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Karen Pechilis ed., "A Cultural History of Hinduism: Volumes 1-6" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
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Hello and welcome back to the New Books and Indian Religions podcast, the podcast channeling here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Achiraj Balkaram. More importantly, I have the triple pleasure of welcoming to the podcast today Doctors Karen Kagulis, Jared Whitaker and Valerie Stoker. They are three of the editors of a six volume, fantastic comprehensive new publication called Cultural History of Hinduism. It's published by Bloomsbury. What I will do actually, I realize that when folks are listening, they don't always know off the bat whose voice is who. So I'm going to say welcome to you and then you'll respond to the note of your voices. So welcome Karen.
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Hello. Thanks for having us, Raj.
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And welcome Jared.
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Hello Raj. Jadim, thanks for having us.
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Oh, my pleasure. And last but not least, welcome Valerie.
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Thank you. Happy to be here.
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So I understand that this project, or one can infer that a project this size would have taken a fair bit of time. But someone tell me maybe the backstory, the genesis of how this project came into being. What was the B show? What was the seed? Tell us a bit about the journey behind it all.
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C
Well, I can say where it Starts, it's Karen speaking and this is your. As you've mentioned, it's a six volume set and it's called A Cultural History of Hinduism and it originated with the publisher Bloomsbury academic. And in 2015, at the International History of Religions association conference which was held in Erfurt, Ms. Lali Purslow, who's the editorial director of religion at Bloomsbury Academic, approached me about a series they had already initiated and that was a Cultural History of and the possibility of expanding this into Hinduism. And at the time, Bloomsbury Academic had just a few of these sets out, including A Cultural History of animals from 2007, which actually was a choice outstanding academic title. So they were kind of, you know, they felt this format was appreciative. Soon thereafter, A Cultural History of the human body in 2010, cultural history of gardens in 2013, cultural history of food in 2015. And then that's the moment when she approached me to be the general editor. The structure of each set is that there are six volumes, each representing a specific time period, from antiquity to modernity. And within each of those periods, eight topics that are the same across the six volumes are explored. This is a reference work or it's an updated scholarship reference work. So you could read one volume and get a comprehensive view of a given time period for the topic, or you could read the same number chapter in each of the volumes and and get a sense of a specific topic across the time periods. I thought this was a terrific idea and I thought a very accessible way to study the resonant complexities of Hinduism. Absolutely fantastic. Volume editors joined me in a project. Jared Whitaker for volume one. He's here with us today in this podcast. Adish Satai, who edited and wrote the introduction to volume 1 2. Sorry, on the classical era, 200 BC to 800 CE. Valerie Stoker, who edited volume four on the Age of Empires and I did volume three. Excuse me, I should have mentioned that. And then Amanda Lucia, who wrote the introduction for and with the late Maya warrior, who edited volume six on the Age of Independence, 1947-2017. And then volume five also Willem Beckerling did the kind of Colonial age sort of volume. There were a number of scholars within each volume. So totally 55 superb scholars contributed articles to the set from international locations including the us, Canada, India, Thailand, Singapore and European countries including the uk, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Switzerland. So it's a very diverse group. And that is at least that was the structure and everybody came into it. It's a piece of the backstory yeah.
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Well, thank you very much for so clearly laying out the parameters of. Of this work. Certainly, as the listeners probably realize, we can easily do a podcast episode on each of the volumes, but it makes sense to sort of give it off to all of the contributors in here from to the editors who are here today. I also really resonate with this, obviously, when we do sort of textbooks or write encyclopedia articles and this and that. Clearly the chronology is crucial and we think orally as scholars often. But I love the dovetailing of thinking temporally and thinking thematically, because often when people are not necessarily scholars or thinking along those terms, they're thinking, well, you know, this is what. This is the thing I do now. This is my worship now, this is my food now, this is marriages now. You know, how does that track in another culture or another time? So I love that. I think that was a masterstroke of organization and brilliance for different kinds of learners, different kinds of readers, whether our colleagues, whether efficient use of our colleagues time, or whether laypersons who have various interests, all of which can certainly be found in these chapters. So let's see, where can we go from there? You know, I'm a little bit of an organizational nerd, and this seems to be quite the project with lots of moving parts and like, you know, maybe you can give us a sense of how long this took. And, you know, it's sort of like the editors of each volume kind of, you know, go off and do their thing and kind of check in with Karen here and there, and it just seems like a mammoth thing to even think of an organization. Don't mind speaking to that one of you.
