Hinduism Unit

New Books in Hindu Studies 

Contact: Sohini Pillai (sohini.pillai@kzoo.edu)

Description: This panel features first monographs in Hindu studies with the aim of both exposing scholars in the field to new theoretical interventions, and of providing concrete ideas about how to incorporate those interventions into scholars’ own pedagogies. Given the range of new books in Hindu studies, preference will be given to first monographs. To nominate a book for consideration (either your own or someone else’s), please email Sohini Pillai.

Revisiting Spirit Possession in Hinduism 

Contact: Gaurika Mehta (gmehta@scu.edu) and Shiva Sai Ram Urella (shivasairam.urella@yale.edu)

Description: Ritual, power, body, space, caste, gender—spirit possession foregrounds major themes in the study of Hinduism. For this panel, we invite scholars to revisit spirit possession and its relationship with Hinduism. Topics might include (but are not limited to): 1) the role of the body in spirit possession rituals, 2) the relationship between caste and community in spirit possession rituals, 3) issues of agency, embodiment, and identity, 4) migration and spirit possession rituals in South Asian diasporas, 5) questions of terminology (spirit possession, manifestation, vibration, performance, play), and 6) place-making, performance, and healing.

Interrogating Hinduism

Contact: Shiva Sai Ram Urella (shivasairam.urella@yale.edu)

Description: This panel invites scholars to look beyond historical and textual explorations of the term Hinduism to examine how communities in South Asia and elsewhere actively negotiate, contest, and reject the term. This panel will explore the tensions of being—or refusing to be—Hindu, in quotidian and transnational contexts, highlight experiences of inclusion/exclusion based on caste identities, alternative theories/models of religion and religious belonging, vernacular registers of ritual knowledge and devotion, politics of adoption and rejection of the label Hinduism, the strategic deployment of sect and tradition (dharma, sampradaya), and articulations of derivative political terminologies (Hinduphobia, Hindutva). 

New Hinduisms, New Religious Movements

Contact: Shreya Maini (shreya.maini@duke.edu) and Claire Robinson (crobison@bowdoin.edu) 

Art and Aesthetics of (alternatively “in” Or “and” ?) Hinduism

Contact: Avni Chag (a.c.chag@vu.nl) and Ujaan Ghosh (ghosh.301@osu.edu) 

Description: This panel critically rethinks Hindu art and aesthetics by treating visual and material forms as sites of religious knowledge production rather than as illustrative objects. It invites papers that challenge inherited art historical and theological frameworks, examining how aesthetic practices actively shape power, authority, and religious imagination within Hindu traditions. In this vein, the panel is equally interested in questions of built space and the architecture of Hinduism. With the contemporary proliferation of Hindu temples across India and the diaspora, it is critical to read these monumental projects not merely as aesthetic expressions, but as sites that anchor archives of displacement, migratory labor, and uneven regimes of capital.

Religious Histories of Hinduism: Memory, Narrative, and Archives 

Contact; Avni Chag (a.c.chag@vu.nl) 

This panel examines how histories of Hinduism are shaped through practices of memory, narration, and archival preservation. It foregrounds the ways religious pasts are produced and authorised across textual, material, and digital contexts, attending to both institutional frameworks and vernacular forms of remembrance. By focusing on archives and memory as active sites of interpretation rather than neutral repositories, the panel invites critical reflection on how Hindu religious histories are continually made and remade.

Hinduism and the Colonial Encounter

Contact: Ujaan Ghosh (ghosh.301@osu.edu )

This panel invites critical contributions on the ways in which Hinduism was shaped and reshaped through the British colonial encounter. It seeks to revisit earlier historiographical debates on the colonial “construction” (or otherwise) of Hinduism, while also engaging newer scholarship that examines how colonial encounters reconfigured textual traditions, and lived practices of Hinduism. The questions that the panel seeks to interrogate, but are not limited to: The panel interrogates—though is not limited to—questions such as: In what ways did colonial capitalism, its trading networks, its intellectual projects, and its institutions shape or reshape our understanding of Hinduism? What forms of power underwrote these processes, and how do their afterlives continue to structure contemporary religious identities, institutions, and claims to authenticity? Finally, how did colonial engagements with Hinduism furnish the conceptual and institutional groundwork for modern majoritarian religious projects, including Hindutva, its ideologies, and its ideologues?

Situating Hinduism: The Village as an Ethnographic Field Site

Contact: Gaurika Mehta (gmehta@scu.edu) and Shiva Sai Ram Urella (shivasairam.urella@yale.edu)

Description: Local goddesses and ancestral deities dwell in the village. The village is shaped by dynamics of migration, labor, and caste hierarchies. During festivals and processions, the village becomes a site of memory and transformation. For this roundtable, we invite scholars to situate Hinduism in the “village” and think about the village as an ethnographic field site. Topics might include but are not limited to: 1) the village as a site of vernacular Hinduism, 2) the relationship between ritual, land, and social hierarchies, 3) connections between local, regional, and diasporic networks of devotion, 4) the village as site of memory and transformation: festivals, processions, and public space, 5) thinking with or beyond the ideas of “folk tradition,” and 6) ethnographic methods and practices.