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Tracy Pintchman ed., "Engaging Hindu Narratives and Practices in the Contemporary World" (2025)
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Commercial Narrator
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
And breathe.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Hello and welcome back to the New Books Indian Religions Podcast, a podcast gently on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balmar and more importantly, I have the pleasure, the delight of welcoming back to the podcast Dr. Tracy Pinchman, who is Director of Global Studies at Loyola University Chicago. We are actually going to do something slightly innovative but also well within the lane of this podcast which is shedding light on the things that scholars shed light on in the world of Indian studies. We are looking at for the first time that in my history doing the podcast, we are looking at a special edition, a special publication as part of the International Journal of Hindu Studies. Tracy has edited this. We'll talk about the contours thereof. This could easily be its own edited book. It's doing the same work on a different scale, but it's super fascinating. So Tracy, welcome to the podcast.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Thank you Raj for having me on.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
So tell us about maybe a little bit about the genesis of this special volume of the ijhs the International Journal for Indoor Studies.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Sure. So the idea came to me a couple of years ago. I was looking at the works of Amish Chipati and thinking around the issue of rewriting, reworking both practices and narratives that are predominant in what we might think of as traditional Hinduism and the ways that they're being really significantly reworked in the 21st century. And so I called up a few scholars and we got together. Actually some of these started as a conference panel at the aar and I invited a few other folks to join me in thinking through some of the ways in which in contemporary Hinduism, more well known practices and stories were being retold, reworked, rewritten in contemporary contexts. So that was the genesis of the. Of the special issue. I started out with 10 contributors and since life happens to all of us, that whittled down to six contributors, which is why it is a special issue of a journal and not a book. We just simply didn't have enough to make it into a book. And I was low to invite new contributors after I had kind of conceptualized this. So it worked out perfectly. We have three on engaging Hindu narratives in the contemporary world and three on engaging Hindu practices in the contemporary world. So it worked out actually very nicely to have a three plus three kind of special issue.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, it's fascinating. At some point I will invite once again Sushil Natal, who is the editor of the International Journal of Hindustani, to talk a bit about that enterprise. It's a very important forum in sort of indology, you know, religious studies, Hindu studies. And it publishes a wider of really fascinating and top quality, high caliber work. So you started off with 10 and then life happened, you ended up with six. And literally these six contributed contributions are super fascinating, exceptional. But tell us a bit about this process. Was this your first time doing a special edition of a journal volume? Was there something sort of new or sort of memorable about this process for you? What was that like for you?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yes, so it was my first time being a guest editor on a special issue of a journal. I have edited or co edited five books. So it was not my first time being an editor. Co editor. And by the way, in those books too, we lost contributors along the way. So it's not an unusual process. And I myself have had to drop out of projects when family emergencies meant that my energies needed to go elsewhere. So this is part of the process. What was different in doing a special issue is the speed. So this was. I submitted the manuscript, it was about a little over a year before it actually came out in print. The. And also the process of pulling it together was a little more complicated because as guest editor, I also had to. Was responsible for the copy editing. I also had to copy edit all of the contributions and then kind of guide the authors through those final processes. So it's a little bit different from doing an edited book, which takes longer and is a little bit less fraught in terms of the responsibilities of the editor. But the process was not all that different, ultimately.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, fascinating. So we recently had the good fortune of meeting in person Madison.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yes, we did.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