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C
Well, I was going to say, you know, one of the things if, if you all remember, we had to really think about periodization, and we did this all, the whole group of the volume editors, because, you know, the other. The volumes that were already out from Bloomsbury Academic were, you know, some of the periodizations were, you know, Renaissance and Enlightenment. And I mean, it just. So maybe you guys, I mean, both of you actually had a lot to say about what we were going to call the time period of your volume. So maybe you could speak to that.
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But. Yeah, I mean, I can jump in. I mean, I, you know, Rog, the. The larger question about the formation of the project, and I mean, I think the first thing is to publicly thank Karen for a Herculean task, really, truly. And, you know, if the listeners will forgive, maybe via the gendered metaphor, but it really was. I mean, and as you've mentioned, in conceptualization across each volume and then across all of the volumes. And Karen was exemplary in kind of constantly leading and constantly, you know, fostering a really supportive process and, you know, just another shout out I had. And I think we all had a really great experience with Bloomsbury Academic. I mean, they were really exemplary in the work and effort they put in. And so, you know, I don't want to talk long. I think Valerie can jump here too. But I mean, I'll just say that, you know, I mean, Karen approached me.
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Oh.
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You know, I think I met with her in person at Madison conference in 2016 or 2017. We talked about it. And then as Karen recruited the editors, we began to talk over email about the kind of areas and the topics and we began to kind of peer those down, if I remember correctly. We began to talk about the titles. I mean, one of the things I'll just say about my volume, which is a cultural history of Hinduism and antiquity, it was long being advertised as in the pre classical age. And so if you look online when you search the volume, there will be these old photos of the pre classical age. And, you know, I just. We felt in discussion that In Antiquity worked better. And so we changed there. And, you know, there's a lot we can talk about about recruiting the individual authors and the coherency of the chapters, which is, I think, exemplary as well. So I'll just. I'll stop there and I'll pass off to Valerie.
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Yeah, I'd like to echo what Jared was saying about Karen's leadership. I mean, she really was so calm and helpful and supportive. I think a few curveballs were thrown our way at various stages having to do with permissions to reprint lengthy passages of translation. And Karen was just, you know, I would kind of freak out and send her a panicked email about it and she would just be very, very calm about it. And she was just a true joy to work with, as were all of the staff at Bloomsbury. They were really excellent. Jared, I think to the question of the logistical challenge of a project like this, which, again, Karen did most of the heavy lifting in terms of management. But, Jared, I think you finished your volume way ahead of the rest of us, right? Like, wasn't it ready to go? And we were still, you know, the rest were still scrambling, like some special skill there.
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So Karen gave me a deadline of 2019, and I gave my authors a deadline of 2019. And everyone had this happen by 2019. I only learned after that about how early I had got everyone in. And, you know, I mean, the publication date, I suppose we should note, is 2024. And I mean, Karen, you could speak to this about. There were some problems with the production of the volumes, particularly the loss of one of the editors. But also my understanding is, of course, the pandemic hit us. Right. And that slowed things down.
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Yeah, it's always, you know, when you have this many people involved. And yes, it was amazing that Jared's Antiquity volume. Yes, he did that lickety split, which was amazing. But, you know, I don't know, we can draw a lot of conclusions about the coherence of one, you know, field over another. I'm not sure. I think it was. It was Jared's stewardship and quite a piece of luck, I would imagine as well, somewhere in there. But, you know, yeah, we did, we did have a lot of really good group discussions. But I mean, Valerie, you changed the title of your volume. I mean, this was really, was one of the very first things we talked about. And yet we did some changes. And your kind of volume is emblematic of that.
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Yeah, I was going to say. So thank you for reminding me that this question of periodization, it really was, you know, central, I think, to each of the volumes. I mean, they're all covering, you know, pretty long period of time. And so how do you put a singular label on what that time period is? It's a really difficult thing to do. And I would also say that the periodization challenge is in a lot of ways linked up to the logistical challenge of you're getting the chapters submitted to you at different periods. Right. So Jared sounds like he had, you know, everyone was sort of operating more or less in lockstep, but in my case it was a more drawn out process. And so as they came in, different authors had slightly different ways of characterizing what the period was, even though they were working with the title that we came up with, which was the Age of Empires. And they had been part of the conversation about changing the title, which originally had been the Age of Colonialism. And my volume spans the period of 1500 to 1857. And so I felt like for the early part of that period, the colonial label didn't actually work all that well for a number of reasons. And so I continued to think about the period in political terms because that's sort of what I had inherited from the original formulation. So I replaced the Age of Colonialism with the Age of Empires, thinking we have Vijayanagara empire reaching its apex in South India in the early 1500s. And we had the establishment of The Mughal empire in 1526. Right. So this sort of marks the beginning of my time period. And then, of course, you have all of these European powers in the 17th and 18th century kind of vying for economic and political footholds that are part of global empires that they're trying to establish. So Age of Empires seemed to make sense. But then, of course, as the chapters came in, there were a lot of alternatives that, you know, alternative ways of thinking about the period that came into play. So I ended up talking about that quite a bit in my introduction and also in the panels that we did at Madison and. And at the aar. Early Modern is another way that people kind of framed the period, which has its pros and cons. Encounter and exchange was another way. The age of Hindu sectarianism, there were all of these different possibilities that were floated. So I would say that, yes, periodization was a challenge and that it's a challenge that the book then is able to. I think the reader can kind of think about that challenge, you know, as they're going through the different chapters.
