This panel seeks to highlight the many languages of Hinduism beyond Sanskrit and the primary vernaculars of academic study. Its goal is to study Hinduism through the lens of regional or vernacular languages that are less frequently studied in academic circles, and, more importantly, not typically associated with Hinduism. Specifically, the studies included in this panel focus on Thai, Bengali, Gujarati, and Chinese. By analyzing these languages from various regions, including Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia across different historical periods, these papers collectively argue for the intricate and dynamic connection between these languages and the formation and development of Hindu institutions, identities, and scriptures. The history of Hinduism has always involved more than just Sanskrit, as several languages have been instrumental in shaping and transforming different Hindu traditions and Hindu-related communities throughout India and beyond. This panel hopes to promote more in-depth research on the same topic.
Although the popularity of the Rāmāyaṇa story beyond India proper, and especially in Southeast Asia, is well known, the popularity of Mahābhārata stories, especially in Pali Buddhist countries, is less so. Indeed, this has even led to the perception that the Rāmāyaṇa has a geographically transcendent quality, while the Mahābhārata was of less universal popularity because it is tied to Bhārat, or India. In this paper, I examine an interesting exception to this perceived tendency, the adoption of the story of Kṛṣṇa’s grandson Aniruddha from the Harivaṃśa into Siamese literature. I show that while it ultimately lost out to the Rāmakian—the Thai version of the Rāmāyaṇa—in popularity, it was at the height of Siamese power and prosperity a coequal partner in the adoption of Hindu mythology into elite Siamese courtly literature.
What is the relationship between vernacular languages and the birth of “Hindutva?” Despite Sanskrit’s notoriety as the language of Brahminical articulation, when Hindutva or Hindu Nationalism broadly as a political movement was born in the late nineteenth century, the vernacular became the language of its political articulation. Here, I probe and problematize a raucous public debate in Bengal in the final decade of the nineteenth century. At the heart of it was a polemical exchange between Brahmos and Hindus surrounding the nature of idolatry. As Brahmos chastised Hindus, castigating them of idol worship, those who defended image worship self-essentialized it as a fundamental fulcrum of a Hindu identity. This public articulation in the vernacular (at least in Bengal), discursively produced the category of the “Hindu.” This controversy, I argue, allows us a glimpse into the connection between religion, language, and a Hindu identity formation in a colonized society.
In the fifteenth century, Śvetāmbara Jain monks produced a voluminous body of literature in Gujarati (Māru-Gūrjara). Didactic story literature comprises the greatest quantity of this emerging vernacular register, far outstripping their output of devotional poems and songs that tend to dominate studies of vernacularization. One such collection, the Śīlopadeśamālā-Bālāvabodha, instructs laywomen to view their pathway to the Jain soteriology of mokṣa as going through the upholding of family honor and prestige, especially by maintaining good wifely comportment and maintaining chastity at all costs. The contents of this story collection and manuscript evidence of its distribution give us new insight into the close connections between Śvetāmbara monastic orders (gaccha) and the caste communities who supported them. Concerns of caste purity that are policed on women’s bodies are here ideologically linked to women’s soteriological potential. Thus, early Jain works in emerging vernaculars forged and maintained ideological links between caste and sect.
In 2009, a woman surnamed Li began distributing a scripture in northeast China, which she claims was revealed to her by Kṛṣṇa. Titled Bojiafan song (Ode of the Bhagavān)—a clear play on Bhagavad-gītā (Ch.: Bojiafan ge)—the work presents itself as Kṛṣṇa’s final word and offers a cosmogony, cosmography, and detailed ontology. It also warns against environmental degradation and prophesizes a magnificent future for China once it adopts Hinduism. The present paper argues the following about this truly unique religious text: (1) that its emergence is in keeping with what historian Vincent Goossaert calls China’s “revelatory ecology,” (2) that it evidences specifically Daoist understandings of scripture, and (3) that its production and circulation appear to mark the start of a largely internal or “one-sided” dialogue between Chinese and Hinduism akin to the one Buddhologist Robert Sharf indicates has been occurring among Chinese and Buddhism now for hundreds of years.