The Parashakthi Temple in Pontiac, Michigan serves as a site of worship for the Hindu goddess Karumariamman, whose origins are in South India. In her American home Karumariamman has assumed the status of Great Goddess, a tantric deity and wonder worker who communicates directly with devotees through dreams, visions, and miracles. Drawing on fifteen years of field work, Tracy Pintchman reveals how the Parashakthi Temple has become a site of theological and ritual innovation. A unique spiritual community, the temple does not simply reproduce Indian goddess traditions, but instead reimagines Hinduism and the Hindu Goddess in the American religious, cultural, and natural landscape. The congregation's faith is grounded in a vision of the Goddess as a breaker of boundaries, including those of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, history, and nationality. Like her congregants, Pintchman suggests, the goddess is emblematic of the qualities of a new immigrant; she embraces the opportunities her new home affords her and refashions herself, but she does not forget her roots, keeping one foot planted in her Indian homeland and another planted firmly in her new land, the United States. In Goddess Beyond Boundaries: Worshipping the Eternal Mother at a North American Hindu Temple (Oxford UP, 2023), Pintchman considers larger issues concerning the creativity of immigrant Hindu communities and the ways in which diaspora contexts facilitate the production of new forms of Hinduism that are made possible by globalization and modern technology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The ancient Indian Vedas contain sentences of rather varied content, including religious statements ("Varuṇa truly is the king of the gods"), words of wisdom ("Thought is quicker than speech") or even banal observations ("Wife and husband wash each other's back"). The well-known Erlangen Indo-Europeanists and Indologists Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996) and Johanna Narten (1930-2019) collected such sentences in the original language during their decades of work on the Vedas.  In Vedic Sentences: Edited from the Literary Estate (Veda-Sätze: Aus Dem Nachlass Herausgegeben) (Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2024), Antonia Ruppel and Bernhard Forssman have furnished this collection of 863 short texts with translations and a complete vocabulary in two languages (English and German) and are publishing it here for the first time. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Hinduism and Tribal Religions (Springer, 2021) offers an overview of Hinduism as found in India and the diaspora. Exploring Hinduism in India in dynamic interaction, rather than in isolation, the volume discusses the relation of Hinduism with other religions of Indian origin and with religions which did not originate in India but have been a major feature of its religious landscape. This volume fills the need felt by Hindus both in India and the diaspora for more knowledge about modern-day Hinduism, Hindu history and traditions. It takes into account three main aspects of Hinduism: that the active pan-Indian and diasporic language of the Hindus is English; that modern Hindus need a rational rather than a devotional or traditional exposition of the religion; and that they need information about and arguments to address the stereotypes which characterize the presentation of Hinduism in academia and the media, especially in the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Dalpat Rajpurohit's book Sundar's Dreams: Ārambhik Ādhunikatā, Dādūpanth and Sundardās's Poetry (Rajkamal, 2022) explores the making and lifespan of a religious community in early modern India. Demonstrating fresh perspectives on how to speak historically about the Hindi literary past it questions the categorization of Hindi literature into the binaries of ‘spontaneous’ devotional (bhakti) versus ‘mannerist’ courtly (riti) tropes which have remained prevalent in Hindi historiographies since the nationalist period. The book studies the devotional and literate community of the sixteenth-century poet-saint Dadu Dayal who flourished in north-western India during the heydays of the Mughal-Rajput multicultural milieu. Building networks with imperial and sub-imperial courts the community of Dadu Dayal grew in the towns located on the major trade routes in Mughal India. Dadu Dayal’s disciples got patronage from traders flourishing in Mughal trade and admitted saints of merchant castes backgrounds into their community. In such a socio-historical context emerged the poet-saint Sundardas who composed in the polished literary idiom of Hindi and whose life span covered almost the entire seventeenth century.  By studying the large corpus of Sundardas, published and unpublished, the book demonstrates how Sundardas sought to create a new community of taste by participating in the literary innovations happening in the courtly circles. Sundardas was one of the early poet-saints who equated devotion (bhakti) with non-duelist thought, thus vernacularized the philosophical system which would later become the chief scholastic stance of modern Hinduism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Does Hindu astrology work? If so, why? When does it not work? Why? Where and how did Hindu astrology arise and develop? What are its similarities with other astrological systems? These are among the unusual and fascinating questions tackled by an Oxford mathematician, Dr. A. P. Stone, who learned Sanskrit specifically for the purpose. Analyzing various models for the origin, development, and functioning of yugas, manvantaras, karma, and Hindu astrology as a whole, Hindu Astrology: Myths, Symbols, and Realities (Pippa Rann Books, 2023) raises questions also about the role of the supernatural and synchronicity. The epilogue includes the author's reflections on astrology as a whole, religion, and science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within cultures of devotion and ritual shaped by Islamic intellectual and religious histories. Central to this story are the Mughal siblings, Jahanara Begum and Dara Shikoh, and their Sufi guide Mulla Shah. Through detailed art historical analysis supported by new translations, this study contextualizes artworks made for Indo-Muslim patrons by putting them into direct dialogue with written testimonies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

