New Books in Indian Religions

In Embodied Ecology: Yoga and the Environment (Mandala Publishing, 2025), Hindu Studies scholar Christopher Key Chapple explores how Hindu and Yoga traditions can inform contemporary discourse about the problems of environmental degradation both in India and globally. What do Hinduism and Yoga philosophy have to say about ecology and the environment? Christopher Key Chapple provides an in-depth analysis of the traditional texts and ideas that relate to modern concerns and conversations in the environmental movement. Chapple explains what ancient Indian texts, including the Vedas and Upani?ads, tell us about the centrality of earth-awareness in early India. Chapple then also exami...

"Nitya Prārthanā” and “Nitya Dhyāna” are two profound collections designed to infuse daily life with sacredness. “Nitya Prārthanā” offers popular chants from the prayer tradition of India (not Veda) for everyday activities, transforming routine tasks into moments of divine connection. “Nitya Dhyāna” gathers timeless Vedic mantras and sūktams to support practitioners of yoga, Ayurveda, and other Indian traditions. Both collections encourage a prayerful, mindful approach to life, helping seekers cultivate inner peace and wellness.

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The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience (Columbia UP, 2025) traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpe...

Blending travelogue, history, and archaeology, Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand (SUNY Press, 2023) unravels the various avatars of India's most famous emperor, revealing how he came to be remembered—and forgotten—in distinctive ways at particular points in time and in specific locations. Through personal journeys that take her across India and to various sites and cities in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand, archaeologist Nayanjot Lahiri explores how Ashoka's visibility from antiquity to the modern era has been accompanied by a reinvention of his persona. Although the historical Ashoka spoke expansively of his ideas...

The Bhagavad Gita is a world classic often considered to be not just the 'Hindu Bible' but sometimes the 'Indian Bible' as well. Over the last two centuries, it has attracted much scholarly attention from Indologists. Ithamar Theodor's bold and revisionist monograph The Philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita (Cambridge UP, 2025) aspires to further develop their scholarship by treating the Gita as a discrete philosophy and by offering a systematic survey of its main topics and doctrines, in so doing emphasising their philosophical potential. A major innovation here is the articulation of the Gita's structure extracted from Vedantic and Yogic pattens of...

This textbook offers a fresh approach to learning Sanskrit, the ancient language at the heart of South Asia’s vast religious, philosophical, and literary heritage. Designed for independent learners and classrooms alike, it provides a uniquely in-depth and immersive introduction to the language, exploring a rich selection of Sanskrit texts from the Buddhist tradition.

Reading Sanskrit: A Complete Step-By-Step Introduction with Texts from the Buddhist Tradition (Columbia UP, 2025)draws from the Buddhist tradition’s vast Sanskrit corpus to present a thematically coherent collection of texts covering a wide range of literary genres, including narrative, philosophical, and poetic writing...

Hinduism in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2022) is an accessible and lively introduction to common questions about the practices, ideas, and narratives often identified as Hindu. Suitable for beginning students and the general reader.

Steven W. Ramey is a Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, where he also directs the Asian Studies Program.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices (SUNY Press, 2025) explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas. This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions--namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities' iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists intensification, which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, o...

Our Primary Expertise argues counter to the longstanding trend in the field by seeing religion as mundane and not unique, which means that the field's research and teaching can have relevance all across human culture, and well beyond academia. Russell McCutcheon offers a timely argument by taking seriously threats to the humanities now happening all across higher education.

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The Concept of Mind in Hindu Tantra (Routledge, 2024) presents an account of the concept of mind in Hindu Tantra through a study of religious and philosophical texts in the medieval period. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of Religious Studies, Asian Religion, Hindu Studies, Indian philosophy and comparative philosophy.

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How did Brahma create alluring women, and for what purpose? Why did the righteous King Bhangashvana choose womanhood? How did the sage Markandeya's pupil prevent his guru's wife from committing adultery? What role did Indra play in the births of Vishvamitra and Parashu Rama? How were death, diseases, desire and anger created? Why and how did the institution of kingship come about? What can one learn from the mouse who escaped the cat, the owl, the mongoose and the hunter; or the wise jackal who was betrayed by the lion king? Why did Shiva swallow Shukra, the guru of the Asuras?

E...

Kenneth Bo Nielsen is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and leader of the Centre for South Asian Democracy.

M. Sudhir Selvaraj is Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford.

Kathinka Frøystad is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo.

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Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts (Oxford UP, 2025) serves to expand readers' understanding of what it meant to practice alchemy on the Indian subcontinent. With its broad selection of examined themes, this collection offers a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the Indian alchemical idiom and the beliefs and practices of its practitioners.

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The Hindi heartland, comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, covers nearly 38 per cent of India's total area and is home to over 40 per cent of India's population. It provides the country with over 40 per cent of its parliamentarians and determines the contours of national politics (out of the fifteen prime ministers India has had since 1947, eight have been from the Hindi belt). Yet, despite its political significance, the Hindi belt is among the most impoverished regions in the country. It consumes the bulk of the country's resources, but lags behind other states on various...

