emissaries, missionaries to their own cultures. Thus “religion and religious identity, rather than secularism,” came to define modern education in Bengal (p. 148). In Pedagogy for Religion, Sengupta, who is associate director of Stanford Introductory Studies at Stanford University, brings together three fields of study that are rarely placed in conversation with one another: the history of Western missions, imperialism, and education. She draws source material from all of these areas, reading English-language colonial government sources, especially the reports and records of the Department of Public Instruction, pedagogical manuals like David Stow’s 1860 Object Teaching and Oral Lessons, and mission accounts from the Church Missionary Society, Baptist Missionary Society, and Scottish Free Church mission, among others, alongside the Bengali and English publications of teachers and education reformers like Gopal Chunder Bandhopadhyay and Abdul Karim. The sources range in time from English missionary William Carey’s 1792 Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen, to the 1942 Report of the Kamal Yar Jung Education Committee, a document written by Bengali Muslim leaders in the context of coming Indian independence. The book thus covers a wide swath of Bengal’s colonial history, though Sengupta spends most of her time in the late nineteenth century. Occasionally, the broad scope of the monograph does make its overarching argument less clear. It is difficult to pin down in early chapters exactly what Sengupta understands as constitutive of “modern religious subjectivity”—a list of characteristics of...

Prasada, the Gracious Gift, in Contemporary and Classical South Asia

The importance of prasāda as a “gracious gift” in contemporary South Asian religious practice is hard to overstate. As the central liturgical prop at Hindu pilgrimage centers and local temples alike, prasāda is an everyday part of Hindu religious practice. Yet long before the codification of modern Hindu ritual, prasāda was also a foundational concept in Sanskrit literature. Scholarly works have considered prasāda as an element of Hindu ritual from anthropological perspectives and in specialized textual contexts but they have not been integrated together. In this article, I use a multidisciplinary approach to put prasāda at the center of analysis. First, I present some general principles of contemporary prasāda practice illustrated by examples from four Hindu pilgrimage sites, followed by a brief analysis of prasāda's usage in well-known Sanskrit scriptures (selections from the Purāṇas). Taken together, prasāda is revealed to be a foundational concept for making sense of Hindu religious life in South Asian terms.

‘Foul unhallow’d fires’1: Officiating Sati and the Colonial Hindu Widow in the United Provinces

This article, in addition to the textual debates on sati, reviews the relevance of sensationalism around and governance of the sati cases by the nineteenth-century colonial state in the United Provinces (then known as the North-Western Provinces). While this article contains plenty of evidence to show the colonial engagement with shastras (more appropriately the vyavasthas), yet the question that has been posed is that the six volumes of Parliamentary Papers published on sati need to be read as a source material for writing women’s ethno-psychological history. Numerous cases of women burning themselves cannot be reduced to a question of mere shastric concern. As will become evident from the cases cited here—Hindu widows across caste had imbibed a deep sense of what a dutiful wife/widow should do. These notions of duty and faith accumulated over the ages, not only in a specific time and space. This article also argues that the historical process through which the colonial state and the Hindu reformers engaged with the position of the Hindu widow, produced two dominant ideas on the reform of the Hindu widows—one that the Hindu widows burnt themselves with their husband’s dead bodies by ‘volition’; the other that the colonial state (like its predecessors) possessed (or at least claimed to possess) a ‘moral–ethical’ status to scrutinize whether the custom of widow immolation was ‘involuntary’ or ‘voluntary’. These two processes complemented each other in a colonial context; the idea of a ‘voluntary’ widowhood germinated within official circles in the late nineteenth century and the idea of a living sati was extended to the public sphere by the Hindu reformist discourse. This nineteenth-century officio-reformist debate and discussion was marked by profound creativity for discourses and representations of the body and identity of a Hindu widow. It is this distinct ‘colonial’ Hindu widow whose image was later incorporated into nationalist and post-Independence discourses on nation and development.

Communicating Hinduism in a Changing Media Context

AbstractNew media forms have a range of implications for the way in which the Hindu community is conceived and Hinduism is practiced. Oral modes of communication continue to have a significant role in the communication of Hinduism, however, Hindus have also made effective, and often innovative, use of all media forms. The use of print made by Hindu reformers, such as Rammohun Roy, was an important feature in the conceptualization of Hinduism as a ‘world religion’. Print technology also made possible the proliferation of visual images, which have now become incorporated into the devotional practices of many Hindus. Hindus have also developed unique genres in film and television, drawing on the rich narrative traditions of Hindu mythology. Hinduism can also be found in cyberspace. Online darśan, online pūjā services and other uses of the Internet have enabled Hindus, both in India and in diaspora, to maintain a connection with gurus, sacred places and other aspects of tradition. These developments in communication technologies are important in understanding Hinduism today, and the way in which it has evolved in a global context.

Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī: from Indology to Political Mythology and Back

The Bhojśālā or ‘Hall of Bhoja’ is a term used to describe the centre for Sanskrit studies associated with King Bhoja, the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty. The Bhojśālā is also linked to Sarasvatī – the goddess of learning – whose shrine is said to have stood in the hall's precinct. Since the early years of the twentieth century, the mosque adjacent to the tomb of Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in the town of Dhār has been identified as the Bhojśālā. This has turned the building into a focal point of religious, social and political tension. Access to the site, currently under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India, has been marked by communal friction and disputes in the press and in the courts. My aim in this paper is not to chart this sorry tale of events; I only need note that the legal and political wrangles, not to mention a steady flow of inflammatory assertions, have formed a toxic backdrop to the scholarly publications cited in the pages that follow. A second issue beyond the scope of this paper is how the medieval history of Dhār has played its part in the wider ‘invention of tradition’ and formation of modern Hindu identity. Stepping back from these concerns, my ambition here is rather modest: I seek only to explore how the mosque at Dhār has come to be described as the Bhojśālā and, on this basis, to undertake an assessment of that identification. Along the way, I will touch on a number of problems concerning the history, architecture and literary culture of central India.

‘EAST INDIAN’ COSMOPOLITANISM

In this essay I reassess the legacy of Henry Vivian Louis Derozio (1809–31) through the first extended interpretation of The Fakeer of Jungheera (1828), his 2,050-line poem, published when he was barely nineteen. What makes this poem notable, even unique, is that it is the first long poem written by any Indian in the English language. More remarkably, it is also an intriguing conjuncture of a complex set of relations at the very beginnings of modern India: British colonialism and local resistance, the English language and Indian vernaculars, native and European miscegenation, Christian missionaries and Hindu reformers, pre-nationalism and the imagining of India, evolving gender and patriarchal norms, Hindu–Muslim negotiations, sati and colonial power, to name a few. Though the poem is justifiably famous, it has hardly received the detailed attention that it deserves. My purpose here, however, extends beyond a reading of The Fakeer of Jungheera. I wish to argue that the conventional ways in which Derozio is understood – as a pioneer of Indian modernity and a proto-nationalist – are actually insufficient if not misleading. They throw, as it were,a blanket over not only his singular career, but on the whole phenomenon of what I call ‘East Indian cosmopolitanism’. I argue that the ‘national’ as a valid social or cultural space was not yet available, that it came into being later, after Derozio's time. Those who consider him a ‘national’ poet are performing a kind of back-projection that is not borne out by the work. On the other hand, the kind of cosmopolitanism that his writings and life embody, was also short-lived, based on the opportunities of the early colonial period, which shrunk into more restricted binaries with the establishment of British paramountcy. Yet, such ‘East Indian cosmopolitanism’ was very important for the formation of public culture in India and presaged by many decades the argumentative English-speaking class and English-language media in India. I take ‘East Indians’ at their own definition and evaluation as people of mixed race who wished to distinguish themselves certainly from the Indians and, per force, from the Europeans too. Derozio's newspaper, which claimed to be the voice of this community, was itself The East Indian. The history of how Derozio has been read shows that he has been primarily seen as a representative of the Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) community, without reference to his unique and short-lived cosmopolitanism. East Indian cosmopolitanism is thus one of those ‘lost’ modes of being which were replaced and overwritten by others. By recovering it, we add a vital component to our knowledge of how colonialism in its early days gave rise to a new society and consciousness in India.

Anxious Hindu Masculinities in Colonial North India: Shuddhi and Sangathan Movements

S tudies on masculinity in India have flowered only recently. 1 The study of men is as vital for gender analysis as that of the ruling classes for class analysis. Religious identities particularly have emerged as a critical arena of masculinity studies, including in India. But the privileging of the heterosexual male occurs in a wide range of caste and ethnic groups in South Asia in diverse forms. Significant works have revealed how the male body was constructed in colonial discourse, contrasting the manly British with the effeminate colonial subject. In present-day India, links have been made between the growth of the Hindu Right, assertions of masculinity and violence. However, contemporary articulations of a militant Hindu masculinity and community have historical roots, especially in the colonial period. This article explores the intermeshing of Hindu religious identities, violence, caste, and assertions of masculinities in colonial north India. It does so by particularly focusing on the shuddhi movement (purification; conversion from other religions to Hinduism and reclamation of lower castes into the Hindu caste hierarchy) and the sangathan movement (organization; community defense) in the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh, henceforth UP), which were launched by the Arya Samaj, an activist Hindu revivalist and reformist movement founded in 1875. In colonial India, manhood emerged as a national preoccupation. Colonialism justified itself through masculine images, and nationalism