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Yeah, it's interesting. And to dovetail on that. I think what Valerie's alluding to is, you know, this and Karen, this difficulty of us recognizing as scholars that a lot of these even periodization categories we picking are kind of arbitrary. Right. I mean, you know, even even Adish's volume on the classical age, it's still even using this language of classical, which is critiqued in the volume. Right. And then I want to just draw to the larger issue that I specifically talk about in my introduction. And then I know other editors and other volumes address these issues as well, is just the heading, too, that we have in the volume is Hinduism. And that we are using a term that doesn't have currency for much of Indian history. I mean, here the word Hindu doesn't have currency for much of Indian history. And so even that idea of the way you're packaging the volume and you're packaging the set for readers and for scholars and scholarly articles. And then, of course, people who may be not scholars of India and trying to say, look, here's this thing we're dealing with with Hinduism. And of course, chapter, so my introduction, second paragraph, is there's no such thing as Hinduism in the period I'm dealing with, or many of the periods we're dealing with. Right. And so one of the things for me was also. And I think Karen was on board, and everyone was on board, and I know a lot of the other volumes do this, is that a lot of my authors don't just deal, say, with Brahmanism in ancient India and the varied expressions of Brahmanism. That itself is not a singular thing, that there's a lot of internal strife and conflict and sectarian breaks and different kind of theological, metaphysical, ontological, ritual, ideological practices going on with the Brahmanism that a lot of my authors had to speak then about, say, Jainism and Buddhism and the kind of conflict and tension that's happening with Jains and Buddhists, which is defining Brahmanism and Brahmanism is defining in relation to itself. And so that was the joy for me in having the authors engage in that across my chapters and then looking at the other volumes and seeing in the ways in which the various authors were engaging with the kind of tension. I mean, you know, the negotiation of meaning and power and different groups negotiating identity, et cetera. So, you know, it was a logistic challenge to get this all done. And then I just, I'll end here by just giving a shout out to my, my chapter authors. Apparently we, apparently we did a really good job. So thank you all for getting that in really early. It's okay not to be perfect with finances. Experian is your big financial friend and here to help. Did you know you can get matched with credit cards on the app? Some cards are labeled no Ding decline, which means if you're not approved, they won't hurt your credit scores. Download the Experian app from for free today. Applying for no Ding decline cards won't hurt your credit scores if you aren't initially approved. Initial approval will result in a hard inquiry which may impact your credit scores.
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Yeah, I just wanted to kind of dovetail with that, that this is part of the significance of it being a cultural history. And so although, you know, lines are not hard and fast, authors such as Paula Bass and Lynn Hunt and others have really talked about how cultural history is different than social history. And largely social history is looking at categories of people. It tends to kind of orient around an axis of, you know, central people, marginalized people, et cetera. But it does tend to be in categories of people. Whereas cultural history really is what's produced. It's shot through with performance, because anything that's acted, said, minted, drawn, whatever is performed. And so performance is really part of the discussion across these volumes. And it also deals with contestation, so mainstream and non mainstream, and how there are contested ways that meanings are built over time. And so things are contingent. I like to say things are in motion. And I think that's a lot of what Jared was describing and also Valerie as well. So I think that's the significance between how these volumes ended up and what the program was very much in keeping with cultural history is history in motion. And so cultural modifying history signals that this is not a typical sort of nationalist, territorialized, or was very kind of putting too much weight on Hinduism, as Jarrah was just saying. And coupling history with culture signals that this is not a typical timeless view of culture. Again, it is things in motion. And so I think that was. We also really embodied that Zeitgeist. And our contributors definitely did, too. We all wrote introductions to each of the volumes. And so that's very helpful for kind of situating those conversations and pointing out ways in which people said things in a similar way and maybe said things in a different way in the volumes. Our volumes themselves have that diversity.