Yoga Studies in Five Minutes (Equinox Publishing, 2025) provides an accessible guide to the diverse and growing field of research into yoga as a social, historical and cultural phenomenon. Both leading scholars and innovative researchers offer 60 brief responses to questions that offer insights into the study of yoga, such as: Who was the first teacher of yoga? Is yoga Indian? What is parampara? Are there holy texts in yoga? What are the goals of yoga? Why do yogis hold their breath? The collection covers ancient history, modern developments, and contemporary issues, considers the diverse practices and philosophies of yoga in a...

This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion - they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. In Holy Places: How Pilgrimage Changed the World (Profile, 2025) Professor Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage through nineteen sacred sites - from the temples of Jerusalem to the banks of the Ganges, by way of Iona, Lourdes, Amritsar and Buenos Aires - revealing the many ways in which this ancient practice has shaped our religions an...

What happens when an analyst conducts interviews—and I am not speaking here about interviewing other analysts as we do at NBiP, but rather what happens when an analyst does field research, and researches one of the eternal subjects of our field which is to say love and also, to borrow from Gregorio Kohon, its’ vicissitudes?

Locating within himself demeaning feelings towards an other—and the setting is a psych ward in India, and in an India that continues to rework its having been partitioned, having partitioned itself, and the other is a Muslim other in a Hindu...

In this episode, Raj Balkaran speaks with Karen Pechilis, Jarrod Whitaker, and Valerie Stoker about A Cultural History of Hinduism (Bloomsbury, 2024), a landmark six-volume series that traces Hindu traditions from the ancient world to the present. Each volume is organized around eight core themes—Sources of Authority; Body and Mind; Social Organization; Identity and Difference; Politics and Power; Arts and Visual Culture; Lineages and Exemplars; and Global Contexts—allowing readers to compare developments across historical periods. Covering the Ancient, Classical, Post-Classical, Empires, Late Colonial, and Independence eras, the series brings together leading voices in Hindu studies.

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About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway, which connects the distant rural shrine with urban Pakistan. Now, an increasingly confident minority Hindu community has claimed Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. In Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple...

India's Nonviolent Freedom Struggle focuses on the Thomas Christians, a group of Christians in South India who waged a nonviolent struggle against European colonization during the politically volatile period of 1599-1799. India's Non-violent Freedom Struggle: The Thomas Christians (1599-1799) (Routledge, 2023) has three related objectives and unique characteristics. First, it offers a comprehensive study of primary sources that scholars have referenced but rarely studied in-depth. Second, it argues that the Thomas Christian narratives provide a unique position to challenge prevalent estimations found in canonical and postcolonial critical discourse on the nation. Third, it considers how an account of a nonviolent str...

This open access book, Yoga and Animal Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) offers a comprehensive understanding of yoga theory and practice as it bears on several dimensions of animal-related ethical reflection and action. "Yoga" has become a household word in recent decades and, increasingly, has drawn physical yoga practitioners to explore its philosophy; significantly, classical yoga philosophy and praxis are deeply grounded in realizing the self in relation with all beings as non-material selves. Therefore yoga provides an ideal entry-way into contemporary animal ethics discourse, contributing particularly in its appeal to the experiential dimension of human self-understanding in relation to nonhuman anima...

Dr. Christopher Chapple, founder of Loyola Marymount University’s pioneering M.A. in Yoga Studies, joins us to discuss how the program blends rigorous scholarship with embodied practice. We explore its study of Sanskrit, classical texts, philosophy, and modern applications, as well as its flexible residential and low-residency formats. Hear how this unique graduate program is shaping the next generation of yoga teachers, scholars, and leaders. Website here

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Vedic Myths and Rituals, edited by Jan E.M. Houben and Julieta Rotaru, is a scholarly volume exploring the deep interplay between mythic narrative and ritual practice in the Vedic tradition. Drawing on diverse case studies—from the myth of Pedu’s horse to the consecration rites of the Soma sacrifice—the book examines how ritual structure, symbolic meaning, and cosmic time converge in Vedic religious life. Engaging theoretical models like Roy Rappaport’s ritual theory, the contributors reveal how Vedic rituals generate “time out of time,” sustain cosmic order, and transform participants. With essays from leading scholars and an unpublish...

This conversation examines the newly published translation of the Varāha Upaniṣad, a lesser-known but deeply transformative scripture from the Kṛṣṇa‑Yajurveda, composed between the 13th and 16th centuries CE and spanning 249 verses. 

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In this episode, Dr. Raj Balkaran speaks with art historian and curator Alisa Lozhkina about her groundbreaking Ukrainian translation of the Devī Māhātmya—the first ever in the language. They explore the inspiration behind this bold project, the text’s unique reception in the Ukrainian cultural and spiritual landscape, and broader reflections on the relevance of goddess traditions in times of crisis. The conversation also ranges into the challenges and freedoms of independent scholarship and the emerging role of artificial intelligence in research.

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The anthology presents a diverse array of essays delving into Gandhi's political activities, ethical beliefs, and philosophical stance. Distinguished Gandhian scholars contribute to this collection, setting it apart from similar compilations by focusing not just on Gandhi's impact or the debate over his relevance, but on maintaining his bold ethical ideals and progressive views in an era of skepticism. The essays delve into Gandhi's comprehensive dissection of political logic, his concept of neighbourly political bonds, his fearlessness and adeptness as a yogi. The work also discusses the worldwide landscape of nonviolence, Gandhi's perspectives on Palestine, his legal work in...