A month or two ago. Ish. I mean, in the timeless time of podcast land. It was previous to this time that we're recording. And in addition to attending a really, really super fascinating panel that you presented on and presented some of your, you know, some of the work that we talked about in your podcast before with this fascinating figure and movement and temple, I had the good pleasure of receiving a. Can you believe this? A printed copy of a. Of a journal in these days, you know, it's such a pleasure. I have a. I have an online. I have a digital database that I created or had helped starting about a decade ago. So everything is sort of electronic. It's especially useful for travels and this and that. But it's so very nice to have a physical copy and it really does add to the reading interface. So I quite enjoyed that. Do we want to make mention of maybe whether. What would be best next? Some of the contributions or some of the themes perhaps? You know, whatever you think would work?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Well, sure, I'd be happy to. So the first three chapters in the special issue deal with the reinvention of stories or the retelling, recasting of traditional, if you will. And that term obviously is in scare quotes. Right. When I say the word traditional, we all know how problematic that term is. I use it here for convenience's sake. So my chapter looks at Amist Tripathi's reworking of Sita in his Ramchandra series, which is a really kind of fascinating, interesting set of books. It's a trilogy focused. Well, it's really a retelling of the Ramayana, even though it never claims to be that, but that is essentially what it is. And in that work, Sita is a warrior and she is prime minister. She co shares the status of the Vishnu with Ram. So it is on its surface sort of a feminist retelling of the story. But as I unpack it, I try to show that it's kind of a traditional, modern retelling of the story. It's there there's undertones of Hindu nationalism throughout and lots of references to contemporary events. And so on the second chapter, Nel Shapiro Hawley did a wonderful job in looking at Aru Shah's series. It's a trilogy. She actually focused only on one of the books, but it was. Sorry, it's Roshni Chokshi's Arusha and the End of Time. And it's an account written for. Or it's a series of three books written for young adults. And she focuses here on the first book, Arusha and the End of Time, that tells the story of the Pandava sisters rather than the Pandava brothers. The third chapter is Tulsi Srinivasa. She also just published a book, a larger work around this topic, the Goddess in the Mirror, but her contribution is called the Endless Story. Myth is Ethics and Ethics as Myth. And she looks at women's retellings of stories from the Mahabharata in beauty parlors and the way in which goddesses are invoked. So these three really focus on reworking Hindu stories in contemporary settings. The last three chapters turn instead to practices, and we avoided the terms myth and ritual in the title for pointed reasons. What constitutes a myth? Myth is a highly loaded term, ritual. As you may know, lots of literature published about the term ritual, rights of a ritual and practices here, and narratives seemed to me more neutral terms, less loaded terms. So we ended up going with those terms at Sushil's request as well. And so on the last three, Emiloco looks at Tamil women's reworkings of ritual as a kind of protest in light of widespread alcoholism. Brian Pennington looks at Garwal and pilgrimage in Garoal and reworking of that in a secular context, kind of the post independence reworking of that pilgrimage route. And then finally, Varuni Bhatia looks at Holi and the digitization of Holi greetings and the way in which those greetings reflect the contemporary political and economic context. So the first three narratives, though, we've been looking at innovative recreations, reworkings of Hindu practices and contemporary. All of them are contemporary, all of them look at the 21st century. So it was a nice balance.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Fantastic. Myth is indeed a loaded word. It is officially a four letter word. And ritual might as well be in certain contexts, although myth does feature in all.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yes, and I mean, they're good for, again, all of these terms. Obviously there's a whole history behind them and all of them are controversial terms. But. But they're useful, right? So they're useful as kind of Shorthand to an audience that may or may not know all of the controversy surrounding these terms. Nevertheless, we jettisoned them for the title of this particular special issue.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Absolutely, absolutely. And this is more pointed to an academic audience, and it's understandable. And yet, when we, those of us who are foolish enough to be public scholars or engaging, you know, actually gratefully engaging, very interesting lifelong learners, we use these terms to bring them into the class. Like, here's a course on Indian mythology, and the class has to be problematize or score or color, you know, deconstruct, you know, what is Indian and what is mythology. Right.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
And they're all problematic terms. And they become even more problematic in light of 20th, 21st century reworkings where things that we think of as myth get recast in popular literature. So is it still what we would think of as myth? So those terms are so problematic that we tried to avoid invoking them, at least in the introduction, at least in the framing of the issue.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, I think it's really interesting with the ballot. And so let's talk a little bit on the sort of meta level, which is sort of, kind of where I live and where I imagine many of the audience questions are. Many of our question. Our audience are sort of educated in some field into files or even not. They're just interested in this podcast. So. So we have the three papers on, on. On narrative and the three papers on. On. On practices. Are these sort of like subsections or do they interlace in some way? Would you say? Are they sort of, Sort of. Is. Is it like two separate ecosystem of ideas, would you say?