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Yeah, it's beautiful. And I think that the diversity, nuance, the categorization or even softening categorization that we're now discussing is, to my mind, so much a feature rather than a bug. Because I've probably said a dozen times on this podcast over the years that when one is studying South Asia, particularly from modern Western academic categories, if one's categories do not shift in some sense, one is not studying South Asia, that there's something different soil. How do we define temporal periods? And so I love the extent to which this work is. There's a level of depth and breadth, and in certain ways it's very comprehensive. But it actually, the fact that it presents things as a moving target and sort of a churning ocean, that doesn't obfuscate what's happening. What that does is it indicates the notion to which, quote, unquote, Hinduism is not a genus or a species, it's a jungle. It's the jungle, it's the Indic jungle. It's a subcontinental smorgasbord of so much. And so sometimes when I teach intro Hinduism, whether to adult learners or undergrads, I mean, I talk about it as more of a jungler, I think, just a very. It's not a perfect analogy, but if we look at sort of any time period, say Europe in the medieval, in the Middle Ages, and we look at everything from those who are doing Christian religiosity or Greco Roman thought or sort of quote, unquote pagan practice, and we look at it all together, Hinduism is pretty much everything happening in all these orders of society, you know, at once. And the category itself is problematic. But by the same token, in at our Epoch. It's the best, it's the best word. However, basically the word Hinduism is. It's what we have to signal something of South Asian culture and history. So, so that's great. So perhaps we could take a little bit of, a little bit of a close up on a couple of the volumes, since we have the editors here. Of course we're not going to comprehensively go through all the content in each, but maybe we can be wonderfully traditional and do it chronologically as, as the, as the collection itself does and talk about Jared and antiquity and sort of like, when does antiquity start? And maybe you could tell us. I leave it up to you. I don't have any agenda in terms of how you respond. If you want to comment on a little bit of, you know, the content or you know, what you're. What's being demarcated provisionally for this volume as antiquity. If you want to share a little bit about what that process was like for you editing these different papers, you know, whatever you feel inspired to.
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I mean, I think the period of antiquity is what Karen told me was the period of antiquity. But I think, of course I had to make decisions. And because this was being framed in terms of Hinduism and I'm doing ear quotes here for the audience, or scare quotes, I had to make decisions. And when we began to talk about the different chapter headings and the different areas, one of the shortcomings of the volume, and it's one that I fully recognize, or two of them, is that I had to in some sense not bring in, say, discussion of the Indus Valley civilization, though Madhav Deshpande in his final chapter, which I think is a significant one, and we should talk about actually the final chapters, the global context chapters, which are I think the most different across all the volumes and maybe were the most challenging for us as editors and even maybe the writers to think about. But I had to make decisions. And so I made a temporal decision. We talked about 2000 and roughly here, BCE but really what we're talking about probably here is the arrival of Sanskrit speaking peoples and the arrival of pastorous peoples that are reflected in the Rig Veda, right? People who are not Brahmans by any means, because that's not the word they're using for themselves, but the traditions that will develop into Brahmanism within the Rig Veda. And so we're placing that with these movements in the middle of the second millennium bce. So I had to cut away the Indus Valley, which is a shortcoming. I'm happy to receive that critique. Another serious critique would be, I had to think geographically. And so a sustained critique. I would accept that it's Sanskrit centered and it's North Indian centered. Right. It was difficult for me to think about having somebody write about central or South India in this period. And I know a lot of other volume editors that's contained within their volumes and attention to the whole geography of the subcontinent. So maybe it was my bias as a Vedic scholar, or maybe my bias as somebody who's a Sanskrit scholar, that I situated the volume within North India, within the Gangetic Valley and the Indus Valley, and that's where I placed it. And so that was the parameters. And then it was really the processes of finding the authors who all did, I think, exceptional jobs. I'm not just praising my authors, all of the scholars I've happily picked up. I've read all of the chapters in the Defining Mind and Body chapters, all six of them. And they're just fantastic to read it across that time and space. I've read all the ones on politics and power, which I found fascinating and interesting. And then I've read a few of the ones, the chapter eight, which I find maybe we can talk about as well. I mean, I'm kind of dancing around the question, and I want my other colleagues to be able to speak, but it was really thinking about the ancient period in India, which is here I'm defining as the Sanskritic period, the North Indian period, the Rig Veda, the textual periods, the Rig Veda through the Brahmanas and the Aranicas and the Upanishads and the Sutras and the Shastras and the epics, and then, of course, Brahmanism and then the rise of Buddhism and Jainism. So that's how we were thinking about the kind of time period and how to think about the framing of that time period. And then coming to this arbitrary stop. We think about the end of the Vedic period, however we want to define that as Vedic scholars, the rise of maybe what we call the Classical period with the kind of later Upanishads and the Dharma Sutras and then the epics. Thinking about that linguistically, thinking about that politically, religiously. And so we were just picking the state to hand off and say 2000 to 200 BCE. This is a good framework. But even in my volume, some of my authors, some of the authors of the volume, I'm saying them like I'm possessing them, that they're mine. Some of the authors of the volume had to go beyond that date into the common era. And just talk about, you know, these traditions, these textual traditions and these religious, cultural, political traditions. So I'll leave it there. I mean, Valerie would be up next.
