Media about extraordinary individuals (saints, sages, heroes, etc.) often entails the work of translation. The lives of such personages translate the values of their community; disciples translate and transmit their story; sometimes devotees even translate the body from one place to another. Moreover, those studying such media are frequently faced with the need to translate ideas from one linguistic and conceptual world to another. But do these acts of translation entail violence? Do devotees and/or scholars disfigure the extraordinary individual when they carry (compel?) them across cultures, traditions, moral frameworks, and contemporary understandings of identity (race, sex, gender, religion, secularity, etc.)? As scholars, what are our ethical responsibilities in the face of such (alleged) violence? In keeping with the collaborative ethos of the Hagiology Seminar, this roundtable will involve participation in three virtual conversations leading up to an in-person session at the 2024 AAR Annual Meeting. The roundtable will be headed by Reyhan Durmaz (University of Pennsylvania).
The Mīmāṃsā author Kumārila was one of the most formidable and determined critics of the Yogācāra philosophy and of the tradition of Buddhist epistemology that emerged within it. This session explores several aspects of his biting and brilliant critique and discusses what we can learn from it, both for our understanding of South Asian intellectual history and for philosophy today. Key topics to be discussed include the Buddhist concept of conventional truth, idealism, the dream argument, the "self-awareness" (svasaṃvedana ) doctrine of Yogācāra and the memory argument for it, and whether an anti-realist, non-referential view of language can be internally consistent.
Followers of the Nyāya school famously held that the existence of God (īśvara ) can be established through inference. Their best-known argument is deceptively simple: the world must have an intelligent maker (kartṛ ) because it is an effect (kārya ), like a pot. This roundtable will focus on Jayanta Bhaṭṭa’s formulation of the argument in the Nyāyamañjarī (āhnika 3; critical edition by Kataoka [2005]); Jayanta offers a relatively early (9th c.) defense of the inference from kāryatva (“being an effect”), written in characteristically lucid prose. The session will bring together several scholars to analyze and debate Jayanta’s argument. The goal of the format is to create a space for lively and rigorous discussion, rather than traditional paper presentations. A handout with the original Sanskrit and an English translation of selections from Jayanta’s text will be provided.
This roundtable brings together several scholars to discuss Loriliai Biernacki’s recent book The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism (Oxford University Press, 2022) in the broader context of South Asian philosophies of materiality. What does it mean for a thing to be “material”? What is the relationship between matter and consciousness? What does it mean to speak of the divine as immanent within the material world? How might premodern thinkers like Abhinavagupta contribute to contemporary philosophies of materiality and the recovery of wonder? Participants will discuss these questions and engage with Biernacki’s book from a variety of perspectives, including Śaiva Tantra, Sāṃkhya, and Jainism, followed by a response from the author.
This roundtable invites scholars to reflect on ethnographic research in India as it relates to India's current political climate and nationalist narratives about Indian history and religion. Our first participant reflects on queer belonging by asking how “transgressive” researchers might confront risks of reprisal. Focusing on narratives of trauma and belonging among new generations of Indian Muslims, our second participant discusses how ethnographic devices such as reflexivity become especially fraught in the current political climate. As a scholar considering Hinduism and politics, our third participant outlines difficulties in the research process – from research visa applications to overcoming skepticism from fieldwork participants. Our fourth contributor considers the ethical implications of ethnography when one's work depends on fostering relationships with pro-Hindutva religious leaders. Finally, our fifth participant looks at how their research on the management of Hindu temples in Himachal Pradesh connects to complex and contested relationships between regional and national politics.
This panel seeks to explore how Hindu practices, stories, and discursive worlds articulate with climate change, both as an idea and as a set of material-physical processes impacting South Asia at present. Specific inquiries in the session range from the interplay of caste, race, sexuality, and gender with the natural and mythological worlds of the Sundarbans and Tamil Nadu to Ayurvedic perspectives on moral texture to the responses of Himalayan religious tourism to shifting weather patterns. The goal of the panel is to invite conversations about how Hindu traditions can help to think about issues of scale (microcosm, macrocosm), relationality, and human/nonhuman agency in a moment of cascading ecological crises that often intensify pre-existing forms of structural violence.