A number of converts to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts and deities, and they often interpret these events through a specifically Buddhist lens. Paranormal States: Psychic Abilities in Buddhist Convert Communities (Columbia UP, 2024) is a groundbreaking exploration of these phenomena and their implications for both humanistic and scientific study of the paranormal. D. E. Osto examines accounts of paranormal phenomena experienced by convert Buddhists from around the world collected through an online survey and interviews, placing them in the context of Indian Buddhist sources and recent scientific research. They focus in detail on the life stories of two interviewees and the important role the paranormal has played in their lives. These contemporary first-person narratives demonstrate the continued importance of the psychic and paranormal within the Buddhist tradition, and they can be interpreted as a living Buddhist folklore. Osto considers the limitations of both traditional religious views and Western scientific studies of the paranormal and proposes instead a new Buddhist phenomenological approach. Ultimately, Paranormal States contends, these deeply mysterious and extraordinary experiences exceed current understandings--and they can help bridge the gap between religious and scientific worldviews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya (SUNY Press, 2024), Steven E. Lindquist investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Known for his sharp tongue and deep thought, Yājñavalkya is associated with a number of "firsts" in Indian religious literary history: the first person to discuss brahman and ātman thoroughly; the first to put forth a theory of karma and reincarnation; the first to renounce his household life; and the first to dispute with women in religious debate.  Throughout early Indian history, he was seen as a priestly bearer of ritual authority, a sage of mystical knowledge, and an innovative propagator of philosophical ideas and religious law. Drawing on history, literary studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit philology, narrative studies, and philosophy, Lindquist traces Yājñavalkya's literary life--from his earliest mentions in ritual texts, through his developing biography in the Upaniṣads, and finally to his role as a hoary sage in narrative literature--offering the first detailed monograph on this central figure in early Indian religious and literary history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

This autobiography--Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story (Bloomsbury, 2024)--traces Francis X. Clooney's intellectual and spiritual journey from middle-class American Catholicism to a lifelong study of Hinduism. Clooney sheds fresh and realistic light on the idea and ideal of scholar-practitioner, since his wide learning, Christian and Hindu, is grounded in his Catholic and Jesuit commitments, as well as in a commensurate learning with respect to several Hindu traditions that are most accessible to scholars willing to learn empathetically and in a participatory manner. What Clooney has learnt and written must be understood in terms of a love of Christ deeply informed by a Hindu instinct for loving God without reserve. A fundamental spiritual disposition - intuitions of God present everywhere - has energized his work over his long career, love giving direction and body to his professional academic work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

An influential eighth-century Buddhist text, Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, or Guide to the Practices of Awakening, how to become a supremely virtuous person, a bodhisattva who desires to end the suffering of all sentient beings.  Stephen Harris’s Buddhist Ethics and the Bodhisattva Path: Śāntideva on Virtue and Well-Being (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is a study of the Guide. It articulates Śāntideva’s moral psychology and virtue theory in chapter-length treatments of four central virtues: generosity, patience, compassion, and wisdom. According to Harris, Śāntideva thinks these virtues benefit human persons, and thus the radically altruistic bodhisattva path is also a self-interested one. Harris’s book also explores how this ethical project coheres with the emptiness of all things, the famous Madhyamaka denial of intrinsic nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora.  Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology (SUNY Press, 2024) reframes this controversy by shifting attention from "conversion" to a wider, interreligious study of "mission" as a category of thought and practice. Comparative theologian Reid B. Locklin traces the emergence of the nondualist Hindu teaching of Advaita Vedānta as a missionary tradition, from the eighth century to the present day, and draws this tradition into dialogue with contemporary proposals in Christian missiology. As a descriptive study of the Chinmaya Mission, the Ramakrishna Mission, and other leading Advaita mission movements, Hindu Mission, Christian Mission contributes to a growing body of scholarship on transnational Hinduism. As a speculative work of Christian comparative theology, it develops key themes from this engagement for a new, interreligious theology of mission and conversion for the twenty-first century and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Saving the Dead: Tibetan Funerary Rituals in the Tradition of the Sarvardurgatipariśodhana Tantra (WSTB, 2024) explores Tibetan funerary manuals based on the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (SDP), focusing on the writings of the Sa skya author Rje btsun Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1147–1216) and the diverse forms of agency—human, nonhuman, and material—articulated in his texts. It also examines the polemical responses evoked by Grags pa rgyal mtshan’s manuals from Bo dong Paṇ chen Phyogs las rnam gyal (1375/6–1451) and Go rams pa Bsod nams seng ge (1429–89), elucidating key points of contention including methodologies for site preparation in funeral rites, visualization practices involving objects representing the deceased, and the relationship between tantric narrative and ritual enactment. Finally, the study analyzes A mes zhabs Ngag dbang kun dga’ bsod nams’s (1597–1659) attempt to integrate advanced bardo practices characteristic of highest yogatantra into the yogatantric rites delineated in the SDP, underscoring divergent assumptions about postmortem agency reflected in works classified as yogatantra and highest yogatantra. This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Jainism originated in India and shares some features with Buddhism and Hinduism, but it is a distinct tradition with its own key texts, art, rituals, beliefs, and history. One important way it has often been distinguished from Buddhism and Hinduism is through the highly contested category of Tantra: Jainism, unlike the others, does not contain a tantric path to liberation.  But in Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation (U Chicago Press, 2021), historian of religions Ellen Gough refines and challenges our understanding of Tantra by looking at the development over two millennia of a Jain incantation, or mantra, that evolved from an auspicious invocation in a second-century text into a key component of mendicant initiations and meditations that continue to this day. Typically, Jainism is characterized as a celibate, ascetic path to liberation in which one destroys karma through austerities, while the tantric path to liberation is characterized as embracing the pleasures of the material world, requiring the ritual use of mantras to destroy karma. Gough, however, argues that asceticism and Tantra should not be viewed in opposition to one another. She does so by showing that Jains perform "tantric" rituals of initiation and meditation on mantras and maṇḍalas. Jainism includes kinds of tantric practices, Gough provocatively argues, because tantric practices are a logical extension of the ascetic path to liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