Sanskritist and seasoned teacher Dr. Antonia Ruppel shares her views on the merits and pitfalls of academic enterprise, the brave new world of self-employed scholarship and the teaching of ancient languages. 

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The book, the third volume to emerge from the enterprise known as 'The Backwaters Collective on Metaphysics and Politics', attempts to further the collective's ambition to put into question the certitudes of conventional social science discourse, decolonize the dominant knowledge frameworks, and understand how the intellectual and cultural resources of Indian civilization may be deployed to think both, about some problems in contemporary politics and culture, and to introduce greater plurality into the world of modern knowledge systems.

Some of the collective's members remain deeply committed to reinitiating metaphysics into politics, and similarly, the collective's enduring interest...

On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperCollins India.

As a young girl in Bombay, Kirin Narayan was enthralled by her father’s stories about how their ancestors had made the ancient rock-cut cave temples at Ellora. Recalling those stories as an adult, she was inspired to lea...

The Krama School of the Trika Saivism of Kashmir, more familiar as Kalikrama in the contemporary parlance, has turned out to be the most crucial among the monistic Saiva traditions of medieval Kashmir after the Pratyabhijna school, a scenario people could hardly envisage six decades back when it first came to the notice of modern scholarship. The doctrine of Kalikrama, lit. sequential order of consciousness deities called Kalis, constitutes the most pivotal aspect of this school marked by a synchronous resonance between the esoteric/Tantric and cognitive/metaphysical undercurrents of the system. In order to delve deeper into the d...

Invisible Fire by Joanna Jurewicz explores early Hindu philosophy through the Manusmṛti, Bhagavadgītā, and Mokṣadharma, showing that reality is a single cognitive field manifesting through subject-object perception. Drawing from Vedic roots and cognitive linguistics, Jurewicz argues that creation, bondage, and liberation are all epistemic processes. Misrecognition leads to suffering; liberation arises through refined cognition and self-recognition. The “invisible fire” symbolizes transformative awareness latent in ritual, memory, and selfhood. Integrating modern theories of metaphor, play, and responsibility, the book reveals early Smṛti as a sophisticated philosophy of consciousness rooted in tradition and aimed at ontological and ethical integratio...

In The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors, the author sketches the contours of relations between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal.

The central argument is that various patterns of amicability and antipathy have been generated towards Muslims over the last six hundred years and these patterns emerge at dynamic intersections between Hindu self-understandings and social shifts on contested landscapes.

The core of the book is a set of translations of the Bengali writings of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), and Annada Shankar Ray (1904-2002). Their lives were deeply interwoven with some Hindu-Muslim synthetic i...

Islam is a religion of violence and behind every Muslim there lurks a potential terrorist. Islam is a threat to values of the Christian West. They are like oil and water. Clearly, they don't mix.

One God and Two Religions: Christians and Muslims as Neighbors (Fortress Press, 2025) confronts these popular perceptions head-on. With keen insight and gentle understanding, Amir Hussain explores the differences between Christianity and Islam, as well as the many things these two enduring faith traditions hold in common - including, first and foremost, their belief in and desire to be faithful to the one, tr...

This monograph outlines the core principles of equity and trusts in Sanskrit jurisprudence (Dharmaśāstra) and traces their application in the practical legal administration of religious and charitable endowments throughout Indian history. Dharmaśāstra describes phenomena that, in Anglo-American jurisprudence, are associated with courts of equity: the management of religious and charitable trusts; and the guardianship of those who lack legal capacity. Drawing on Sanskrit jurisprudential and philosophical texts, ancient inscriptions, Persian legal documents, colonial-era law reports, and contemporary case law, Equity and Trusts in Sanskrit Jurisprudence demonstrates that India's rulers have drawn on rich and venerable Sanskrit jurisprudential princi...

Much of world history is Indian history. Home today to one in four people, the subcontinent has long been densely populated and deeply connected to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas through migration and trade. In this magisterial history, Audrey Truschke tells the fascinating story of the region historically known as India--which includes today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan--and the people who have lived there.

A sweeping account of five millennia, from the dawn of the Indus Valley Civilization to the twenty-first century, this engaging and richly textured narrative chronicles the most important political, social...

In the second half of the eighteenth century, several British East India Company servants published accounts of what they deemed to be the original and ancient religion of India. Drawing on what are recognised today as the texts and traditions of Hinduism, these works fed into a booming enlightenment interest in Eastern philosophy. At the same time, the Company’s aggressive conquest of Bengal was facing a crisis of legitimacy and many of the prominent political minds of the day were turning their attention to the question of empire. In this original study, Jessica Patterson situates these Company works on t...

This book engages historically and theologically with the Hindu and Jewish traditions, covering conceptions of the divine, religious heroes, women, devotional literature, theodicy, land, and nationalist claims on it, and social differentiation and oppression. Scholarly considerations are enriched with actual conversations between Hindus and Jews.

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Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire.

Empire Inside Out: Reli...

Since the earliest encounters between tantric traditions and Western scholars of religion, tantra has posed a challenge. The representation of tantra, whether in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Tibet, or Japan, has tended to emphasize the antinomian, decadent aspects, which, as attention-grabbing as they were for audiences in the West, created a one-dimensional understanding, and hampered the academic study of the field for more than a century. Additionally, the Western perspective on religion has been dominated by doctrinal studies. As a result, sectarian boundaries between different tantric traditions are frequently replicated in the scholarship, and research tends to be sequestered according...

