Project Noon

What do we learn from Rabindranath Tagore’s copious yet lesser-known writings on the Hindu-Muslim question? 

What do we learn from the fascinating interplay of Hindu-Muslim interactions in the history of Bengal? How do the behavioral patterns between the two communities fare and change over the course of history, particularly entering into the modern period? What do the Bauls, Muslim and Hindu troubadours and singers, illustrate about the limits of language and identity? How do we maintain a distinct religious identity without effacing or encrusting our sense of self? 

Prof. Ankur Barua joins us again for a conversation on these topics and more as we discuss his fascinating recent publication ‘The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbours: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes’, which sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes. The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904–2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu–Muslim synthetic ideas and subjectivities, and these involvements are articulated throughout their writings which provide multiple vignettes of contemporary modes of amity and antagonism.

Watch our previous conversation on Image Worship in Hindu Traditions.

Prof. Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at Cambridge University. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedantic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality An integral dimension of Prof. Barua’s research is the comparative philosophy of religion. He studies the theological and the socio-political aspects of Hindu–Christian engagements. In recent years, his research focus has moved to Indo-Islamic theology and, in particular, to an exploration of the intersections between the idioms of bhakti, yoga, tawḥīd, and taṣawwuf on the multiply-stratified postcolonial landscapes of South Asia. 

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