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Yeah, let me go ahead and take this opportunity to mention a couple of things, which is each of the volumes covers a lot of area, it's true. But the interesting thing is they're all relatively slender volumes, so you can just sit down and comfortably read each volume. And each volume is packed with some 70 high resolution images. And so we also took that aspect and that's part of the provisions that slowed the whole thing down, but still. So it's right, it's designed to be to mention things that people would expect to be mentioned and yet to go beyond that both in terms of updated critical scholarship as well as the extensive use of imagery. And so and I will just also mention here again, kind of wide angle view, just so we have it in one place in this discussion, the eight topics which we actually we did do a random. Each person right at the very beginning, each volume editor think of eight topics they think is relevant to talk about their volume. And then we all came together and shared them. And there were like six topics that everyone agreed on, which it was extraordinary in a meeting of the minds. Another reason it was great to work with these volume editors. And so the, the topics, the chapters of each, there's an introduction, then there's a chapter on sources of Authority, Chapter 2 on Defining Body and mind, chapter on social organization and everyday norms, chapter four on identity, difference and dialogue, five on politics and power, six on visual culture, seven on lineages and emerging exemplars and movements, and then eight on global context. And I think Jared is quite right in suggesting there's considerable diversity in the global context. In my own mind, I really appreciated the really thorough from antiquity. And then the global article in Jared's volume really kind of is about contemporary and this the kind of the construction of Brahman identity in the development of Brahmanism. And I really appreciated in volume two that Atish and his contributors were talking about the construction of classicality through the production of various cultural texts. And I thought of my own volume, Post Classical 800-1500 as really bringing to light the increased diversity of people who were visibly participating in shaping the cultural history of Hinduism. And so one of the concerns, one of my concerns in the intro to that was to counter the prominent image of that time period as being sort of an unfortunate in between time that represented a decline from the glorious past and the future pinnacles of culture and civilization. And so this is variously imagined as the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance in Europe, or the end of the Gupta Empire to the beginning of the Mughal Empire in India. And so in the case of Indian history, the situation was compounded by an Orientalist tendency to periodize on the basis of religion, equating ancient India with Buddhism, classical India with Hinduism. And then the medieval period is one of decline, but the coming of Islam. So this view is found in Mill and Majumdar alike. So kind of rehabilitating that, showing the vibrancy of different political models. I won't take us through all the ones that I talk about, but basically that this is a more organic development of polity and using updated scholarly models that are based on the recognition of social and cultural differences and the negotiation of power. And so it really is evolution, not devolution. And our use of post classical is intended to invoke evoke this complex intertwining of past and present and cultural formations of the period. With that said, one of my contributors did really want to use the term medieval. I said, fine, you know, we're not going to banish the term, but we do want people to have this. Re visionist, in a good sense of that period in this volume. And I also wanted to highlight the period's new visibility of diverse participants in the making of culture. There were new sources of authority by named authors, such as commentaries and Sanskrit. And in regional languages. There were new anthologies, doxographies, theologies, bhakti poetry in regional languages and in the growth of hagiography as a genre. So all those opportunities for multiple voices to come in some diversity, artisans signed their work, such as at the Hoysaleshwara temple of the 12th century. And aristocratic women participated in politics and in temple building, while local women served in temples. And still others visited temples to perform vows and pilgrimage authorized by the evolving Puranas. There were new forms of socialization in the urban context, which were observed and commented on by both Hindu and Muslim authors, describing a whole range of casts of characters and their adventures. Long lasting lineages were established by renowned philosophers and traders, set up detailed networks for both land and sea based commerce, really covered extensively in our global chapter of this volume. So really what I in the introduction and then the contributors really fleshed out in their articles. This is a flourishing, or was a flourishing diverse society. And giving people a sense of that was really important to volume three. When did making plans get this complicated?