This panel explores the different ways Hindus and Hinduism have taken shape in various diasporic contexts beyond South Asia and North America. How has engagement with and understandings of Hinduism evolved in countries that carry historical Hindu influences? How has temple construction has offered communities forms of liberty? How do Hindus in the diaspora re/create public worship of Hindu figures? How has Hinduism been embraced in certain socio-political contexts? This panel presents the work of graduate students and emerging scholars studying Hindu diasporas in Thailand, Mauritius, People’s Republic of China, and United Arab Emirates to address these questions of community formation and practice. Through these explorations this panel further enriches the discourse of global Hindu diasporas.
This roundtable features four first monographs that offer new theoretical interventions in Hindu studies. The authors are grouped in pairs to respond to each other's books and to discuss how these new works may be incorporated into their own scholarship and pedagogy. The first pair features literary studies of figures and texts central to any idea of Hinduism: the Upanishadic figure of Yajnavalkya on one hand, and the multitude of regional language tellings of the Mahabharata on the other. The second pair turns to the social and cultural history of Hinduism in the early modern period. One book traces the emergence of the "Hindu" in a northwestern Indian kingdom; the other develops a new approach to the study of south Indian temple murals. Spanning diverse locations from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu and a variety of methodologies, the panel displays the breadth and diversity of Hindu studies.
In the past thirty-five years, there have been a plethora of scholarly studies of retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata epic narrative traditions. But what about retellings of Hindu stories outside of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata such as the Upaniṣads, the Purāṇas, sthalapurāṇa s, hagiographies, and other religious narratives? The goal of this panel is to highlight the outstanding diversity of premodern and modern retellings of Hindu narratives throughout South Asia. This panel brings together four scholars of religion who examine retellings of Hindu stories in multiple different languages including Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and English and in several different mediums such as narrative poems, comic books, magazines, and television serials. The four papers in this panel span diverse locations in South Asia from Gujarat to Kashmir to Tamil Nadu to Andhra Pradesh and integrate approaches from different fields including comparative literature, anthropology, gender studies, and media studies.
The recent emergence of the term “Hinduphobia” in social media and public policy has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream Western society. It is a term that appears to function as part of a spectrum of well-established terms for structural forms of racism linked to historical material practices of discrimination such as Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, and anti-semitism. However, while there certainly are many hypothetical and real examples of discrimination against Hindus by virtue of their religion in parts of the world, the attempt to include “Hinduphobia” into the lexicon of terminology arguably masks the much more immediate political and social reality that the claim silences legitimate criticism of India. In this roundtable discussion, panelists will explore several core questions and case studies involving Hinduphobia and its impact in North American, Hindu diasporic, and Indian contexts.
This interdisciplinary roundtable discussion considers how Hindu majoritarianism has shaped Indian electoral politics and articulations of nationalism, belonging, and citizenship in the runup to the 2024 Indian elections. The panelists explore domestic, transnational, and diaspora-centered reactions to, and perceptions of, Indian electoral politics. The roundtable is specifically interested in articulations of religion, particularly Hinduism, in Indian political campaigns, and the mobilization of political rhetoric around religion and secularism in creating voting blocs, influencing policies, and engaging in hard and soft power gambits on international stages. The members of this panel chart various aspects of this discourse-the role of social media in manufacturing transnational support for BJP policies, how US Hindutva organizations represent Indian electoral politics to their constituents, the electoral impact of the language of secularism within political campaigns, and how the Ramjanmabhoomi movement becomes a political movement that buttresses the BJP's goals of reinventing India as a Hindu rashtra.
Walk into an airport bookstore in South Asia or North America and you’ll find the narrative worlds of Hinduism packaged between the covers of paperback after paperback. This panel addresses the big business—and the global business—of Hindu literature. We ask: How are Hindu stories currently being told in popular literature? How are they being sold to mass-market readers? How do patterns of “telling and selling” shift to accommodate different genres, media, and imagined readers in a range of locales? By analyzing Kevin Missal’s Kalki trilogy (Fingerprint), Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah series (Disney Hyperion), the Devi graphic novels (Virgin Comics), and Shantanu Gupta’s children’s comic Ajay to Yogi Adityanath (Itihasa Academy), our panel explores how, in the last fifteen years, there has been an explosion of popular literature that roots itself in Hindu mythology—even as it borrows openly from the modern literary categories of fantasy and science fiction.
