Recommended by Ankur Barua, Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge.
A list of resources for the online lecture series on Hindu socio-religious visions to be held in August 2023 as part of a collaboration between Project Noon and The Cambridge Interfaith Programme.
On Hinduism:
Hindu socioreligious universes have a labyrinthine complexity. If you study these universes specifically at the grassroots, which I often do, you may feel lost, which I often do too!
So, before embarking on an exploration at ground zero, it is good to steadily work through a few long-range surveys of the field. Such introductory overviews contextualise specific texts, traditions, and teachers, and enable you to gain a “sense of narrative” – that is, you begin to understand why someone in, say, 1650 CE was likely to express a theological viewpoint in a certain way whereas someone in, say, 450 BCE had formulated this viewpoint in quite a different way.
The umbrella term “Hindu-ism” encompasses a diverse – and even divergent – set of traditions, and the key challenge is to understand both the distinctive variations across these traditions and certain overlapping patterns of intellectual inquiry, spiritual discipline, and social living.
The introductory text by Klaus K. Klostermaier is a good starting point – you can build on your understanding with the more detailed introductions by Gavin Flood and Julius Lipner. Central to many Hindu visions of the human self (ātman), the divine self (paramātman, brahman), and the complexities of the everyday world (saṃsāra) is the Bhagavad-gītā, and the volumes by Catherine Robinson and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad are helpful guides through its exegetical textures and sociopolitical locations.
One of the most distinctive aspects of Hindu socioreligious traditions is the conceptualization of the divine reality as the cosmic feminine power (devī) – the volume by John Hawley and Donna Wulff is a good introduction to the multiple manifestations of the devī, and debates relating to the relation between cosmological visions of the deity and women’s empowerment on the ground.
In a certain sense, Hinduism is a conceptual abstraction – what you find in the sociocultural densities of everyday living is not so much a scriptural principle as real-life people. So alongside an exploration of the philosophical and the theological dimensions of Hindu worldviews, it is important to study the sociocultural locations of these worldviews – the volumes by Joyce Flueckiger, John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan, and Stephen Jacobs contain numerous vignettes of everyday forms of Hindu living.
For around two millennia, Hindu visions of ultimate liberation from worldly finitude have coexisted, sometimes in an uneasy tension, with Hindu imaginations of the social polity in the here and now. Over the last two centuries, these visions and imaginations have occasionally entered into volatile combinations with the idioms of nationalism, anticolonialism, social identity, and collective belonging. A good starting point for exploring these dynamic complexities is the volume by David Ludden.
- Hinduism: a Short History / Klaus K. Klostermaier
- An Introduction to Hinduism / Gavin Flood
- Hindus: their Religious Beliefs and Practices / Julius Lipner
- Interpretations of the Bhagavad-Gītā and Images of the Hindu Tradition / Catherine A. Robinson
- Devī: Goddesses of India / edited by John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff
- Everyday Hinduism / Joyce Flueckiger
- The Life of Hinduism / John Stratton Hawley and Vasudha Narayanan
- Hinduism Today: An Introduction / Stephen Jacobs
- Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India / edited by David Ludden
- Divine Self, Human Self: The Philosophy of Being in Two Gītā Commentaries / Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad.
On Hindu-Muslim engagements:
A recurring theme in the literature on Hindu-Muslim engagements is the role of Sufi teachers (pīr, murshid) in reworking or recalibrating Indic wisdom through Islamic prisms. C. Ernst highlights the significance of yogic teachings in Sufi milieus. Dārā Shukōh (1615–1659) is a pioneering figure on these translatory horizons – his motif of a “meeting of two oceans” is echoed in the title of J. Assayag’s volume. Another theme relates to the “reification” of types of sociocultural identity or socioeconomic location through the binary prism of either Hindu or Muslim. Through ethnographic studies, P. Gottschalk shows that villagers often use a set of competing identities which do not always revolve around specifically religious axes. D.-S. Khan too critiques the representation of Hindus and Muslims as belonging to two monolithically antagonistic blocs. A good historical account of the emergence of such representations in colonial India is G. Thursby. Whether the two categories of “Hindu” and “Muslim” are to be understood primarily in a spiritualistic sense (relating to conceptions of divinity, the afterlife, contemplative cultivation, and so on) or expansively in a civilizational sense (relating also to material practices, social exchanges, political negotiations for power, and so on) is a vital question that lies at the heart of much of this literature, including A. Barua’s volume on Hindu-Muslim interactions in Bengal. As his blog essay indicates, some of these interactions are shaped by translations with the idioms of love (prem, bhakti, ‘ishq, maḥabba).
- Assayag, J. At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India. New Delhi: Manohar, 2004.
- Ernst, C. Refractions of Islam in India: Situating Sufism and Yoga. New Delhi: SAGE, 2016.
- Gottschalk, Peter. Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Khan, D. -S. Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia. London: Tauris, 2004.
- Mahfuzul Haq, M., ed. Majmaulbahrain; or, The Mingling of the Two Oceans by Muhammad Dara Shikuh. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1929.
- Thursby, G. R. Hindu-Muslim Relations in British India. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1975.
- Barua, A. The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes, 2022.
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