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Good question. Yes and no. I mean, the overarching theme here is of the reworkings of these in contemporary settings. So one foot in earlier iterations of both these practices and these stories, but one foot also in the modern reworkings and retellings of them. So, for example. And so, for example, if we look at Varuni Bhatia's article at the end, and there was a reason I put these actually in the order I put them in, but she does this fascinating turn to looking at online greetings, holy greetings, and the way in which they convey so much more than just holy greetings in the modern age. And of course, all of this is only made possible by the Internet, Right. And by the rise and by globalization, by the opening of the economy. I think the overriding, if you will, sub theme here is the way in which. And this is another problematic word that's going to be in scarecrows but modernity has functioned to transform both these narratives and practices. And let me unpack that a little, little bit in terms of what I mean, as we all know, about the economic changes of India 93 and of course, the rise of the Internet, which has globalized all kinds of media. And so between those two things, you see an explosion in the 21st century of retellings, reworkings of a variety of what we might think of as traditions in ways that reflect really the modern context. And so the one exception to that might be, well, two exceptions really. In the journal issue, Amy Locos and Brian Pennington's contributions really look at the ways in which, in the 21st century, other factors have helped to reshape, in the case of Amy's contribution, ritual, in the case of a particular kind of ritual, in the case of Brian Pennington's contribution, the way in which the legal status of a particular pilgrimage route in Garo has been reshaped by legal frameworks. So those two are a little bit different. But the other four really look at the changes that were affected by 93, the economic changes, and also the rise of the Internet in particular, and the rise of global narrative, global reworkings and retellings of a variety of Hindu content.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
So, I mean, endlessly fascinating. So the ways in which sort of all of these papers, whether the ones that are practice oriented or narrative oriented, they're all united in the umbrella of, might we say, renovation, repackaging, sort of adaptation and sort of this polyphony of adapt expectations. Are these sort of deviations? Are these par for the course? Is this just the, the new. This is just Hinduism doing its thing or how might you describe this?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yeah, this is Hinduism doing its thing. And again, Hinduism is another problematic term. But so, yeah, some of these. Yeah, but I know it's an. It's another term that, you know, it's hard to avoid but has, you know, scarecrows around it. So in some cases, reworkings in some of the chapters. So Amy Aloco's particularly looking at the way in which a particular right, a specific right, has been reworked in light of a problem, a contemporary problem. Some of these are really renovations. And so, for example, looking at Nell Hawley, Nell Shapiro Hawley's contribution, the Ara Shah novels have one foot in the Mahabharata, but there are no Pandava sisters. Right? So in any of the, if you will, traditional, well known retelling tellings or retellings of the Mahabharata. And so this fantasy literature that both she and I address Actually, I look at the Ramayana side and she looks at the Mahabharata side, and. But this genre of fantasy is kind of new, and it's made possible again by this globalization of narrative and the way in which opening up the economy has made exposure to Western media available in ways that it wasn't necessarily before the economic changes of 93.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
That's super intriguing. Are there any. Are there any phenomena in here which really surprised you? Is there something that kind of stood out to you as particularly unexpected, or is it all sort of, you know, business as usual in the Indic world?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
I wouldn't say necessarily unexpected. I think I was pleasantly surprised by the range that this set of scholars brought to the issue. It didn't start out as, you know, with three narrative and three in practice. That's how it ended up. And all of the essays in the issue are very strong. All of them take up a different piece of this contemporary puzzle. And so if there was one thing that surprised me, it was just how widespread this phenomenon is of reworking, retelling, revising both narratives and practices in the contemporary Hindu world.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, this is probably beyond the pay grade of either one of us, but one of the things. One of the occupational hazards I suffer is thinking aloud and thought. But here we are. You know, one wonders at the extent to which. Certainly there's no question that everything from globalization to all of the. All of the factors that have. That have contributed to these adaptations are certainly at play in all the world's religious traditions. And yet one wonders if there isn't. If this isn't. There's. If there isn't something more uniquely indic about the adaptability of such ideas, about the extent to which, you know, it's more of a banyan tree than an oak tree, the extent to which sort of repackaging is. There's much more of a precedent for sort of, you know, like, for example, there's like 300 Mahabharata Ramayanas. Right. So it's like it's understood that there are variations and there's less balking at adaptation and variation. Perhaps, you know, this is just thinking aloud, right?
