South Asian Religions Research Articles

Introduction to the special issue: Authoritarianism and religion in South Asia: Trends and twists

AbstractReligious sentiments have become a potent tool for political elites, altering national identities and citizenship criteria. This manipulation, driven by majoritarian ideologies, has marginalized religious minorities, leading to discrimination, violence, and legal persecution against them. Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist nationalisms seem to collectively erode secular democracy in South Asia. Moreover, right‐wing populist leaders, notably Modi in India and the Rajapaksas in Sri Lanka, have merged religious nationalism with authoritarian political orientations posing a challenge to democratic foundations and impacting significantly on the dynamics of state and societal relations. This is the context in which this World Affairs 2024 special issue delves into the relationship(s) between religion, politics, and authoritarianism in the South Asian region. It examines the evolving “religion‐politics” nexus or “complex” to explicate the relationship between religion and authoritarianism, particularly with respect to authoritarian governments mobilizing religion as a readily available resource for popular political mobilization, legitimization, and power consolidation. India's BJP employs Hindutva ideology to marginalize minorities, Bangladesh's regime uses Islam for political legitimacy, and Sri Lanka's Sinhala‐Buddhist nationalism fosters exclusionary policies. By fostering social and cultural polarization, this fusion of authoritarianism with religious nationalism poses a serious challenge to the secular state. The articles in this special issue explore these themes comprehensively, delving into the ideological foundations of political decisions and their consequences for marginalized communities. By shedding light on this multifaceted interplay, the collection offers valuable insights into South Asia's sociopolitical landscape, serving as a vital resource for scholars, policy makers, and global observers seeking to understand the region's complex dynamics.

Mathas, toward understanding the public religious, educational, and political ascetic institution in South Asian religions

AbstractThemathais an important yet understudied public religious, political, and educational institution with wide‐ranging influence in the formation of the structures and theology of Hinduism and Jainism. Recently, scholars of South Asian religion have turned their attention to understand these institutions and their role in the creation of sectarian identity and theology, as educational and economic centers, and symbols of sovereign power. This essay is not attempting thorough historical account of ascetic institutions in India. Instead, its focus is to highlight the existing and recent scholarship on themathato encourage more research on the topic. Therefore, this essay provides an overview of recent trends in the scholarship ofmathasin India, focusing on exemplary works that have helped us to understand the history of these institutions more deeply, providing an overview of themathathrough an overview of recent work.

Good Queen, Bad Queen: Gender, Devotion, and Mythmaking in Women’s Histories

How do we remember and write about powerful women and the impacts they have had on history? Who tells their stories, and to whose advantage are those narratives constructed? And what happens if we look carefully and acknowledge that when they enter historical narratives, many of these “women” are not adults, but actually relatively young girls? Rani Rasmani Dasi (1793–1861) and Bar-rajā Phuleshwari Kunwari (also known as Phulmati and Pramateshwari) (d. 1731) are each remembered as powerful women influencers of popular religion in South Asia, though in very different ways. These two “queens” were each remarkable women who variously defied, upended, and upheld common assumptions and narratives about caste, gender, power, and religion in Hindu society in early modern India. This study critically investigates the work of Rasmani and Phuleshwari’s many chroniclers, biographers, and hagiographers, questioning received narratives and attempting to construct a glimpse of them as living girls and women. What do we actually know about them, about their activities and motivations? And what can we know, when so much of the evidence is unreliable? Thrust into unfamiliar social, political, and religious environments as young girls, they grew into deeply religious women who used their considerable influence and resources to promote their own visions of divine power. They also became full participants in and beneficiaries of problematic power structures of domination and exploitation. But with closer investigation, it appears that much of what we think we know about these women is incomplete or, in the case of Phuleshwari, completely unreliable.

Modern Islamic Civilization in South and Southeast Asia

Background. Islam is the second largest religion in South Asia, with more than 600 million Muslims living there, making up about a third of the region's population. The history of Islam in South Asia began along the coastal regions of the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, after its beginnings in the Arabian Peninsula. Purpose. This research was made to thoroughly explore the history of Islamic civilization in the modern era in South Asia and Southeast Asia. With this research, it is hoped that it can add insight to the readers in the study of the history of Islamic civilization and can answer various questions about when Islam entered South Asia and Southeast Asia, how the process and impact on the people who live there, and who plays an important role in the spread of Islam on both continents. Method. The data collected will be analyzed by identifying the themes, arguments or main ideas in the texts and analyzing how they influenced and were influenced by the development of Islamic civilization in Southeast and South Asia. Results. Southeast Asia is home to the largest Muslim population in the world. Islam is the majority religion in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei Darussalam. Islam in Southeast Asia was spread through the activities of traders and Sufis. Unlike other Islamic regions of the world, it was spread through the Arab and Turkish conquests. Conclusion. Thus the presentation of material about Islamic Civilization in Southeast Asia and South Asia and how the method of its spread. We as writers realize that the results of the papers we compile are far from perfect, for the future we will try to be even better in presenting writing or discussion.

Kipling's Manipulation of Religions in Kim: A Document of his Imperialist Position

Since the publication of Rudyard Kipling's (1865–1936) Kim (1901), most critics have agreed that the novel falls into the genre of colonial fiction. But they are divided into two groups – defenders and detractors – regarding Kipling's treatment of religions in the novel. The defenders celebrate his accomplishment and sympathy in depicting the devotion and attraction of the Victorian Era towards Buddhism. On the other hand, the detractors blame Kipling for fictionalising the confrontation between pragmatic Western rationality and Eastern mystical irrationality. Against this backdrop, this article revisits the novel with a postcolonial lens to study Kipling's dealings with religions in South-Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It discovers that Kipling employs strategies of surveillance and knowledge of history and ethnography while handling religions in the novel. Such fictional employment of strategy and knowledge in characterising the South-Asian religions seems to have been colonially favourable in the contemporary socio-political context. Accordingly, this article argues that Kipling manipulates religions in his narrative for the sake of imperialism through surveillance of religions, consciousness of history, and ethnographic discourse that reflect his imperialist position.

It’s All in the Name: A Character-Based Approach to Infer Religion

AbstractLarge-scale microdata on group identity are critical for studies on identity politics and violence but remain largely unavailable for developing countries. We use personal names to infer religion in South Asia—where religion is a salient social division, and yet, disaggregated data on it are scarce. Existing work predicts religion using a dictionary-based method and, therefore, cannot classify unseen names. We provide character-based machine-learning models that can classify unseen names too with high accuracy. Our models are also much faster and, hence, scalable to large datasets. We explain the classification decisions of one of our models using the layer-wise relevance propagation technique. The character patterns learned by the classifier are rooted in the linguistic origins of names. We apply these to infer the religion of electoral candidates using historical data on Indian elections and observe a trend of declining Muslim representation. Our approach can be used to detect identity groups across the world for whom the underlying names might have different linguistic roots.

The Helen Crovetto Award

The co-general editors of Nova Religio are pleased to announce the winner of the Eighth Helen Crovetto Award for Excellence in the Study of New Religious Movements with Ties to South Asia. The award was established in 2010 by Helen Crovetto to encourage research and articles on new religions that originate in South Asia, as well as on new religious movements that were inspired in part or whole by religions from South Asia. The winner was selected by members of Nova Religio’s editorial board with expertise in South Asian religions, and Catherine Wessinger, co-general editor, from articles appearing in volume 25 of the journal.Emily McKendry-Smith receives the award for her article, “Public Household, Private Congregation: The Brahma Kumaris as a ‘Public Private’ Space for Nepali Women,” which appeared in Nova Religio 25, no. 3 (February 2022), https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2022.25.3.32.We thank Helen Crovetto for her generosity in providing the opportunity to encourage and reward authors for exceptional articles on new religious movements with ties to South Asia. We look forward to recognizing outstanding work in this area in the future.

