Histories of art in India never fail to mention the greatest hits: Mughal miniatures, Chola bronzes, the ruins of Hampi. Yet most artworks—not just in India but around the world—are not celebrated masterpieces like these; rather, many are blends and montages, mixtures of materials and methods, styles that can’t be easily classified; made by artists who are anonymous or not widely known. Where’s the history of these arts? A new monograph by Holly Shaffer, Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture at Brown University, shines a light on this theme in colonial India: it’s called Grafted Arts: Ar ..read more

When you think of alcoholic drinks in world history, you might think of French wine, Japanese sake, Russian vodka...But what about India? Although it’s not well represented in global histories of alcohol, in fact Indian history overflows with drinking cultures and a diverse array of alcoholic drinks. We learn about all this—and more—through the pioneering research of James McHugh, Professor of South Asian religions at the University of Southern California. His new book, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions, is the first-ever academic monograph on alcohol in early India. But ..read more

Would it surprise you to learn that most people in contemporary India believe in god? That Śiva is the most popular Hindu deity? That while half of Indians meditate weekly, only a third have ever practiced yoga? These are just a few of the findings of the Pew Research Center’s report on religious life in India. Published this past summer, the Pew report is a major milestone in the study of South Asian religions. It represents the most extensive publicly available data ever collected on religion in Indian society—including the intersection with politics, caste, and identity. One of the report’s ..read more

Sanskrit is known as the classical language of India, especially Hindu traditions. But over its 3000 year history, Sanskrit was widely used in other Indian religions, as well. And not only religions. Sanskrit was a lingua franca in Early India—a window onto cosmopolitain, literary, intellectual, and political cultures of the past. On this episode, Finnian talks with Audrey Truschke, a historian of South Asia at Rutgers University, who has made her name studying Sanskrit texts and Islamic power on the subcontinent. Her most recent book, “The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives of Indo-Musl ..read more

What comes to mind when you hear the word “yoga”? A sequence of postures, maybe; perhaps a seated meditation. But this Sanskrit word has a history going back millennia. Yoga has been—and continues to be—a label for many different doctrines and practices; a spiritual path claimed by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, and many other groups; and a potent symbol in religion, politics and culture around the world. Growing from roots in early Indian asceticism, Yoga today is a truly global phenomenon. At the same time, yoga’s success has also fostered the rise of yoga and meditation studies a ..read more

Some years before the Buddha lived, another renunciant teacher rose to prominence in ancient India. Known as Mahavira, “the great hero,” he practiced the most difficult austerities. Preaching non-violence, he aimed to transcend his body and escape rebirth. When he finally reached liberation, he became known as the Jina—the victor. His followers, the Jains, worshipped Mahavira as the last in a series of enlightened teachers. Although its numbers are relatively small, Jainism remains a vibrant faith in India up to the present day—making it one of the oldest surviving religions in South Asia. On ..read more

If you’ve ever walked along city streets in India, chances are you’ve noticed Hindu street shrines. These are public spaces where people worship deities, saints, and spirits. Wayside shrines come in all shapes and sizes, from humble altars to full-on temples. You could think of them as crowd-sourced devotion: they seem to arise organically in response to the urban environment—at the base of a tree or near a busy intersection. The shrines usually house a sacred object, some incarnation of spiritual presence: a statue, an image, a stone. Going about their days, Hindus pause here to pray, reflect ..read more

The Mughal Empire was an Islamic dynasty that ruled much of South Asia from the 16th-19th centuries. It was one of the grandest empires the world has ever known. But the Mughals did not rely on military might alone to consolidate their rule. They also used works of literature—stories that evoked peoples, cultures, and far-flung landscapes. Through stories, regional factions competed for influence at the Mughal court—and sought to define themselves. My guest today is Tanvir Aktar Ahmed, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. Tanvir works at the intersec ..read more

In the past decade, India has seen the resurgence of Hindu nationalism, a political ideology of “Hindu-ness,” expressed by the neo-Sanskrit term Hindutva. Hindutva envisions India—a country where Hindus are the majority in terms of numbers—as a rightfully Hindu nation; Hindu nationalists feel threatened by minority groups, especially India’s Muslims. Riding this momentum is the current prime minister, Narendra Modi, who’s fanned the flames of identity politics throughout his career and now governs with a Hindutva worldview, with policies that critics call anti-Muslim. To learn more, I sat down ..read more

Welcome to Sensing the Sacred, a new podcast from the Center for Contemporary South Asia at the Watson Institute at Brown University. There’s so much fascinating scholarship about South Asian religions across disciplines—religious studies, history, anthropology, critical theory, political science. With Sensing the Sacred, we aim to bridge these boundaries and bring you interdisciplinary conversations on a wide range of topics. I hope you’ll join me, Finnian Gerety, as I talk to colleagues from around the world about Hindu nationalism, street shrines in India, stories of saints in Afghanistan ..read more