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Correct. No, you're absolutely correct. And yes, we know that from Paula Richmond's volumes on many Ramayanas and retelling Ramayanas. And Nel Shapiro Hawley and Sohani Pillai recently published many Mahabharatas. So this idea of telling, retelling, refashioning narrative is very much there. And it was there before 93 as well. When you think of the Hindi film industry right out of Bollywood and retelling stories in film, reworking of various kinds of of traditional Hindu story. If you again, using the word traditional advisedly, Hindu stories through film and all kinds of retellings of the traditional, again using that word advisedly. But the myths of Krishna, for example, of Sita in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, all of that is there already. So the retelling, reworking of narrative and the repurposing of certain kinds of of practices, traditional practices, is very much part of the Hindu tradition. It is not alien at all.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, really intriguing. These, these studies, these papers are so excellent and this special volume, so coherent in a sense, in terms of the overarching banner. One wonders if, do you have plans of revisiting this? Do you think this will go somewhere? Is this sort of, you know, is this, are you, have you scratched this itch for now? And there's something else that you're working on that you want to tell us about?
- [23:07]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Sure. Well, it's tentative at this point, but so, yes, following the work that I did on this special issue where I looked at Amish Tripathi's retelling of the Sita story, Sita Ram story, the Ramayana, even though he never uses again that term for obvious reasons.
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Commercial Narrator
Right.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
That he didn't want to attract too much negative attention, that he was overworking the Ramayana. So he never says that he's actually retelling the story of the Ramayana, but after looking at that, I got intrigued by the whole world of popular novels that retell, rework, refashion the stories of the heroes and heroines of the epics and also the gods and goddesses that are there in the Puranas. And so I gave a paper that I'm turning into an article on the reworking of Kalki in Stephen Misal's Kalki series. What's really interesting about him is he's not Hindu. He was raised in a Christian family, but he writes about Hindu figures because he's Indian. And he says he actually wrote in an interview. I couldn't write about Christian figures that wouldn't sell in this country. He actually says that in an interview. So he retells the stories of a variety of Hindu figures and he wrote a Kalki trilogy that I gave a paper on and that gave me a larger idea for doing a book on the retelling of Hindu goddess and Hindu heroine stories in these popular novels that Oxford University Press is interested in publishing. So that will be the next thing that I'm working on. And also a Routledge volume on Hindu popular culture. There is a ton of creativity out there. There's just a ton of creative reworking, refashioning, revising. And this is all part of the history of commentary and the history that we see already in the Hindu tradition of retelling stories, reworking stories to reflect the context in which the reteller, the refashioner, exists. And Hindu popular literature has exploded in the first half of the 20th century. Well, first half, first 20 years, sorry, of the 21st century. It's exploded in the first 20 years or so of the 20th century. So the first quarter of the century that we're living in. And a lot of this material is being published in English, which is also fascinating because it tells you about audience. The audience here is a sophisticated English speaking audience, not just necessarily Indian Hindu audience, but a global Hindu audience. And so the reworkings and refashionings of Hindu goddesses and Hindu heroines is being done from a feminist perspective, from a globalized perspective. So this is just in the tradition of Hindu commentary that we see over the centuries already existing in Hinduism.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, it is so invigorating to have folks track these moving targets in real time. I know that's a little bit tongue in cheek because of the nature of scholarship, where by the time the book's published, you've long moved on to what you, you know, to your, to, to your ethnographic research or whatever you were researching for the book. But, but nevertheless, I mean, to have more of your finger for a scholarship to have its finger on the pulse of contemporary lived tradition. And it's, you know, it's sort of, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's escalating manifestations. I mean, that's, that's really cool. That's super cool for a variety of reasons. It sounds like we will be chatting with you on this podcast again and again.
- [26:58]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Well, we hope. I'm just at the very beginning of my journey into this sea of popular Hindu literature that's out there. What's interesting too, is how often scholars are quick to dismiss popular literature. But this is just in the tradition of commentary. This is not new. This has been happening in Hinduism for the last, how many hundreds or thousands of years of retelling stories and reworking different kinds of stories and also practices to reflect, affect the time in which the reworkings find themselves. So these popular works are doing the same thing. And if you look at, for example, Nel Shapiro Hawley's chapter in the Journal of Hindu Studies issue that I just guest edited, she's writing for an American Hindu audience. So this is very much a context reflecting the context in which not only she finds herself, but in which the audience, the intended audience, finds itself. So this is nothing new.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, it's fascinating and perhaps unsurprising since it's taken us a few generations of scholarship to even take the Purana seriously. They've been around. They're as old as Islam. Right.