Today the number of native speakers of Indo-European languages across the world is approximated to be over 2.6 billion—about 45 percent of the Earth’s population. Yet the idea that an ancient, prehistoric population in one time and place gave rise to a wide variety of peoples and languages is one with a long and troubled past. In this expansive investigation, based on more than forty years of research, archaeologist J. P. Mallory navigates the complex history of our search for the Indo-European homeland, offering fresh insight into the debates surrounding origin, as well as the latest genetic research.

In...

Claiming Citizenship: Race, Religion, and Political Mobilization Among New Americans (Oxford UP, 2025) looks at Indian Americans, currently the second-largest group of immigrants in the United States, and a group that has seen significant representation in the three most recent presidential administrations. Prema Kurien asks how Indian Americans have become a rising political force given that they have not followed the traditional, recommended model of political influence. She examines the dialectical process through which immigrants conform to the structures and cultures of the society to which they have immigrated, but also work to transform their adopted homelands to accommodate their un...

Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India: Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, the Hari-Hara Mystery, and the Hindu-Christian Encounter (Routledge, 2025) is a research inquiry in interfaith studies that uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address vexing issues arising in the study of mysticism and enlightened sages.

This book raises the following questions: If all human beings have access to mystical consciousness, and some do access it, how is it that only a few become luminary sages, displaying extraordinary power? What is the ethical responsibility of such sages? And how is the encounter among sages/mystics of different traditions contributing to...

Wendy Doniger’s An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963–64 (SUNY Press, 2023) is a memoir-style collection of letters and reflections from her first trip to India as a young scholar. It offers a rare glimpse into the formative experiences that shaped her future career in Indology. The personal letters of her younger self are in conversation with reflections of her older self. Using this work as a launchpad, this interview broaches Doniger's personal and professional life learning through the course of her prominent career, spanning over five decades. This conversation commemorates Raj Balkaran's 400th New Books Network interview. 

Wen...

The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this book the Kashmiri translation and the corresponding parts of Jarvis’s English version are presented on facing pages. The Kashmiri text is reproduced as a facsimile of the autograph prepared by Pandit Jagaddhar Zadoo, one of the two Kashmiri translators. The Kashmiri text in the present volume was written on modern paper in easily legible Devanagari characters by using only a few more additional diacritic symbols. This publication contains an introduction written by Surindar Nath Pandi...

This book is a sociological study of knowledge and knowers and explores the production and perceived value of 'yogic knowledge', how distinction is curated, and how access to this knowledge is gained. The book focuses on the organization Shanti Mandir (SM) in India, a new religious movement, which was founded in 1987 by Swami Nityananda Saraswati. By identifying the structuring forces of the guru's discourse, and focusing on the marketing strategies and subsequent exchanges of capital and affective emotions, this monograph documents what the legitimate yogic identity promoted by SM is within the context of the transglobal yoga industry. A...

With a compelling story, wit, insight, and candor, American author Stephen Huyler leads the reader into the heart of India. It is a country and culture he knows and loves well. Beginning with his arrival on his twentieth birthday, he spins tales of a young man's fascination that seasons into a rare relationship that has lasted half a century. Few foreigners have traveled as extensively in India as he. Huyler has learned to feel the pulse of the people. His innate adaptability has enabled him to be truly quiet, observing, accepting, and accepted by a remarkable range of individuals...

Secularism and Islam in Bangladesh: 50 Years After Independence (Routledge, 2025) comprehensively analyses the syncretistic form of Bengali Islam and its relationship with secularism in Bangladesh from pre-British to contemporary times. It focuses on the importance of understanding the dynamics between religion and secularism within specific cultural contexts. Arguing that extremist interpretations of Islam, which aim to establish a theocratic state, have not been able to influence the pluralistic religious and cultural life of Bangladesh substantially, the book shows that religious and cultural pluralism will continue to thrive despite the apparent threat posed by increasing religiosity among Bangladeshi Muslims. This book is...

Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network. 

Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is here. 

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The Mirror of Ornaments (Alaṅkāradappaṇō) defines and exemplifies 42 figures of speech or “ornaments” in 134 verses. It is the only surviving work of poetics in Prakrit, a literary language closely related to Sanskrit. It is one of the earliest representatives of the larger Indian discourse on poetics, and is especially closely linked to Bhāmaha’s Ornament of Literature (Kāvyālaṅkāra). This book includes an introduction, annotated translation, glossary, and diplomatic and critical editions of the single surviving manuscript of the Mirror of Ornaments.

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Metaphysics As Therapy: List-Making and Renunciation in Gnostic Yogas (Springer, 2025) examines the significance of metaphysical list-making as a determining feature of 'spiritual exercises' in South Asian gnostic yogas. It examines how these ancient traditions sought spiritual transformation through the dialectical practice of taxonomy. It highlights the gnostic thread that intersects 'spiritual exercises' and 'ways of life' in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina circles. 

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In Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal (Duke UP, 2024), Tithi Bhattacharya maps the role that Bengali ghosts and ghost stories played in constituting the modern Indian nation, and the religious ideas seeded therein, as it emerged in dialogue with European science. Bhattacharya introduces readers to the multifarious habits and personalities of Bengal’s traditional ghosts and investigates and mourns their eventual extermination. For Bhattacharya, British colonization marked a transition from the older, multifaith folk world of traditional ghosts to newer and more frightening specters. These "modern" Bengali ghosts, borne out of a new rati...