According to Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (early centuries CE), Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill Śambūka, whose transgression is said to be the cause of a young Brahmin's death.  The works surveyed in Śambūka's Death Toll: A History of Motives and Motifs in an Evolving Rāmāyaṇa Narrative (Anthem Press, 2023) this study include numerous works originating in Hindu, Jain, Dalit and non-Brahmin communities while spanning the period from Śambūka's first appearance in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa through to the present day. The book follows the Śambūka episode chronologically across its entire history--approximately two millennia--to illuminate the social, religious, legal, and artistic connections that span the entire range of the Rāmāyaṇa's influence and its place throughout various phases of Indian history and social revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Providing a decolonial, action-focused account of Yoga philosophy, Yoga - Anticolonial Philosophy: An Action-Focused Guide to Practice (Singing Dragon, 2024) from Dr. Shyam Ranganathan, pioneering scholar in the field of Indian moral philosophy, focuses on the South Asian tradition to explore what Yoga was like prior to colonization. It challenges teachers and trainees to reflect on the impact of Western colonialism on Yoga as well as understand Yoga as the original decolonial practice in a way that is accessible. Each chapter takes the reader through a journey of sources and traditions, beginning with an investigation into the colonial -Platonic and Aristotelian- approaches to pedagogy in colonized yoga spaces, through contrary, ancient philosophies of South Asia, such as Jainism, Buddhism, Sankhya, and various forms of Vedanta, to sources of Yoga, including the Upanisads, Yoga Sutra, Bhagavad Gita and Hatha Yoga Pradipika. With discussions of the precolonial philosophy of Yoga, its relationship to social justice, and modern postural yoga's relationship with colonial trauma, this is a comprehensive guide for any yoga teacher or trainee to activate and synergize their practice. Supplementary online resources bring the text to life, making this the perfect text for yoga teacher trainings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

The Violence of Recognition: Adivasi Indigeneity and Anti-Dalitness in India (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the operations of Hindu nationalists and their role in sparking the largest incident of anti-Christian violence in India’s history. Through vivid ethnographic storytelling, Pinky Hota explores the roots of ethnonationalist conflict between two historically marginalized groups—the Kandha, who are Adivasi (tribal people considered indigenous in India), and the Pana, a community of Christian Dalits (previously referred to as “untouchables”). Hota documents how Hindutva mobilization led to large-scale violence, culminating in attacks against many thousands of Pana Dalits in the district of Kandhamal in 2008. Bringing indigenous studies as well as race and ethnic studies into conversation with Dalit studies, Hota shows that, despite attempts to frame these ethnonationalist tensions as an indigenous population’s resistance against disenfranchisement, Kandha hostility against the Pana must be understood as anti-Christian, anti-Dalit violence animated by racial capitalism. Hota’s analysis of caste in relation to race and religion details how Hindu nationalists exploit the singular and exclusionary legal recognition of Adivasis and the putatively liberatory, anti-capitalist discourse of indigeneity in order to justify continued oppression of Dalits—particularly those such as the Pana. Because the Pana lost their legal protection as recognized minorities (Scheduled Caste) upon conversion to Christianity, they struggle for recognition within the Indian state’s classificatory scheme. Within the framework of recognition, Hota shows, indigeneity works as a political technology that reproduces the political, economic, and cultural exclusion of landless marginalized groups such as Dalits. The Violence of Recognition reveals the violent implications of minority recognition in creating and maintaining hierarchies of racial capitalism. Yash Sharma is a PhD student in Political Science at the School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati. His research is focused on the interactions of political mobilization and anti-minority violence within Hindu nationalist organizations in India. Twitter. Email: sharmaym@mail.uc.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