Визначення часу та місця створення “Гаяшірша-паньчаратри”

This paper discusses the dating and the place of origin of the text Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra, a compilation that sets down the rules and rituals governing the construction of that most dramatic, physical representation of religion in South Asia, the Hindu temple. The Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra is, as it states itself, a compendium. It gathers material from previous sources. The oldest known manuscript is from the 16th century. Texts that cite the Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra date from between the 9th or 10th century to the 17th century. The Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra must be older than these texts. Previous scholars have suggested dates ranging from c. 500–1600 CE in respect to the dating of the Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra, which is a very wide window indeed. The general scholarly consensus, however, is that the text was produced around 800 CE. Some details in the text, like the descriptions of circumambulatory paths, can be used to date the text as well as identify its place of origin. References to north Indian scripts in the text indicate that the Hayaśīrṣa Pañcarātra was produced shortly before the 10th century. Since the text has borrowed sections from the Viṣṇudharmottara Purāṇa, it must be younger than that text, i.e. it was compiled after the 7th century CE. The ways that vyūhas and lokeśas are described in the text suggest an earlier rather than later date. Thus, the 8th–9th century CE seems to be an acceptable working hypothesis. The references to scripts may suggest a date later rather than earlier in that period. All the extant manuscripts of the text have been found in Bengal and Orissa, which makes them the best candidates in respect to the text’s place of origin. References in the text, like names of kings, which can be connected to a place, are either north Indian or specifically Bengali. The text is, therefore, of a north Indian origin and most likely was compiled in northeast India, probably Bengal or Orissa.

Review: Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname, by Stuart Earle Strange

Review: <i>Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname</i>, by Stuart Earle Strange

Logic in the Religions of South Asia

This special issue of Journal of Indian Philosophy results from a thematic session on “Logic in the Religions of South Asia”, a separate section of the 2nd World Congress on Logic and Religion (held at the University of Warsaw, Poland, June 18–22 June, 2017). The papers address questions, discussed in philosophical thought in classical India, such as how religious practice could shape philosophical reflection on the relation between language and reality, whether there are necessary truths and whether a priori knowledge is possible, the nature of some arguments for the existence of God, especially the argument from the causality of the universe, the problem of the validity of religious authority, the relation between logic and religious belief as well as language-related topics such as a theory of interrogatives expressing doubts and of declaratives expressing certitudes, both regarded as the verbal expression of cognitions.

On Rewriting Buddhism

Abstract Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being (e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.

Dalit religion

AbstractA reckoning with the question of Dalit religion is overdue. The religious worlds of that swath of the population of South Asia subject to the structural violence of “untouchability” have long been misapprehended—a consequence, in large part, of classificatory practices of the colonial and postcolonial state—as a kind of unlettered adjunct to Hinduism. This article assembles scholarly findings of recent years to foreground how Dalits themselves have constructed religious community across time and space. Dalit religion, we argue, is better understood not as a variant of Hinduism but as a critical provocation to all religion in South Asia, as well as a congeries of autonomous regional traditions that, too long obfuscated under colonial and brahminical taxonomies of religion, call out for study on their own terms.

The Helen Crovetto Award

The co-general editors of Nova Religio are pleased to announce the winner of the Seventh Helen Crovetto Award for Excellence in the Study of New Religious Movements with Ties to South Asia. The award was established in 2010 by Helen Crovetto to encourage research and articles on new religions that originate in South Asia, as well as on new religious movements that were inspired in part or whole by religions from South Asia. The winner was selected by Hugh Urban, Scott Lowe, Andrea Jain, and Catherine Wessinger, members of Nova Religio’s editorial board with expertise in South Asian religions, from articles appearing in volume 24 of the journal.Irina Sadovina receives the award for her article, “Legitimating New Religiosity in Contemporary Russia: ‘Vedic Wisdom’ Under Fire” (https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2021.24.3.6), which appeared in Nova Religio 24, no. 3 (February 2021).We thank Helen Crovetto for her generosity in providing the opportunity to encourage and reward authors for exceptional articles on new religious movements with ties to South Asia. We look forward to recognizing outstanding work in this area in the future.