In Yogalands (McGill-Queen's UP, 2025), Paul Bramadat wrestles with his position as a skeptical scholar who is also a devoted yoga practitioner. Drawing from his own experience, and from conversations with hundreds of yoga teachers and students in the United States and Canada, he seeks to understand what yoga means for people in the modern West. In doing so, he addresses issues that often sit beneath the surface in yogaland: why yoga’s religious dimensions are rarely mentioned in classes; how the relationship between yoga and trauma might be reconsidered; and how yoga seems to have survived debates around nationalism, cultu...

Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures (Oxford UP, 2025) examines some of the most well-known and widely circulated narratives in the history of Sanskrit literature, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Visnusarman's famed animal stories (the Panchatantra), Somadeva's labyrinthine Ocean of Rivers of Stories (the Kathasaritsagara), Kalhana's Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir (the Rajatarangini), and two of the most famous plays in the history of Sanskrit literature, Kalidasa's Abhijnanasakuntala and Harsa's Ratnavali. Offering a sustained close, intertextual reading, John Nemec argues that these texts all share a common frame: they feature stories of the mutual relations of...

The SāṃKhya System: Accounting for the Real (SUNY Press, 2024) brings new life to an ancient Hindu system of thought. Sāṃkhya spans the fields of philosophy, physics, metaphysics, psychology, and ethics. Although notably not theological, its key premises can be found in virtually all religious traditions that originate from India. Sāṃkhya espouses a reciprocity between Prakṛti, the realm of activity, and Puruṣa, the silent witness. It also delineates the phenomenal experiences that arise from Prakṛti, including the operations of the human body, the five great elements, and the eight mental states. Sāṃkhya proclaims that knowledge of w...

Reframing India in World History breaks the stereotypical portrayal of India based on misconstrued historical theories. Prevalent constructions of Indian history are tinged with colonial historical frameworks and presentation. It is important to understand India for what it is in the past based on self-determined frameworks derived from Indian history to reclaim India’s place in the world history. Based on new evidence-based research, Lavanya Vemsani explores patterns of civilization that are indigenous to India to investigate its history from the beginning to the present. This book covers topics central to a comprehensive understanding of the nation including a disc...

The small town of Vṛndāvana is today one of the most vibrant places of pilgrimage in northern India. Throngs of pilgrims travel there each year to honour the sacred land of Kṛṣṇa’s youth and to visit many of its temples. The Building of Vṛndāvana: Architecture, Theology, and Practice in an Early Modern Pilgrimage Town (Brill, 2023) explores the complex history of this town’s early modern origins. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines to examine history, architecture, art, ritual, theology, and literature in this pivotal period, the book examines how these various disciplines were used to create, de...

Sri Krishna Prem: A Wing and a Prayer is an in-depth, spiritual biography of a British fighter pilot (WW I), Ronald Nixon (1898-1965). Raised in an intellectually vibrant family, educated at Cambridge, he had a religious experience during one of his flights as a RAF pilot, and when the war ended, he embarked on a religious/philosophical journey that carried him to India, first as a university professor, and then into the religious world of his mentors, the university's vice-chancellor, G.N. Chakravarti and his wife, Monica (Yashoda Mai). Initiated by Yashoda Mai, he joined a movement celebrating the 16t...

Mick Brown’s The Nirvana Express: How the Search for Enlightenment Went West (Oxford UP, 2023) is a riveting account about the West's engagement with Eastern spirituality across a century. It traces the life of multiple characters that intersected across time and space to create a network of interlinking stories about saints, salesmen and scoundrels all involved in spirituality.

From Edwin Arnold, whose epic poem about the life of the Buddha became a best-seller in Victorian Britain, to the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley; and from spiritual teachers Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba and Ramana Maharshi to the controversial guru...

The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) to the Integral Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) co-created for his ashram. Scholars have ignored Mirra for Aurobindo, which prevents a full understanding of their spiritual practice. Scholars have also avoided examining work Aurobindo produced after they began their partnership in 1920 until his death in 1950, and privilege the written output in his journal Arya from 1914 to 1921. In this initial fertile period, he put forth his innovative teaching about what he...

In this episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with David Gordon White, a distinguished indologist and scholar of Tantra. Our conversation focuses on David’s most recent project tracing the transregional histories of spirits, gods, demons, and their associated rituals across Eurasia. Along the way, we dive into an intellectual conversation about dog-headed men, angry goddesses, alchemical mercury, body-snatching yogis, the origins of Dracula, and much, much more.

If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get yo...

John joins Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian for the roundup episode of the second series of Violent Majorities, focusing on long-distance ethnonationalism. Looking back at their conversations with Peter Beinart on Zionism and Subir Sinha on Hindutva, Lori begins by asking whether Peter underestimates the material entanglements keeping Jewish American support for Israel in place. Ajantha wonders if a space has been opened up by Zionism’s more naked dependence on coercion and brute force. When John expresses puzzlement about the fervent ethnonationalism of minorities within a pluralistic society Lori and Ajantha point out that a sense of minority vulner...

What is Hinduism?

For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to keep the peace, much to the chagrin of officials back in London.