For My Blemishless Lord (de Gruyter, 2023) presents the text and translation of the exquisite poem Amalaṉ Āti Pirāṉ by Tiruppāṇ Āḻvār, which is part of the Śrīvaiṣṇava canon, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (6th- 9thcenturies CE), as well as of the three Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries in Tamil-Sanskrit Manipravala (13th- 14th centuries) by key figures in the medieval religious history of South Asia, namely, Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai, Aḻakiya Maṇavāḷa Perumāḷ Nāyaṉār, and Vedānta Deśika. Offering the first fully annotated, complete translation of these exegetical writings, this volume analyses the language, commentary techniques, and the theological positions of, as well as cultural, religious and other allusions made by these commentators, placing them in their literary, social and religious backgrounds, during a period of budding dissent within the Śrīvaiṣṇava community, to which they contributed at least in part. This rich resource is made available in English for the first time for students of Tamil and Manipravala, theology, religious history, and philology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

In Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan (Suluk Press, 2024), Carl W. Ernst and Patrick J. D’Silva explore the intersections of Sufi and yogic breath-based meditation. Ernst and D’Silva offer us here two stunning texts for study.  The first, an anonymous Persian translation of a 14th century manuscript that introduces us to a variety of divinations, incantations, and much more, as well as a thorough outline of the science of the breath, based on whether it comes out from the left or right nostrils and its significance. This text especially is fascinating for its incantations to yogini devis (or female spirits).  The second text under consideration is Hazrat Inayat Khan’s The Science of the Breath dictated in English to his student Zohra Williams in the early 20th century. There are numerous similarities across these two texts separated by centuries, especially the focus on breath divination based on left and right nostrils (in this instance associated with jamal and jalali qualities while in the former focused on solar and lunar relations) but also key differences, such as attention to the elements like earth, fire, water etc. in Inayat Khan’s teachings.  Reading these two texts on breath and its divination side by side brings to focus the long tradition of Sufi engagement with yoga, and the overlaps between Hindu and Muslim spiritual practices amongst Sufis and yogis, especially of magic, sciences and much more. This book will be of interest to practitioners of Sufism as well as those with interest in Sufism, Islam, yoga, Hinduism, and much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Personhood is central to the worldview of ancient India. Across voluminous texts and diverse traditions, the subject of the puruṣa, the Sanskrit term for "person," has been a constant source of insight and innovation. Yet little sustained scholarly attention has been paid to the precise meanings of the puruṣa concept or its historical transformations within and across traditions. In Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India (Oxford UP, 2024), Matthew I. Robertson traces the history of Indic thinking about puruṣas through an extensive analysis of the major texts and traditions of ancient India. Through clear explanations of classic Sanskrit texts and the idioms of Indian traditions, Robertson discerns the emergence and development of a sustained, paradigmatic understanding that persons are deeply confluent with the world. Personhood is worldhood. Puruṣa argues for the significance of this "worldly" thinking about personhood to Indian traditions and identifies a host of techniques that were developed to "extend" and "expand" persons to ever-greater scopes. Ritualized swellings of sovereigns to match the extent of their realm find complement in ascetic meditations on the intersubjective nature of perceptually delimited person-worlds, which in turn find complement in yogas of sensory restraint, the dietary regimens of Ayurvedic medicine, and the devotional theologies by which persons "share" and "eat" the expansive divinity of God. Whether in the guise of a king, an ascetic, a yogi, a buddha, or a patient in the care of an Ayurvedic physician, fully realized persons know themselves to be coterminous with the horizons of their world. Offering new readings of classic works and addressing the fields of religion, politics, philosophy, medicine, and literature, Puruṣa: Personhood in Ancient India challenges us to reexamine the goals of ancient Indian religions and yields new insights into the interrelated natures of persons and the worlds in which they live. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions

Ute Husken discusses the European Association for South Asian Studies and its upcoming conference in Heidelberg, Germany in October 2025. This conference is open to scholars of wide-reaching disciplines and career stages. Feel free to contact: info@ecsas2025.com with general queries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions