New Books in Hindu Studies

This roundtable aims to expose scholars in the field to studies that break new theoretical and evidentiary ground by featuring four first monographs with implications for Hindu studies. Group in pairs, the authors will respond to each other's books, detailing their interventions and imagining how they can be incorporated into their own scholarship and pedagogies. After the members of each pair respond to the other author's book, there will be further time for discussion. In these ways, the Roundtable takes a novel and more practical approach relative to traditional book panels. Further, this roundtable has become a staple feature of the Hinduism Unit by offering an opportunity to showcase the work of multiple new books in the field.
This year, the first pair of books features literary studies of figures and texts that are central to any idea of Hindu studies: the Upanishadic figure of Yajnavalkya on one hand, and the multitude of regional language tellings of the Mahabharata on the other. The second pair of books features diverse historical approaches to the social and cultural history of Hinduism in the early modern period. One work centers the interpretation of a dense administrative archive to understand the emergence of the "Hindu" in northwestern India, while the other opens up new art historical approaches to south Indian temples. Spanning diverse locations from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu and wide variety of methodologies, the panel displays the true breadth and diversity of Hindu studies.

Pair One: Literary Lives and the Lives of Literatures

The first book opens up new vistas on the study of the wide-ranging Mahabharata tradition. Recognized as the longest poem ever composed, the Sanskrit Mahabharata tells the tale of the five Pandava princes and the cataclysmic battle they wage with their one hundred cousins, the Kauravas. Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in several regional South Asian languages. This book is a comprehensive study of premodern regional Mahabharata retellings. It argues that Vaishnavas (devotees of the Hindu god Vishnu and his various forms) throughout South Asia turned this epic about an apocalyptic, bloody war into works of ardent bhakti or “devotion” focused on the beloved Hindu deity Krishna. Examining over forty retellings in eleven different regional South Asian languages composed over a period of nine hundred years, it focuses on two particular Mahabharatas: Villiputturar’s fifteenth-century Tamil Paratam and Sabalsingh Chauhan’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahabharat. Through close comparative readings, this book reveals the similar ways poets from opposite ends of the Indian sub-continent transform the story of the Sanskrit Mahabharata into devotional narratives centered on Krishna. At the same time, it also shows how these Mahabharatas are each unique pieces of religious literature that speak to different local audiences in premodern South Asia.

The second book investigates the intersections between historical context and literary production in the "life" of Yajnavalkya, the most important ancient Indian literary figure prior to the Buddha. Known for his sharp tongue and deep thought, Yajnavalkya is associated with a number of "firsts" in Indian religious literary history: discussing brahman and atman thoroughly; putting forth a theory of karma and reincarnation; renouncing his household life; and disputing with women in religious debate. The author elaborates Yajnavalkya rise in the Sanskrit tradition, first in his own sakha and then outwards 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, the author calls for a rethinking of the divide (both in method and in content) between ritual, philosophical, and narrative texts and of the nature of hagiography and biography in early Sanskrit literature.

Pair Two: Body, Space, and Identity in Early Modern India

The third book interprets the significance of temple and palace murals in relationship to the momentous transformations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows the distinctive importance of textuality in this period—evident in the power accrued by professional scribes, the prominence given to authorship and textual transmission, and in representations of the written word within painting and sculpture. Telugu and Tamil-language inscriptions that accompany mural paintings, in most cases documented and translated here for the first time, illuminate the ways in which people negotiated ideas of the local within a translocal context as demonstrated through various kinds of spatial mapping, place-based myths, supralocal economic and political networks, and polyglot cultures. The book reconceives the relationship between art and devotion in the South Indian temple by considering the experience of a viewing body in motion, understanding viewers as participants, rather than beholders, who co-produced the murals through their somatic and imaginative engagements with them.

The fourth book explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. The author presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with rajput and brahmin elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that configured the Muslim also in caste terms. This process played out in such sites as the Vaishnav temple, the urban soundscape, the water well and tank, residential space, and the body. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, the book establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.