Remembering the city: translocality and the senses

This article explores how the postcolonial cities of Kolkata and London are remembered across space and time through the translocal memories of a religious minority, followers of the Hindu reform sect, known as the Brahmo Samaj. London Brahmos represent a miniscule translocal community, historically located in the urban culture of Kolkata and yet with a long tradition of travel and migration inside and outside India. Drawing on interviews with London Brahmos, who migrated to London from Kolkata from the 1950s onwards, the article focuses on the role of urban memory as a translocal and sensory practice, infused with enchantment. I start by considering how London and Kolkata are connected through translocal memories of mobility and dwelling. I then move on to contrast sensuous and sterile memories, which emplace translocal urban imaginaries of Kolkata and London and examine the limits of translocality to connect cities and lives through mapping a variety of situated urban sensescapes.

The Place of Comics in the Modern Hindu Imagination

AbstractThis article provides an overview of the birth of comics in India; a discussion of the available scholarship to date, which has focused largely on India’s most prominent comic book series, Amar Chitra Katha, and its connections to classical Hindu mythology and modern Hindu nationalist ideology; a roundup of recent developments in Indian comics since the creation of Amar Chitra Katha; and briefly offers some suggestions for further research.

Universalism in Hinduism

AbstractOne of the distinctive features of Hinduism, especially modern Hinduism, is its emphasis on universalism. Also known as religious pluralism—and sometimes perennialism or the perennial philosophy—universalism can be defined maximally as the idea that all (and minimally as the idea that many) religions contain at least some measure of truth and lead their practitioners to God‐realization—that is, liberation or salvation as conceived in Hindu traditions. Known in contemporary Hindu thought as ‘the harmony of religions’ or ‘the equality of religions’ and prominently associated with the teachings of Ramakrishna and Mahatma Gandhi, universalism is controversial. This article will explore the following dimensions of this doctrine and the controversies associated with it: Its conceptual and social foundations in ancient Hindu scriptures, philosophies, and practices; the process by which its modern formulations both emerge from and influence liberal Christian thought in dialog with Hinduism; criticisms of this doctrine by both Christians and Hindus; and recent attempts to reformulate this doctrine taking these criticisms and into account.

DARWIN AND THE HINDU TRADITION: “DOES WHAT GOES AROUND COME AROUND?”

Abstract. The introduction of English as the medium of instruction for higher education in India in 1835 created a ferment in society and in the religious beliefs of educated Indians—Hindus, Muslims, and, later, Christians. There was a Hindu renaissance characterized by the emergence of reform movements led by charismatic figures who fastened upon aspects of Western thought, especially science, now available in English. The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 was readily assimilated by educated Hindus, and several reformers, notably Vivekananda and Aurobindo, incorporated evolution into their philosophies. Hindu scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose were also influenced by Darwinian evolution, as were a number of modern Hindu thinkers. The results of an investigation into the religious beliefs of young Indian scientists at four centers were also summarized. The view that “what goes around comes around” appears increasingly to be open to doubt. Many educated Indians, not only Hindus, are raising more probing questions that call for deeper dialogues between science and religion, especially about what each believes it means to be truly human.

Unifying Hinduism: philosophy and identity in Indian intellectual history

Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as Hinduism is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts--like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy--have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.

Religious experiments in colonial Calcutta: modern Hinduism and bhakti among the Indian middle class

Any discussion of India from the point of view of the West must deal with the problem posed by the colonial past and the ways in which India was colonized, interpreted and constructed to fit into an imperialist agenda. The terms ‘Hinduism’ and ‘religion’, for example, are themselves quite problematic, since they are born of Western and Judeo-Christian thought, and may not reflect the complexity and diversity of Indic traditions well enough. A translation and transmission of terms and concepts from one cultural domain to another is required, but it is bound to be merely tentative and approximate, since a comprehension of the full meaning of words and concepts related to Indic religions presupposes an extensive grounding in the rich religious thought of India. Bhaktisiddhānta lived on the border between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, between the black and the white towns of Calcutta, between India and the West, and between two world wars. His effort to search for and apply bhakti to the social, political and cultural crises of his time is important for grasping the vitality and dynamism of Indic religions in our time. It is also important for appreciating the struggle carried out by a growing Indian and Hindu middle class to bridge the gaps between East and West, and on the basis of indigenous culture produce new ideas for reciprocal co-operation, which in the case of Bhaktisiddhānta were related to the idea and practice of bhakti.

