Religion

Nehru and the Spirit of Science

Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings show a complex thinker who saw science as a tool for social change, not just an enemy of religion. He sought a balance between science and spirituality, inspired by Gandhi…
▶30-Sep-2024
Archishman Raju
Book
Book Review

The Revival of Buddhism

Reports of the death of Buddhism in precolonial India were greatly exaggerated. The many Buddhisms promoted by ideologies across the spectrum in modern times came to distinctively shape South Asia.
▶18-Jul-2024
Chandrabhan P. Yadav
Book
Book Review

Regulating Religious Expression

The experience of legal provisions against “outraging religious feelings” demonstrates the pitfalls of modern states resorting to penal secularism.
▶07-Aug-2023
Abhinav Sekhri

The Discourse of Religious Conversions

To have a rational conversation about religious conversions in India, we have to carefully disentangle reason from rhetoric, cleanse key words of their emotive charge, subject arguments to logical…
▶05-Jul-2023
Syed Sayeed

Constitution, not Caste, Must Govern Temple Space

Despite Tamil Nadu’s history of anti-caste movements, continued reports on the denial of temple entry to Dalits indicate that the space has to come under greater legal and public scrutiny. The state…
▶08-Jun-2023
Dhivya Sivaramane
Essay

The Cultural Unity of the Deccan Plateau, 1347–1687

Between the 14th and 17th centuries, the states of the Deccan drew on the same resources to base their authority -- the memory of the prestigious Chalukyas maharajas of Kalyana, and the prestige…
▶08-Mar-2021
Richard M. Eaton

Love Taboos: Controlling Hindu-Muslim Romances

The myth of ‘love jihad’ is sustained through widely circulated illustrations of ‘lustful’ Muslim men and ‘victimised’ Hindu women. These images recirculate decades-old calumnies and make invisible…
▶07-Jan-2021
Charu Gupta
Review Article
Book
Book Review

A Prehistory of Religious Modernity

A comparative study of the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayanis, two sects seen as polar opposites, raises questions on both the superiority of the Hindu reform project during the colonial period and…
▶19-Nov-2020
Tanika Sarkar

Gandhi: A Player of Infinite Games

Even radical dissenters have experimented within some boundaries. Gandhi played with boundaries themselves in nearly every domain of life — politics, sexuality, culture, knowledge. He was uniquely a…
▶26-Sep-2019
Vinay Lal

‘Transgression’: Explaining contemporary India

Complex societal transformations can be assessed through their changing normative structures. One can analyse the different social domains in India by focussing on the key concept of ‘transgression’…
▶01-May-2019
Peter Ronald deSouza