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Dr. Tracy Pinchman
So, Raj, can I ask you a question? I don't see why not. Were there any particular. If you had a chance to. I know you had a chance to look at it. I don't know how in depth you were able to read the essays in the special issue. Were there any ones in particular that you found especially fascinating or interesting?
- [28:32]
Dr. Raj Balmar
You know, I. Actually there. It's, it's, it's. They're all different and they're all intriguing. I would say that I would happily enjoy a flight to any overseas destination with any one of these people sitting next to me. Some of them, most of them actually, whom I've had the pleasure of meeting and having on the podcast. I would say if I was in more of a little bit of a geeky kind of scholarly, self interested mode, I would focus on the narrative ones if I wanted to sort of have a deeper conversation. Otherwise I would just kind of pick the brains of any of these people. They're so intriguing. But if I wanted to have more of an exchange or cross collaboration, I would certainly focus on the narrative ones. They're all fascinating, I think. To be honest. I think the Vasita for the new millennium was the one where the narrative interest and the sort of feminine divine interest and the epic interest and the sort of global market interest all converge. So there's so, so much there.
- [29:36]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Well, Avit Tripathi would agree with you because it was a hugely bestselling series, the Ramchandra series, along with his other series as well. But this one in particular captured the imagination of many, many readers, not all of whom are Hindu.
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Dr. Raj Balmar
Yes, and it's so serendipitous, I did not connect the dots. So I get on these calls. Of course I read the books. I may not read every single word of every book, but certainly I look at the books before the podcast, although I ask these naive questions as if I know nothing about the book. But ironically, you have to know about the book to know which naive questions to ask. So it's kind of intriguing. Yes, you have to know, you know, what to play dumb about in order to get a, get an interesting response. But so I'll have a day where, you know, there's a podcast bracketed out for an hour and there'll be like anything before that. It could be a talk, it could be a course, it could be whatever for a change. It's some writing time and I find myself writing a retelling of the Mahabharata. It's sort of in concert with a. It's a collaboration of sorts. And I'm realizing now that so many of the papers here in our conversation now is a meta commentary and what I myself am doing with this Mahabharata project, it's fascinating. But yeah, audiences have changed. And part of this collaboration is a group has commissioned me to sort of leverage my storytelling in Mahabharata chops not for an indic audience, but for a global audience. Because they feel what I've known for decades, that the Mahabharata, well done for a global audience would be staggering. Right? I mean, so because we live in a time where there's so much interest and cross pollination of ideas and we have access to so many different markets so effortlessly because of the world that we're in now. And there's something just so incredibly timeless about the Mahabharata. I mean, so obviously I chat with the eliminate problem. But also that title, the title that caught my, you know, I had a little bit of whiplash when I scanned through the titles was Myth as Ethics and Ethics as, as Myth because I'm like, yes, that's, that is the narrative's function, you know, is ideology, philosophy, theology. That's, that's what narrative does. That's what lasting narrative does. And I thought, oh, no, I gotta dip into that just because of that kind of interplay that you spells out so beautifully in the, in the subtitles. So that's kind of where I would go. But I'm greedy. I can't just pick one, though.
- [32:05]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yeah. So. And I don't want to speak too much for the contributors. I'll just say that was Tulsi Schwernevas chapter. I mean, as I mentioned, she has published a larger work called the Goddess in the Mirror, which is an anthropological reflection on beauty. But the idea of going to beauty parlors, Right, and finding traditional narratives in beauty parlors, in a way is just brilliant. Right? It's a kind of a brilliant way to think about religious commentary. That's what this is. It's narrative commentary. Let me just say another thing just around what you just said, Raj. We tend to think of Hinduism as it's written in Sanskrit or in indigenous Indian languages as real Hinduism. And we tend to think of the study of the past or the study of Hinduism in India as it's practiced as real, and then the study of other things as not real Hinduism. I face that attitude myself and publishing my most recent book, which looks at. I mean, the book starts in India but moves very quickly to Michigan and the Goddess Temple in Michigan. And North American Hinduism is often like, well, it's derivative, it's not real. I tried to show that's a real side of creativity and reinvention of. Of if we will again using this term advisedly, traditional Hindu practices and stories. That's what I was trying to capture here is the innovation. And that innovation, it might be being done outside of the Jambudvipa, the traditional land of India. It might be being done in languages other than Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, you know, indigenous Indian languages, but it's still Hinduism. It is not to be ignored. It is not to be pushed aside. And it shouldn't be viewed as lesser than. It's still very much part of that whole tradition of reinvention, recreation, revision that is so much part of Hindu narrative and practice well before the context that we look at here in this special issue of the journal.