And, increasingly, Indians began to define what Hinduism meant as part of a broader political awakening.

Manu Pillai tells that story in his latest book Gods, G...

An astonishing variety of murals greet visitors to the temples and palaces of southern India. Beautiful in execution and extensive in scope, murals painted on walls and ceilings adorn the most important spaces of early modern religious and political performance. Scene by scene, histories of holy sites, portraits that incorporate historical figures into mythic landscapes, and Tamil and Telugu inscriptions that evoke the imagined topographies of devotional poetry unfold before the mobile spectator. Body, History, Myth reconceives the relationship between art and devotion in South India by describing how the extraordinary sensory experience of a viewing body in motion un...

This special issue of Nidan: International Journal for Indian Studies is the product of a collective experiment with materials that are assembled, imagined, and agentive in the context of South Asian religions. The articles are available here. 

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Lori Allen and Ajantha Subramanian continue their second series on Violent Majorities. Their previous episode featured Peter Beinart on Zionism as long-distance ethnonationalism; here they speak with Subir Sinha, who teaches at SOAS University of London, comments on Indian and European media, and is a member of a commission of inquiry exploring the 2022 unrest between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester, UK.

The catalysts he identifies for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) include the emergence of new middle classes after economic liberalization, the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11, the 2008 crisis in capitalism, and the spread of new communications technol...

The Hare Krishnas have long been associated with American hippie culture and New Age religious movements. But they have developed deeply rooted communities in India and throughout the world over the past 50 years. Known officially as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), this once-marginal religious community now wields vast economic assets, political influence, and a posh identity endorsed by Indian business tycoons and Bollywood celebrities. 

Bringing Krishna Back to India (Oxford UP, 2024) examines this globalized religious community in Mumbai, India's business and entertainment capital, where ISKCON draws Indians from diverse backgrounds to adopt a socially conservative Kr...

In Indian languages from Sanskrit to Marathi, yoga has an enormous range of meanings, though most often it refers to philosophy or methods to control the mind and body. The Yoga of Power: Political Thought and Practice in India (Columbia UP, 2025) argues for a wider understanding, demonstrating that yoga has long expressed political thought and practice. The political idea of yoga names the tools of kings, poets, warriors, and revolutionaries. It encodes stratagems for going into battle and for the demands of governance. This idea suggests routes to self-rule even when faced with implacable obstacles, and it defines righteous ac...

Handbook of Indian History (Springer, 2024) comprehensively examines the extensive history of India by focusing on the unifying themes of history. The profound analysis of special events and impactful personalities of Indian history form the core of the book. Handbook of Indian History includes articles on cultural, social, and political history of India, topics of religion, philosophy, gender, language and literature, providing a vast array of knowledge on India. The book introduces India from the beginning to the current day, providing depth and breadth of subjects to understand the history of India. The book is beneficial to anyone interested in le...

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and cast...

Gidi Ifergan's The Discerning Clear Gaze of Yoga (Equinox, 2024) explores the road map of yoga as reflected in the Yogasūtra of Patañjali (third century CE) and the Sāṁkhyakārikā of Iśvarakṛṣṇa (350–450 CE) which leads to the rise of this discerning insight, evading interpretations motivated by naivety on the one hand, and excessive suspicion on the other. Inspired by the psychology of yoga, the author offers a meditation focused on the sense of self and the cultivation of a discerning clear gaze.

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The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns. 

Saraha: Poet of Blissful Awareness (Shambhala, 2024) is the first book to attempt a thorough treatment of the context, life, works, poetics, and teachings of Saraha. It features a search for the “historical” Saraha through evidence provided by our knowledge of the medieval Indian context in which he likely l...

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. 

In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their m...

Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270 (UCL Press, 2020) is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region.

Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic...

Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire.

Empire Inside Out expl...

Why yet another book on the Manusmriti? In From Fire To Light: Rereading the Manusmriti (Harper Collins, 2024), acclaimed academic Arvind Sharma argues that the present understanding of the Manusmriti - regarded as a text designed by the higher castes, especially brahmanas, to oppress the lower castes and women - only tells one side of the story. As he demonstrates, this perception, when examined against textual, commentarial and historical evidence, is limited to the point of being misleading (and sometimes downright wrong). Providing an alternative reading of the Manusmriti, From Fire to Light accepts some of the conclusions associated with th...

Applying the "influencer" concept to the study of religion, Gurus, Priestesses, Saints, Mediums and Yoginis: Holy Women as Influencers in Hindu Culture (MDPI, 2024) explores the varieties of strategies that holy women use for gaining and expressing power in diverse roles. It examines different concepts of holiness and leadership for men and women, the role of charisma, and the arenas of activity and accomplishment for holy women in India and abroad. By relating a new idea-that of the 'influencer'-to the study of women and religious authority, the Issue contributes fresh and refined analyses and explanatory models toward a greater understanding of...

Scholars of religion have mostly abandoned the concept of "syncretism" in which certain apparent deviations from "standard" practice are believed to be the result of a mixture of religions. This is particularly relevant to Thailand, in which ordinary religious practice was seen by an earlier generation of scholars as a mixture of three religions: local spirit religion, Hinduism, and Buddhism. In part, the perception that Thai Buddhism is syncretistic is due to a misunderstanding of traditional Buddhism, which has always accepted the existence of local spirits and gods. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Thai Buddhist practice that still stubbornly...