The power of Tantra: religion, sexuality and the politics of South Asian studies

In the West, the varied body of texts and traditions known as Tantra for more than two centuries has had the capacity to scandalize and shock. For European colonizers, Orientalist scholars and Christian missionaries of the Victorian era, Tantra was generally seen as the most degenerate and depraved example of the worst tendencies of the so-called 'Indian mind': a pathological mixture of sensuality and religion that prompted the decline of modern Hinduism. Yet for most contemporary New Age and popular writers, Tantra is celebrated as a much-needed affirmation of physical pleasure and sex: indeed as a 'cult of ecstasy' to counter the perceived hypocritical prudery of many Westerners. In recent years, Tantra has become the focus of a still larger cultural and political debate. In the eyes of many Hindus, much of the western literature on Tantra represents a form of neo-colonialism, which continues to portray India as an exotic, erotic, hyper-sexualized Orient. Which, then, is the 'real' Tantra? Focusing on one of the oldest and most important Tantric traditions, based in Assam, northeast India, Hugh B Urban shows that Tantra is less about optimal sexual pleasure than about harnessing the divine power of the goddess that flows alike through the cosmos, the human body and political society. In a fresh and vital contribution to the field, the author suggests that the 'real' meaning of Tantra lies in helping us rethink not just the history of Indian religions, but also our own modern obsessions with power, sex and the invidious legacies of cultural imperialism.

Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions, and Modern India

This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show that people can and do draw on traditional Hindu ideas about love (as the product of attachments formed in former lives), rebirth (attachments persist from one birth to another) and marriage (which is supposed to outlast one lifetime) to legitimize socially disapproved unions, both cross-sex and same-sex. Right-wing Hindu forces today mistakenly argue that the idea of same-sex love and marriage, and indeed of marriage based on love itself, are Western imports. In fact, same-sex marriages were reported from rural areas and small towns long before the Indian LGBT movement took cognizance of the issue. When families accept them, female couples are generally able to stay together but when families violently oppose them, often with the collusion of local police, couples may be forced to separate or driven to suicide, even though law courts have uniformly upheld the right of consenting adults to live together. Modern Hindu teachers and priests are divided on the question of the validity and desirability of same-sex marriage; a doctrinal debate is now developing.

Female Immigration as a Catalyst for Ritual Practice: A Social History of Hinduism in the United States

Demographic shifts among Hindu populations in the United States are intimately related to the types of Hinduism that have flourished in the American diaspora. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, Hindu ambassadors, Hindu texts, and missionary accounts formed a Hindu imaginary highly influenced by neo-Vedantic ideology. After 1965, ordinary women and female gurus joined the small populations of Hindu male immigrants and Hindu gurus active in the United States. As a result, the neo-Vedantic version of Hinduism that had stood in for the whole of Hinduism prior to 1965 was forced to diversify because of the religious demands made by the gamete of immigrant Indian Hindu families and the multiple Hindu religiosities presented by popular Hindu gurus. This demographic shift impacted the transition of Hinduism in the United States from a masculinised neo-Vedantic interpretation (1820-1965) to its diversification (1965-present), of which a major component is the integration of the feminine. Prior to the 1965 Immigration Act, which brought Hindu families in large numbers to the United States, neo-Vedantin gurus were the primary propagators of 'Hindu- ism' in the United States. 1 However, it would be more accurate to argue that they imported a particular form of Hindu spirituality that emerged from the colonial encounter and was coloured by Orientalism. The religious reformers of the nine- teenth century, both nationalists and independent religious adepts (gurus), shaped their ideologies in reaction to the Romantic orientalism of the colonial period. Where orientalists depicted the native as lazy, effeminate, and degenerate, Hindu reformers inverted these tropes into 'a nationalist self-assertion (that) took the form of a meticulous reversal of the orientalist-anglicist double hypothesis'. This response 'did not upset the belief in the underlying thematic of Romantic orient- alism affirming the existence of cultural essences and civilizational norms and ten- dencies'. 2 Nineteenth century neo-Vedantin reformers drew their ideas from Shankara's Advaita Vedanta, but shaped them with their concerns to respond to the cultural essentialism enacted by their colonial oppressors. They crafted a 'mas- culine' neo-Hinduism that emphasised European demands for rationalism and democracy, which they supplemented with a dedication to social welfare, science,