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D
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates Excludes Massachusetts. That's beautiful. Thank you. For those listening, just to ensure that you're on track, this work has six volumes, more or less well chronologically organized. So we've talked about the first three volumes, which was Antiquity, which Jared from 2000 to 200 BCE and then ADI Satay from University of British Columbia, who's now with us, has, has edited the second volume called Classical Age from 200 BCE 800 CE. And then Karen, who was the series editor, the project editor also specifically edited this third installment on the quote unquote post Classical Age, as she sort of only spoke about 800 CE to 1500 CE. So that's the first three of the volumes. We'll now turn to the next year, at least one, because we have Dr. Alex Doker, who's editor of the Fourth Age of Empires 1500 1856. She'll speak about that momentarily. And the other list of eight themes, just to make sure that you're tracking of what we're saying. All six of these volumes from all epochs, they all include chapters on the same themes. So from all of the six epochs you will see a chapter, for example, on defining body and mind, if that's of interest to you as a scholar or, you know, I think you will see a chapter on visual culture. So it's wonderfully user friendly that you can take one overarching theme and track it across the six epochs or just do a chronological read. That is my public service announcement. Just to keep us on track. Valerie would love to hear a bit about your installment.
- [40:25]
B
Okay, thank you. So, as you just said, Raj, my volume is called A Cultural History of Hinduism in the Age of Empires. And it covers the period 1500 to 1857. And sort of, as Jarrod said about his volume, you know, I didn't pick the time frame and I don't know why exactly it would start at 1500 and go to 1857. So this is one of the challenges of periodization. The dates themselves, you know, what is the date range that you're covering, but then also what label then are you going to give to that period? It sort of presumes that there's some sort of overarching continuity there, or like something that makes sense. That 350 year time period had certain features to it that put it in the same kind of period box. The title, the Age of Empires in part reflected just the sense that I was inheriting a kind of political label for the time period. So I was thinking about the sort of political structure of that era and I did think of it in terms of empires. As I mentioned, as authors, chapters came in, there were different possibilities floated for how we could think about this time period. And one of those being early modern. When you think about early modern, one of the themes that's often. One of the features that's often associated with early modernity is the existence of large and stable states. And so empires in early modern, they kind of work together. Well. Another theme that was mentioned in several of the chapters was that this was a period of kind of dynamic encounter and exchange, cultural cross, cultural exchange and interaction. And that is certainly something that empires, I think, facilitate and enable, because when you have these sort of large.
- [42:25]
A
States.
- [42:25]
B
There'S increased transportation and communication across different places, increased physical mobility that brings different communities, you know, different religious, linguistic, cultural communities together, the emergence of various nodes within those empires that become centers of economic and cultural exchange. And all of this sort of influences developments in Hinduism in this period. And Hindu practitioners are sort of actively involved in a lot of these changes that are taking place between 1500 and 1857. So we see a lot of interaction and exchange between different regions of the Indian subcontinent between north and South India, with the Deccan Plateau acting as a kind of area of exchange between north and south, between Europe and India and Central Asia, between Shaivas and Vaishnavas, between Rajputs and Mughals. Between Sufi Islam and Vaishnava Bhakti, between Anglophone Protestants and Bengali Brahmins. Right. So there's a lot of cross pollination taking place in my time period as well. And I think, you know, each of the chapters managed to bring that dynamic, that kind of churning ocean that you referred to earlier, Raj, which I think is a really good metaphor for it, out. And so that's how we get this sense of, you know, the continuity, the thing that sort of unites the period is in itself this constantly changing thing that happens through cultural interactions, through different people kind of coming together in different spaces and producing and performing new forms of culture as a result of that interaction and exchange.
- [44:26]
D
Yeah, that's great. Thank you for sharing some of the many features of that sort of swath of time. Do you want to say a word about. A brief word about the two remaining volumes that kind of bring us out to antiquity? Sorry, bring us up to modernity, current time.
- [44:44]
C
Yeah, well, Gulen Becker Lege was the volume editor for the Age of late colonialism, 1857 to 1947. Yeah. And I mean, I will echo what Jared and Valerie have both said about. Yeah, these. I mean, periodization is.
- [45:03]
A
Right.