Visual Anthropology of Indian Films: Religious Communities and Cultural Traditions in Bollywood and Beyond (Routledge, 2024) provides a unique insider’s look at the world’s largest film industry, now globally known as ‘Bollywood’ and challenges existing notions about Indian films.

Indian films have been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. Chapters in this edited volume take a fresh view of various hidden gems by maestros such as Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Shakti Samant, Rishikesh Mukherjee, and others. Other chapters provide a pioneering review and analysis of the portrayal of Indian religious...

An illuminating history of religious and political controversy in nineteenth-century Bengal, where Protestant missionary activity spurred a Christian conversion “panic” that indelibly shaped the trajectory of Hindu and Muslim politics.

In 1813, the British Crown adopted a policy officially permitting Protestant missionaries to evangelize among the empire’s Indian subjects. The ramifications proved enormous and long-lasting. While the number of conversions was small—Christian converts never represented more than 1.5 percent of India’s population during the nineteenth century—Bengal’s majority faith communities responded in ways that sharply politicized religious identity, leading to the permanent ejection of religious minorities fro...

Hindu Nationalism in South India: The Rise of Saffron in Kerala (Routledge, 2024) engages with a range of factors that shapes the trajectory of Hindu nationalism in Kerala, the southern state of India. Until recently, Kerala was considered a socio-political exception which had no room for Hindu nationalism. This book questions such Panglossian prognosis and shows the need to map the ideological and political growth of Hindu nationalism which has been downplayed in the academic discourse as temporary aberrations. The introduction to the book places Kerala in the context of South India. Arguing that Hindutva is a real force which ne...

A hitherto unknown work of Sanskrit poetics edited and published for the first time based on manuscripts at the National Library (Paris), the India Office Library (London) and Bodleiden Library (Oxford).

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Given the continued challenges that face the higher education job market in the Humanities in North America, this multi authored volume offers (i) a critical assessment of the current situation of Humanities doctoral students, early career scholars, and those now working in doctoral degree-granting institutions in the U.S. along with (ii) concrete proposals for a way forward. In turn, these proposals (iii) are the starting point for constructive reflections by faculty now working in leading American doctoral programs. The aim for the volume is therefore to initiate and then move forward a conversation among future, current, and recent...

This book introduces, edits and translates the Dattātreyayogaśātra, a Sanskrit text on yoga composed in about 1200 CE in South India. It teaches four types of yoga practice but devotes the majority of its 193 verses to haṭhayoga, which it divides into two varieties, one which consists of the eight auxiliaries first taught by Patañjali and one which has nine physical methods. It is thus the first text to combine the aṣṭāṅga system of Patañjali with physical techniques, and its teachings were highly influential on later authors and commentators of yoga texts. The book is addressed prim...

Whether it’s in commerce or conflict, today’s world pays rapt attention to the Persian Gulf. But the centrality of the Gulf to world history stretches far beyond the oil age–its ancient ports created the first proper trading system and the launching point for the spread of global Islam.

Allen James Fromherz’s new book The Center of the World: A Global History of the Persian Gulf from the Stone Age to the Present (University of California Press, 2024) puts the Gulf at the center of a centuries-long story of world history, showing how societies across the region...

Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship film stars as deities. Focusing on temples dedicated to Bollywood (Hindi cinema) stars and the artifacts produced by Hindi and Tamil cinema fans, Shalini Kakar illustrates how the fan constructs their identity as a devotee and that of the star as a deity. Extending her research from India to the US, Kakar highlights the transnational dimensions of this phenomenon to demonstrate the degree to which devotional fan practices (fan-bhakti) and fan artifacts can help us rethink art, religion, and po...

Indian Philosophy and Yoga in Germany by Owen Ware (Routledge, 2024) takes the reader on a tour through the reception of Yoga philosophies in nineteenth-century German and the early twentieth century. European luminaries like Schlegel, Hegel, von Günderrode, Schelling, Humbolt, and Müller all engaged with works like the Bhagavad Gītā and Yogā Sūtras, though in very different ways, some reading yogic thought as entailing a threatening nihilism, others lauding it as superlatively philosophical. Ware shows how their responses to Indian thought illuminates our understanding of post-Kantian philosophy and its anxieties over pantheism indebted to Spinoza. He concludes...

In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with written text artifacts and a new approach to theorizing and writing Hindi literary history. He responds to recent developments in quantitative and qualitative approaches to book history - including tools developed within the digital humanities - by applying new as well as traditional techniques of paleography, cod...

The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and recreated in India. Moreover, it is argued that the techniques for adapting epic into theater could have been Greco-Roman influences in India, and that some of the elements adapted within the literary motifs (specifically the motifs of the embassy, the ambush, and the ogre) could have been Greco-Roman borrowings by Sanskrit authors.

Th...

The vibrant red sandstone temples of India's Deccan Plateau, such as the Pattadakal temple cluster, have attracted visitors since the eighth century or earlier. A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the coronation place of the Chalukya dynasty, Pattadakal and its neighboring sites are of major historical importance. 

In Shiva's Waterfront Temples: Architects and Their Audiences in Medieval India (Yale UP, 2022), Subhashini Kaligotla situates these buildings in the cosmopolitan milieu of Deccan India and considers how their makers and awestruck visitors would have seen them in their day. Kaligotla reconstructs how architects and builders approached the sites, including the...