Review: Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds, by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Review: <i>Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds</i>, by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

Promoting ‘Yogi Art’

Yoga studies have inaugurated a vast amount of possible research areas that transcend the regional and the disciplinary. This paper probes into the history and reception of yoga in Latin America. In particular, it discusses the ways in which a post-revolutionary Mexican intellectual, José Vasconcelos, understood yoga in the 1920s. This early understanding of yoga was a combination of both socio-political discourses worldwide and the nationalist enterprise of building a modern nation, where notions of race, identity, and cleanliness were paramount. Through different writings, Vasconcelos interpreted both South Asian religions and the Americas as beneficial influences for the betterment of humanity. By noting the influence of different ideologies popular in Latin America (such as nationalisms, Social Darwinism, or Theosophy), this paper analyses the cultural context against which Vasconcelos outlined his understanding of yoga, India, national culture and progress.

Review: Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st Century, by John Stratton Hawley

Jack Hawley has devoted his academic career to studying Vaishnava devotional (bhakti) groups centered on Krishna. Much of his research over the last five decades has been conducted in Vrindavan, a once-small town in the “wilderness” (the “van” in Vrindavan) about 90 miles from the outskirts of New Delhi. Deeply revered by the devotees of Krishna as an idyllic land of pastures and forest glades, the surrounding district (Braj) provides the background to many beloved tales of Krishna’s pastimes, or lila. The town itself is nestled in an oxbow of the sacred Yamuna river, which is central to many of the stories and rituals enjoyed by Krishna’s devotees.Hawley seems extremely well integrated into the region’s life and rhythms and his deep local knowledge is on display throughout the text. He begins his tour of Vrindavan with detailed discussions of ongoing environmental destruction, land development mania, Disneyfication of sacred sites, manic real estate frenzy, and the mind-numbing political corruption that makes it all possible. Existing and proposed Krishna-based theme parks and shopping malls are described in vivid detail.Since 1970, the professor at Barnard College has personally witnessed Vrindavan’s transformation from near idyllic pilgrimage town (though never the paradise depicted in some nostalgic accounts, of course) to bustling metropolitan sprawl, with high rise apartment complexes cluttering the skyline and the still sacred but hideously polluted and diminished Yamuna river channeled, trashed, toxic, and lifeless. Even the most devout pilgrims no longer risk bathing in the deadly effluent. Hawley provides readers with nightmare images—for example, cows choking on discarded plastic bags—and recurring mentions of the monkey problem. In recent decades, Vrindavan’s resourceful monkeys have taught each other to steal eyeglasses and cell phones. Working in collusion with savvy street kids, these rogue primates drop without warning from eves and awnings to snatch valuables from their startled victims. The loot is then returned to owners by the children for a reward. The children pay their simian collaborators with food. While Hawley is clearly fed up with this symbiotic scam, readers may find it intriguing.ISKCON and its many offshoots and competitors play major roles in the trendy, overdeveloped Vrindavan taking form with great speed. (Curiously, most of the western ISKCON devotees in the town are Russian.) In Hawley’s analysis, “The new Vrindavan could not have developed in the way it has without the particular vision of globalization that the Hare Krishna movement has fostered” (91). The ISKCON faction centered in India’s high-tech incubator Bangalore is especially wealthy, powerful, and ambitious. Hawley devotes a chapter to the group’s partially constructed 70-story temple, the Vrindavan Chandrodaya Mandir. When completed it will be the tallest religious structure on the planet, towering over the long lost pastoral paradise of Krishna’s childhood. Its interior exhibits will edify tourists and pilgrims with anachronistic dioramas and state-of-the-art 3-D projections of the old Vrindavan it has helped destroy.Later chapters discuss competing architectural visions of Vrindavan old and new, the struggle between preservationist and futurist factions fighting for control of the town, the abuse and care of widows (Vrindavan has long provided a rough, but holy, haven for widows discarded by their relatives), the varied influences of ISKCON and rival international new religious movements, and descriptions of the religious careers of Hawley’s Goswami friends. The book concludes with discussions of new versus old, destruction versus preservation, constructed versus primeval, ruin versus renewal, and virtual versus real.The book is an elegy as much as a scholarly tome, written in a style that is highly personal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, and intimate. Its poetic language and the author’s assumptions about readers’ background knowledge may discourage undergraduates and those unfamiliar with South Asian religion. Readers comfortable with basic Indian religious vocabulary (both Hindi and Sanskrit) will have an easier time with occasional passages where Hawley neglects to translate terms. One suspects that Hawley viewed this book as a culmination of his career and wrote it exactly the way he wished, academic conventions be damned. More power to him.In his final passages, Hawley portrays the rapacious overdevelopment of Vrindavan as emblematic of the disastrous ecological destruction accelerating all around us wherever we live. Hawley concludes with a warning: “Vrindavan is the sign of our times” (297).