- [45:04]
C
It should be sort of a parenthesis and not, right, a. An edict written in stone. It is for convenience in a lot of ways. And so, you know, I mean, 1500 is the threshold of the Mughal Empire. And so, okay, we are sort of transitioning into empires. And, you know, we are thinking of it in terms of sort of a statecraft distinction. And I'm thinking of, you know, Asher and Talbot's discussion of this and why it makes some sense. It doesn't make sense as a religious division, as in Orientalist scholarship. So there's. I mean, there are some reasons for it. He, you know, his. I would say, kind of in my own mind, a theme of his volume is really the diverse ways of envisioning Hinduism's relationships to political, social, and technological changes characteristic of this sort of modern period. And so, yeah, certainly, you know, reform is there and issues of identity become very, very important. Nationalism, et cetera. And then the age of independence in volume six, 1947 to 2017. Actually, Maya changed that to 2017. It was originally a few years earlier than that. And so our original volume editor, Maya Warrior, had done so much work and so much wonderful work, and then her untimely passing, which just broke our hearts. But Amanda Lucia had contributed to that volume and very kindly stepped in and did a ton of work as well. That was left to be Done. And so that is a volume looking at contemporary issues and defining, interpreting, studying and mobilizing Hinduism. And again, it really comes quite up to the present from 1947 to 2017. And so that would be characteristic of that volume. Some of the controversies that have come up recently do appear in that volume. And we've all questioned the term Hinduism, but then that kind of gets ratcheted up to even another level. And so.
- [47:38]
A
They.
- [47:38]
C
It's a wonderful job. It's a fair job, It's a fair discussion and there will be something for everyone, for sure, but very expertly handled. I wish there was, and I did say this during one of the conferences, you know, I wish there had been something like this when I was in graduate school. Again, it is a reference work and it's, it's certainly, it's selective. There are many, many things in here you'll recognize that are, you know, seem kind of standard. You know, you'd miss them if they weren't there. But there's a lot more there and there's a lot of new ways of thinking about things. So things you've already heard of, but maybe think of them in a different way. We're certainly not making the claim of the Mahabharata. What is here is found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere. We're certainly not making that claim. But it seems to me we cover a lot of ground in these volumes. And again, it's a comprehensive and interesting and thought provoking treatment. Valerie?
- [48:46]
B
Yeah, if I could just sort of add to that. One of the interesting things about doing my volume was that and particularly the time period beginning in 1500 and going all the way to 1857, there had been so much recent research on that earlier part of the volume's time period that's been really illuminating and I think encouraged us to think in really different ways about Hinduism and Hindu sectarianism and categories like early modernity. I'm thinking of Elaine Fisher's work on Hindu sectarianism in South India in this time period. I'm thinking of Patton Bergent's work on Sufism and Tantra and Bhakti, on Audrey Troiszka's work on Sanskrit at the Mughal court. I mean, this is all pretty recent scholarship that has really made us kind of rethink what that early 16th, 17th, 18th centuries looked like. And so it was kind of a pleasure to be able to sort of assemble a lot of that together.
- [49:56]
A
You.
- [49:57]
B
Know, along the lines of these themes. And I do think it really is sort of giving, you know, Current graduate students. Right. This is sort of the state of the field at this particular moment. And it's an interesting. It is an interesting moment in the field. So it was a worthwhile endeavor for that, I think.
- [50:14]
D
I think so often, consciously or subconsciously we write the books that wish existed when we were, that we once needed, that now others can benefit from. And the work of this breadth of this magnitude will certainly serve as a resource to many. And unlike perhaps comparable resources of previous epochs of scholarship, this one is quite user friendly with beautiful visuals, with, you know, sort of thematic links and, you know, the, perhaps the churning is a great analogy, not just for the Indic context, but for understanding and writing about in the context. And perhaps you've had your share of points that come up at the outset and you've got some riches in what you produce. So that's great. Jared, I think you wanted to say something.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah, I wanted to add on, you know, talking about, I think the pedagogical importance of the volumes. If we're talking about young graduate students or graduate students using these volumes, and we're all wishing that we had these in graduate school, what I really appreciate about my authors and the other authors is that what the volumes are trying to show is this long term where we are introducing contemporary theoretical approaches that are coming out of discourse theory, that are coming out of gender theory, that are coming out of body theory, that are coming out of geography and textual theory and identity politics. And so the volumes are really nice showcases of scholars who control the textual sources, control the language, control the complex histories that they're dealing with, but then are embedding those to try and understand them in contemporary social science and humanities theories. And I think it's really important to show that, and it's really important to show that across all time periods. I mean, particularly in my period antiquity, or even broadly a kind of Vedic scholarship period, where you're having scholars who are high incompetent Sanskritists dealing with incredible, incredibly complicated texts, moving into other traditions, Jainism and Buddhism, and then trying to say something that's not just say philosophically or linguistically or historically sophisticated, but say something that's culturally important about what's going on. And so the volumes here that are dealing with visual culture by Joanna Jurewitz, or dealing with power and authority, Mariana Ferreira, or dealing with Vedic of sources of authority here, Kelly Smith and the other wolves, Movoleum, dealing with the body, et cetera, are really engaging in, which might not be obvious to the repeater, but really getting in difficult ways of trying to understand how you can apply contemporary theory to text and textual situations. And then the last thing I just want to say is the final just praise is, I think, the real importance, and it may not be really obvious to the reader who's not familiar with the sensitive politics of Vedic scholarship, but Marav Deshpande's final chapter is a really important meditation on a lifetime of Korea with dealing with really sensitive issues that can become real flashpoints when dealing with ancient India. And so Madhavadesh Pandey's chapter is in particular, I think, a fantastic meditation. I've said this now twice on the difficulties of politically dealing with these topics, given the sensitive nature of how they're interpreted in India today. We're talking about historians outside of India talking about Indian culture, and there's a kind of colonial act going on right there. So to have Maharashtmitam de Pade to talk about growing up in India and being a Brahmin and then coming to America and engaging in the kind of sensitive politics of what goes on with how these texts are interpreted, I think is very important.
