Adam Bowles

Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Āpaddharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata

[This book is a close study of the Āpaddharmaparvan which situates it within its context in the great Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata and within Indian political and social thought, and explores the relationship of its didacticism to the broader literary context of the Mahābhārata., This book is a close study of the Āpaddharmaparvan which situates it within its context in the great Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata and within Indian political and social thought, and explores the relationship of its didacticism to the broader literary context of the Mahābhārata.]

A History of State and Religion in India

Offering the first long-duration analysis of the relationship between the state and religion in South Asia, this book looks at the nature and origins of Indian secularism. It interrogates the proposition that communalism in India is wholly a product of colonial policy and modernisation, questions whether the Indian state has generally been a benign, or disruptive, influence on public religious life, and evaluates the claim that the region has spawned a culture of practical toleration.

Dharma and ‘Custom’: Semantic Persistence, Semantic Change and the Anxieties of the Principled Few

This article does three things. First, it argues that the usage of dharma in the sense of ‘customary practice’, which is found in compounds such as deśadharma and kuladharma, can be traced back to the Atharvaveda. Second, it argues that in the Dharmaśāstra tradition this usage of the word dharma as ‘custom’ ought to be distinguished from acara, which is also often taken in the sense of ‘custom’, because ācāra frequently implies a hieratic sense of ‘customary behaviour’, especially in its association with the cultured practices of particular elites (the sat, sādhu, or śiṣṭa). Therefore, dharma in the usage this article is concerned with is a broader term for ‘custom’ than acara. And, third, it suggests that when the Dharmasastra writers restricted the currency of such customary dharmas to cases where existing sacred texts (sruti or smrti) could not be called upon, they were reaffirming that such dharmas were worldly rather than transcendent, and not to be confused with the transcendent dharma the principled few now identified with these sacred texts—a development attributable to other changes that shifted the word dharma to the very centre of brahmanic ideology.