Vasudha Narayanan

The History of the Academic Study of Religion in Universities, Centers, and Institutes in India1

India is home to more than 800 million Hindus and has a massive higher education system that is overseen by the University Grants Commission (ugc). Despite this, there are hardly any departments of religion or Hinduism in India, but the ugc, even though it has a secular mission, funds universities with explicit religious affiliations. This article traces the reasons for these paradoxes and discusses the apparent lacuna of religious studies departments by looking at the genealogy of the study of religion in India. It initially looks at the contested terrain of nineteenth-century educational institutions. The work of British missionaries, Orientalists, and government officials form the imperial context to understand Charles Wood’s momentous Despatch (1854), which, on the one hand, argues for secular institutions but, on the other, tries to accommodate the work of the Orientalists and the missionaries. Wood recommends a system in which government subsidies, secular education, and universities with overt religious profiles become interlocked, but the formal study of religion is bypassed. Finally, I reconsider what the “dearth” of religious studies and the “absence” of Hinduism departments reveal about the construction of religion in India itself. The lack of conceptual correspondence between “religion” and “Hinduism” as taught in Western academic contexts does not preclude the formal study of religion in India. Instead, the study of religion is conducted within particularized frameworks germane to the Indic context, using a network of unique institutes. Reflection on these distinctively Indian epistemological frameworks push new ways of thinking about religious education and the construction of religion as an object of study in South Asia.

Rewriting the Hindu Traditions from Global Perspectives

Re-imagining South Asian Religions is a collection of essays offering new ways of understanding aspects of Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Theosophical, and Indian Christian experiences.

Y51K and Still Counting: Some Hindu Views of Time

AT THE BEGINNING of every religious ritual conducted in Hindu brahmanical modes, the officiating priest and those doing the ritual formally declare the co-ordinates of the land and the time in which the rite takes place. These words are part of the sankalpa or the declaration of intention to do the ritual. Such co-ordinates are in cosmic frameworks; the land is identified with one of the dvipas or islands in puranic cosmology and the timespan is given as a moment that occurs in a span of millions of years. The celebrant first announces the name of the kalpa (a span of 4320 million human years which is equal to one day in the life of the creator god Brahma) and then finetunes it to a shorter time period called the manavantara, a span of approximately 306,720,000 human years named after the primeval man called Vaivasvata. One then notes that this is first part of the kali yuga (this immediate cycle of 432,000 years). After these cosmic notations of time, the person who is about to do the ritual also notes the· calendrical details. The name of the year is mentioned (many Hindu