- [54:33]
C
Karen Well, I will say what becomes clear also is that there are deeply learned specialists that are clustered in these time periods, and so, and they're in conversation with each other. And so for me, this set also is valuable for people in other, you know, tend to work in a certain time period to then learn about what the conversation is in another time period. And I'm certainly not, you know, an expert in Vedic studies and whatever. And I found it just so fascinating to read Jared's volume because it was like, okay, wow, this is interesting. I mean, usually one goes to conferences precisely, oh, hey, I can hear a panel on this. It's not my bailiwick, but, you know, this would be interesting to learn about. So in some ways, I always think of this set as, well, let the conference come to me, and I can sit in my comfortable chair and my sweatpants and I can have the conference right here and learn what all these wonderful scholars are saying.
- [55:46]
A
And I think vice versa. Karen I think just vice versa. Just as a Vedic scholar who's trained broadly in Indian history, and I can think generally about the medieval period and the modern period. What the joy for me is, you know, if I'm teaching Intro to Hinduism and I know a little bit about Vaishnavism or Shaivism or Shaktism or the various stuff, to now pick up these volumes and go, okay, here's a really contained temporary update of what I picked up in grad school, while I've picked out an Intro to Hinduism textbooks, and I've actually integrated a lot of this stuff to talk about regional differences in sectarian conflict or what we might call interfaith dialogue. And so I've really appreciated your volume, Adish's, Valerie's volume, and it's been really important for me just to go, oh, I can really update my lectures on my intro Hinduism course.
- [56:38]
C
And that's a nice. Yeah, it is. It's scholars to learn about others, the detail in other scholarly fields. And then as you've already mentioned before, the pedagogy is another. So we've got three different uses of this set for grad students, for scholars, and for teachers.
- [56:56]
D
Yeah, that's fantastic. And I. I just couldn't help but think to myself, Karen, and. And I'm sure all of you have had the same experience about knowing something about various places and concepts, epochs of indic thought, but certainly you have a specialization, very specific, what you just described about having a conference come to you in your sweats. Well, not always in my sweats, although I typically have sort of a standard issue, you know, captured. Today I decided to wear a conference shirt because, you know, there's three of you and you know, three times the judging, one of you is enough. So. But having the conference come to you, can you imagine what it's like posting this podcast? You understand that 20. We've covered at least 20 of your contributors monographs. It's like, I, you know, I don't know how like it's. And I always get these ideas for teaching or I can send students these references and it's like, it's crazy. I joke that this podcast is about public education, but really it's about my education in public. That's what it is.
- [58:00]
C
No, it is great. I love listening to the podcast because again, it's just what's on someone's mind, what's on someone who really is an expert in this area. And how can that enrich my understanding?
- [58:16]
A
Yeah.
- [58:17]
D
Are there any other. Any other final thoughts, comments, anything at all before we close for today?
- [58:24]
B
I was just going to thank you for the podcast too, because I have a long commute to work and it's actually a really any way to kind of stay up on the literature and what's being published. Often you're sort of making your lists of, I have to look at that, I have to look at that, I have to look at that. But I can listen to these interviews. I'm like, Okay. I have a handle on what's being argued and, you know, circle back to it later when I have have a moment. So I'm glad. There's the podcast.
- [58:52]
C
Yes. And thank you so much for having us on it so that we can, you know, maybe be heard in someone during their commute or someone in their sweats. And this is the cultural history of Hinduism, and we hope people engage it.
- [59:11]
D
Well, thank you all for appearing on the podcast cast. Of course, we have been speaking about this monumental enterprise called the Cultural History of Hinduism in six volumes published by Booms or Academic. The links are in your podcast notes. We've been speaking with three of its six editors, Doctors Karen Kilis, Jared Whitaker and Valerie Stoker. Until next time, keep well, keep reading, keep listening and keep contemplating this moving target, alt Hinduism. Bye for now.