Extensively based on fieldwork material, From Tapas to Modern Yoga: Sādhus' Understanding of Embodied Practices (Equinox, 2024) primarily analyses embodied practices of ascetics belonging to four religious orders historically associated with the practice of yoga and hatha yoga. This focus on ascetics stems from the fact that yogic techniques probably developed in ascetic contexts, yet scholars have rarely focused their attention on non-international ascetic practitioners of yoga. Creating a confrontation between textual sources and ethnographic data, the book demonstrates how 'embodied practices' (austerities, yoga and hatha yoga) over the centuries accumulated layers of meanings and practices that coexist in the...

When taught properly, yoga can be a healing and life-affirming practice for students experiencing mental illness. Lauren Tober's book Mental Health Aware Yoga: A Guide for Yoga Teachers (Singing Dragon, 2024) will cover the foundations of yoga psychology, therapeutic skills, the mental health crisis, and more. After reading, yoga teachers and trainees will feel confident creating a safe space for their practice.

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A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with Sanskrit poetics and poetic language, thereby yielding an incredibly rich and innovative poetry. Kāḷamēkam sings of courtesans, fellow humans, of gods, of animals, praises them, derides them, and insults them, using sarcasm, dry wit, and criticism, combined with śleṣas and yamakas, samasyā...

In her latest memoir, Landed: A Yogi's Memoir of Places & Poses (2024, Vine Leaves Press),  American-born Jennifer traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country (Israel), midlife hormones (merciless), cross-cultural marriage (to a Frenchman) and their imminent empty nest (a mixed blessing), eventually realizing the words her yoga teachers had been offering for the past twenty-three years: root down into the ground and stay true to yourself. Finally, she understands that home is about who you are, not where you live. Written in experimental chapterettes, Landed spans seven years (and then some), each punctuated with chakr...

Existence and Perception in Medieval Vedānta: Vyāsatīrtha's Defence of Realism in the Nyāyāmṛta (de Gruyter, 2024) focuses on discussions of metaphysics and epistemology in early modern India found in the works of the South Indian philosopher Vyāsatīrtha (1460-1539). Vyāsatīrtha was pivotal to the ascendancy of the Mādhva tradition to intellectual and political influence in the Vijayanagara Empire. 

This book is primarily a philosophical reconstruction based on original translations of relevant parts of Vyāsatīrtha's Sanskrit philosophical text, the "Nectar of Logic" (Nyāyāmṛta). Vyāsatīrtha wrote the Nyā...

The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger Lawyers Association rocked the nation: protests were launched around India and throughout the diaspora, a record-setting human chain called the ‘Women’s W...

Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s book Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin Random House India, 2024) undertakes a systematic intellectual study of Lala Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought through four decades of his active political life, lived between 1888 and 1928. It contests the dominant scholarly interpretation of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought as the nascent stage of Savarkarite Hindutva, and highlights the internally differentiated nature of ‘Hindu Nationalism’. Showing that, by 1915, Lajpat Rai moved towards ‘Indian’ nationalist narratives, it challenges the assumption that all ideas of Hindu nationhood necessarily culminate in Hindutva. An examination of Lajpat Rai’s final nationa...

Michael C. Baltutis' book What is Hinduism?: A Student's Introduction (Routledge, 2024) is an engaging introduction to the complex religious tradition of Hinduism. Central to its focus is demonstrating the fundamental diversity within Hinduism through the multiplicity of its core beliefs and traditions. Chapters are divided into four historical categories – Vedic, Ascetic, Classical, and Contemporary Hinduism – with each examining one deity alongside one key term, serving as a twin focal point for a more complex discussion of related key texts, ideas, social structures, religious practices, festivals, and concepts such as ritual and sacrifice, music and devotion, and engagement and renunciation. ith stu...

Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250), founder of the Madhyamaka or Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy and the most influential of all Buddhist thinkers aside from the Buddha himself, concludes his masterpiece, Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, with these baffling verses:

For the abandonment of all views

He taught the true teaching

By means of compassion

I salute him, Gautama

But how could anyone possibly abandon all views? In Buddhism Between Religion and Philosophy: Nāgārjuna and the Ethics of Emptiness (Oxford UP, 2024), Rafal K. Stepien shows not only...

Today I talked to Hari Dutt Sharma about Gulmini: An Anthology of Sanskrit Lyrics and Gazals (Rākā Prakāśana, 2023). The book presents 51 lyrical poems in rythmic and melodious Sanskrit in free metre, The poems examine various sentiments and emotions (rasa and bhāva) on various subjects, from depictions of beautiful seasonal nature to reflections on international travels and the transmission of Sanskrit poetry, and on the experience of poetic creation.

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Bhakti Ethics, Emotions, and Love in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Metaethics (Lexington Books, 2024) explores the broader implications of understanding bhakti, “devotional love to the divine,” as an ethical theory based on a “realist” account of emotions, where emotions are sensory perceptions of the real ethical qualities of classes of actions. The work discusses how emotions are understood metaphysically as extra-mental, objectively real qualities, what Cogen Bohanec refers to as “affective realism.” This follows from a cosmogenic model where the universe emanates from the loving relationship between the divine feminine, Rādhā, and her intense loving relationship with her masculine counterpart, Kṛṣṇa. Sin...