Vice and Virtue in Sikh Ethics

AbstractIn recent years, there has been increasing interest in analytic philosophy that engages with non-Western philosophical traditions, including South Asian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. However, thus far, there has been (to my knowledge) no engagement with Sikhism, despite its status as a major world religion with a rich philosophical tradition. This paper is an attempt to get a start at analytic philosophical engagement with Sikh philosophy. My focus is on Sikh ethics, and in particular on the theory of vice and virtue that can be gleaned from Sikh scripture. According to this theory, the five major vices have a unified source in the vice of haumai. Haumai is a kind of false conception of oneself as singularly important, and correspondingly, a false conception of the world as revolving around oneself, as a world of objects there for one’s use. Vice, then, comes down to the failure to recognize the importance of others. The corresponding picture of virtue is that virtue consists in a recognition of the importance of others, through the recognition of an ultimate reality on which all are One. After reconstructing the Sikh theory of vice and virtue, I conclude with some comparative remarks on Sikh and Western ethics.

Studying race in the field of South Asian religions

AbstractIn this commentary, I discuss scholarship on race in study of religion in South Asia. Using my experiences in the field, I look at how and why studies on race are marginalized, dismissed, and/or misread. I argue that without a feminist analysis informed by women of color feminisms and queer of color critique, race scholarship will only continue to be marginalized and/or misread even as the field of South Asian religions tries to center race as an object of analysis. I foreground race and caste power as a way to critique how threads of power run through much of the field of South Asian religions and structures the ways in which scholarship on race is approached (or not). As Asian studies broadly and South Asian Studies specifically creates new avenues for scholarship on race, the study of religion in South Asia must examine how racism is institutionalized within the field.

Feminist Critical Hindu Studies in formation

AbstractThis article outlines the philosophy, methodology, and aims of Feminist Critical Hindu Studies (FCHS). We propose a series of strategies and commitments for change and action in the fields of South Asian Religions, Hindu Studies, and South Asian Studies. We draw on the work of scholars in Queer, Critical Race, and Feminist theories. We argue for a queering methodology that disorients us from and seeks to make visible the structures of knowledge and power on which Hinduism and Hindu Studies rest, including the intersecting processes of racialization, the regulation of sexuality and gender, and the violence of caste. We use the concept of Hindu formations to complicate the notions of “Hinduism” and “Hindus” as categories that not only arise in conjunction with forms of white supremacy and caste supremacy, but are imbricated with them. This approach allows us to explore how these categories have been used by various groups throughout history to empower and subjugate people. Driven by the theoretical frameworks of disorientation, intersectionality, and assemblage, FCHS reorients us in our relationship to Hindu Studies, as well as the spaces, practices, and people that inhabit academic institutions, newly attentive to who and what is missing. The work of FCHS is both academic and activist in nature: we call for ethical commitments to build meaningful relations of solidarity and allyship. Working against systemic oppression requires a willingness to interrogate our own positionalities and challenge our complicities.

Religion, nationalism, and gender: Perspective from South Asia

Religious mobilization often takes the form of engagement with “the woman question”: how should women as carriers of culture comport themselves? This article shows that many of the debates over the role of women and religion in South Asia are misunderstood when they are seen as instances of religious fundamentalism. Rather, the theoretical framework to make sense of public religion and gender debates should be through the lens of postcolonial nationalism. The creation and consolidation of the nation is what is at stake—not the creation of the religious community as such. In order to make this argument, the article offers both a review of the literature on secularism and gender as well as short case studies from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. These three former British colonies have each struggled to arrive at a secular settlement and often the contestation over the place of religion has centered on the rules and roles of women in these societies.