- [34:10]
Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, that was so beautifully said and an encapsulation of one of the core driving forces behind the special edition and behind so much of what we cover and how we think that. But, you know, I can't, I can't speak for. I could probably say this generally of religion in general, but. But certainly within the Hindu world. Adaptations are not interruptions of Hinduism. The adaptations are Hinduism. There is no Hinduism absent the myriad of developments and adaptations. And so, and, and, and, and also for those who may adopt a more, whether exclusive or elitist or purist lens, one can easily look to tradition itself. And what is more Hindu than a Vedic fire ritual where there is a priest who's a product of parampara for multiple generations, who is intoning in Sanskrit. And wherever they lie on the earth, you know, Jambudvipa, they will announce the location, they will announce America Deshev, you know, Michigan, Chicago, Nagaray, they will literally recalibrate the liturgy for wherever you are in the world. And that, that announced that very day, that very month, that very year. And it's phenomenal that, that, that all of the Gregorian calendar and all of the globe can fit happily into Hindu ritual time and cosmology. And how do we make the argument that that is an interruption of tradition when tradition itself, its highest echelons, is adapting to that? So it's fascinating, right?
- [35:51]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Yes, it is. And also moving to more marginalized communities or marginalized conceptions. So in the journal issue, Amy Aloko, for example, she looks at women's invocations of the dead in light of an increase in alcoholism among men in South India. Brian Pennington looks at the fraught relationship between secularism and religion in light of independence and in a particular pilgrimage route in Garhwal. So all of this speaks to these differing contexts, both in India and outside of India, and the way in which the context need to change our notion of what counts as, as, as Hinduism. If that makes sense.
- [36:36]
Dr. Raj Balmar
That makes makes sense to me and I imagine to many of our listeners. That's great. So, yeah. Is there anything else?
- [36:45]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
I'm just reluctant to overspeak for some of my contributors who aren't here. And so I don't want to say too much about their chapters, but each and every chapter here has something to contribute to the ongoing renovations and innovations that are present in the Hindu tradition, both in retelling of stories and reworking of, of practices.
- [37:05]
Dr. Raj Balmar
Yeah, I've always, even from when I first started studying Hinduism, formerly maybe 20ish years ago, I've loved the, the metaphor or the, the language of, of renovation of this ancient mansion. Like, say you have an old, whatever era dwelling. Yeah. You're adding wings, removing wings. You're, you're the, the, the wood may not be the same over hundreds of years. Right. So, but nevertheless, there is some continuity in this dwelling. And so we're constantly renovating not because the renovation is what keeps is what contributes to the longevity of the mansion. Right. It doesn't disrupt that longevity.
- [37:44]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
Correct? Yep, that is correct.
- [37:46]
Dr. Raj Balmar
So this is great. So is there anything else either about the project? The volume, the Hindu Jungle, the Meaning of Life, Anything else that you want to comment on before we close for today?
- [37:56]
Dr. Tracy Pinchman
I just want to say thank you for having me on. As I said, I don't want to overspeak for my contributors, but I urge listeners to grab a copy, go online. It is all digital available through academic libraries. There is also hard copy available to go and read all of these fascinating essays. And I want to give a special shout out and thanks to my contributors for staying with the project and for writing five amazing chapters. I'm delighted by all of them. I learned from all of them and I'm grateful to all my contributors for being with me in the project.
- [38:31]
Dr. Raj Balmar
Fantastic. Thank you very much. So for those listening, we've been speaking with Dr. Tracy Pinchman, who is the Director of Global Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She was the editor of a special issue called Engaging into Narratives and Practices in the Contemporary World. This is a 2025 issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies. Check out the link in our podcast notes. These are really rich and accessible contributions and the journey itself is a treasure trove of cutting edge research, really on all things indic. So until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading, keep and keep contemplating the ways in which the new actually illumines the old. Take care.
- [39:34]
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