Episodes

  • Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Sunila S. Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke, "The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India" (Columbia UP, 2025)
    Feb 13 2025
    In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance. This idea suggests routes to self-rule even when faced with implacable obstacles, and it defines righteous action amid the grime and grief of politics and war. Surya Namaskar 1928 by Raja of Anundah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    55 mins
  • Lavanya Vemsani, "Handbook of Indian History" (Springer, 2024)

    Lavanya Vemsani, "Handbook of Indian History" (Springer, 2024)
    Feb 6 2025
    Handbook of Indian History (Springer, 2024) comprehensively examines the extensive history of India by focusing on the unifying themes of history. The profound analysis of special events and impactful personalities of Indian history form the core of the book. Handbook of Indian History includes articles on cultural, social, and political history of India, topics of religion, philosophy, gender, language and literature, providing a vast array of knowledge on India. The book introduces India from the beginning to the current day, providing depth and breadth of subjects to understand the history of India. The book is beneficial to anyone interested in learning about India, including students, researchers, and general readers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    38 mins
  • Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Anand Venkatkrishnan, "Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jan 30 2025
    Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge, and their personal religious commitments featured in a language and genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learning and the local devotional practices of everyday people, though not in a top-down manner. Rather, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality. Venkatkrishnan revisits the historiography of the Bhagavata Purana to expand our knowledge of the many different religious and philosophical communities that interpreted and laid claim to the themes of the text. While most associated with the traditions of Vaisnavism, Love in the Time of Scholarship brings to light how the Bhagavata was also studied by Saivas, Saktas, and others on the periphery of the text's history. This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    38 mins
  • Gidi Ifergan, "The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga" (Equinox, 2024)

    Gidi Ifergan, "The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga" (Equinox, 2024)
    Jan 23 2025
    Gidi Ifergan's The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga (Equinox, 2024) explores the road map of yoga as reflected in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali (third century CE) and the Sāṁkhyakārikā of Iśvarakṛṣṇa (350–450 CE) which leads to the rise of this discerning insight, evading interpretations motivated by naivety on the one hand, and excessive suspicion on the other. Inspired by the psychology of yoga, the author offers a meditation focused on the sense of self and the cultivation of a discerning clear gaze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    41 mins
  • Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness" (Shambhala, 2024)

    Roger R. Jackson, "Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness" (Shambhala, 2024)
    Jan 16 2025
    The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the “historical” Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely lived, the biographical legends that grew up around him in Tibet, and the works attributed to him in Indic and Tibetan text collections; a consideration of the various guises in which Saraha appears in his writings (as poet, social and religious critic, radical gnostic thinker, and more); an overview of Saraha’s poetic and religious legacy in South Asia and beyond; and complete or partial translations, from Tibetan, of over two dozen works attributed to Saraha. These include nearly all his spiritual songs, from his well-known Dohā Trilogy to obscure but important expositions of mahāmudrā, as well as several previously untranslated works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    44 mins
  • Richard H. Davis, "Religions of Early India: A Cultural History" (Princeton UP, 2024)

    Richard H. Davis, "Religions of Early India: A Cultural History" (Princeton UP, 2024)
    Jan 9 2025
    From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    41 mins
  • Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)

    Alastair Gornall, "Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270" (UCL Press, 2020)
    Jan 6 2025
    Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the reformed community; one that served to preserve and protect their religious tradition while also expanding its reach among the more fragmented and localized elites of the period. Rewriting Buddhism is available for free open-access download at uclpress.com/buddhism. Bruno M. Shirley is a PhD candidate at Cornell University, working on Buddhism, kingship and gender in medieval Sri Lankan texts and landscapes. He is on Twitter at @brunomshirley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    56 mins
  • Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Ilanit Loewy Shacham, "Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Jan 5 2025
    Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire. Empire Inside Out explores the Āmuktamālyada as a reflection of one of South Asia's most culturally complex periods, highlighting its rich religious, political, historical and ethnographic detail. Moreover, Loewy Shacham examines the Āmuktamālyada as the work of a king imparting personal insights on empire, kingship, and individuality - specifically, that it is possible to be unbounded by the institution of kingship that he himself embodies. This book demonstrates that Krsnadevaraya's text connects the imperial domain to the village and temple settings, and to the south Indian community of Srivaisnava devotees-and indeed that it situates the source of authority and power not in the royal court but in the margins, where Srivaisnavism originated, giving the far Tamil south a central role in its imperial vision. Employing close textual analysis of the Āmuktamālyada, supplemented by a rich corpus of texts in different languages and genres, Empire Inside Out illuminates a piece of literature that has been fairly neglected, owing to the particularized linguistic and literary training required. The core of the book is based in the historical context of sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, from which it moves to the various pasts that helped shape the Āmuktamālyada, and to our contemporary times and the use of the text in constructing (at times rewriting) history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
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    1 hr and 15 mins