For many years now, campuses across North America have organized to fight for anti-caste protections. While fighting for anti-caste protections is important, it is only the first step that opens the door towards building caste competencies within North American academia, heavily entrenched in its anti-Black and white settler colonial foundations. Beyond the multicultural model, which seeks to incorporate caste as a measure of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the University of California Collective for Caste Abolition is invested in organizing for material and structural change within the UC system and beyond. In this roundtable, the UC Collective for Caste Abolition will share the history of its formation, and its current work and visions to illustrate how institutions across North America may heed the call and participate in the movement for caste abolition. might continue their activism toward caste abolition.
After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, South Asians were shipped to sugar plantations across the Caribbean as indentured workers. Indentured labor—a colonial scheme of migration and labor—produced the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. In recent decades, Indo-Caribbean groups have been migrating to North America, often finding themselves on diasporic and discursive margins. How can scholars move beyond the tropes of centers and margins, and towards methods and disciplinary directions that allow us a different perspective on diasporic religions? This roundtable invites scholars to think about religion and diaspora from (Indo-)Caribbean perspectives. By raising questions about ethnographic and archival methods, and addressing inter-diasporic dynamics, positionality, and disciplinary approaches in the study of Indo-Caribbean religions, we hope to make space for a larger discussion about navigating and negotiating the geopolitical and demographic assumptions that have come to shape the study of religion in South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America.
Latine religion has a storied history of faith and political activism in the US-Mexico borderlands. In this panel, we examine over a century of these practices starting in the 1870s to the 1980s. We situate Southern California as a prominent site for its significance in understanding how Latines have remapped these borderlands as a space and place to reflect their political priorities. In doing so, we also argue for the necessity of transnational approaches to borderlands studies due to interconnected histories on both sides of the boundary and its historical porosity. From radical Catholics to zealous Protestants, this panel explores three distinct Latine Christian histories that center around resistance to hegemonic power structures in the Southern California borderlands. Whether it be in contrast to institutional Catholic norms or state militarization of the US-Mexico border, Latine Christians have been spurred by their faith to create space for themselves and their communities.
How might centering queer subjects challenge dominant assumptions in the field of the history of Christianity? What subjects and sites have been overlooked thus far in histories of queer movements and Christianity? This panel turns its focus beyond Mainline Protestantism: global evangelism in the Metropolitan Community Churches, the religious politics of the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, contentious collaboration between a Jewish lesbian feminist and women leaders of the Christian Right, and the movement for trans affirmation in the Roman Catholic Church. Introducing a diversity of queer and trans religious subjects from the 1970s to the present, primarily though not exclusively based in the United States, these papers address the geopolitical entanglements of religion and sexuality; pervasive anxieties around sex, gender, and the body that have shaped Christian engagements with the state; and responses of LGBTQ communities to their marginalization, including their religious production and advocacy.
This session offers a variety of new research papers on pre-modern Christian history.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided a historic breakthrough for the enshrinement of racial equality under the law in the United States on several levels. By some measures, it represents the legislative highpoint of the midcentury Black freedom movement, particularly the nonviolent wing of the international campaign’s activists. Those activists, predominantly Christians, often relied on their faith to persuade their fellow Americans to support the bill at local, state, and national levels. Fascinatingly, the reality that these activists had to persuade so many of their fellow Christians to support the Civil Rights Act reveals the many Christianities actively being practiced in the United States after World War II. Figures who used their moral authority and appeals to their Christian faith to fight for and against racial equality appealed to their religious identities and logics. Christianity has never been a monolith. Neither has the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024). In this panel, critics will engage Payne’s work, which traces the history and trajectory of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in America and argues the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped - and continue to shape - conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Through the almost billion-dollar industry of Contemporary Christian Music, Baptists, Holiness People, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, who made up a sizable majority of the industry, created the political imaginary of white American evangelicalism. Through CCM’s twenty-first century successor, the so-called worship industry, those Charismatic and Pentecostal political and theological visions have gone global.
This panel brings together three different perspectives on violence in the history of Christianity in response to the AAR Presidential call to understand violence in relation to "the hierarchical understanding of beings and valuation of their lives." Papers examine Christian and Jewish accounts of violence during the First Crusade (1096-1099); the political thought and theology of Martin Luther in response to the German Peasants’ War (1524-1525); and patterns of institutionalized violence in contemporary American Evangelicalism. Looking at narratives and structures that enforced otherness of religious identity, class, gender, and sexuality will enable a deep, comparative investigation of continuity and change in the reifying of boundaries between the centers and peripheries of the Christian world.
