Religious Traditions in South Asia

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey A. Oddie
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Traditions

The Classification of Smells and the Order of the Senses in Indian Religious Traditions

Numen ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 374-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
James McHugh
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
The Other ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Senses

AbstractIn the course of producing complex analyses of sensory experience, traditional Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist scholars in South Asia examined the nature of smell. These scholars were most often interested in the fundamental qualities of smells, i.e. how many types of odor there are. Faced with this difficult task, the three sectarian groups initially produced three different accounts, though in later works most scholars adopted very similar classifications of smell. In part, this may be because of the difficulties involved in classifying smells, but the article also suggests that it was mutually beneficial to abandon contentious material in less significant parts of a system in order to focus discussion on more central issues. Amongst all the sense-objects, odors were most consistently defined by terms implying an aesthetic value. The article also examines the place of the sense of smell within the three different orders of the senses that these three schools of thought used. These sense-orders reflect divergent classificatory principles, and the place of smell in relation to the other senses highlights different aspects of the sense of smell. Unlike their stance on the classification of odors, the three schools of thought always maintained distinct orders of the senses, which must have been a regular reminder of difference in philosophical priorities.

scholarly journals The Dynamics of Islamic Ideology with Regard to Gender and Women’s Education in South Asia

Asian Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Forkan ALI
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Asian Society ◽  
Historical Practices

The article presents an investigation on certain anthropological-social aspects and the social organization of women with a focus on female education and women’s rights in Islam in South Asia, and especially in the subcontinent. It starts with the Moghul period and then turns to the colonial era and contemporary developments. Through the movement for independence from colonial rule of Britain, the Muslim identity in the South Asian region rose in a state of transformation, reform and development. This occurred due to several factors that encouraged the regeneration and reviewing of Indian society in response to the condemnation, discrimination and chauvinism of their colonial rulers and their deep-seated legacy. Women of the society, who were censured to be subjugated by the native men as entitled by colonial rulers, empowered this transformation by taking direct and indirect participation in it even though patriarchal norms and mind-sets have been a durable feature of South Asian society, cutting across faith communities and social strata, including the Hindu, Buddhist and other non-Islamic traditions on the subcontinent. While religious arguments are generally used in efforts to preserve the asymmetrical status of men and women in economic, political, and social arenas, this investigation attempts to show that religious traditions in South Asia are not monolithic in their perceptions of gender and women’s education. The structure of gender roles in these traditions is a consequence of various historical practices and ideological influences. Today, there is a substantial variability within and between religious communities concerning the social status of women. At different times and in different milieus, religious points of view have been deployed to validate male authority over women and, in opposition, to call for more impartial gender relations. 

An Ethnographic Turn in Comparative Theology?

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-215
Author(s):  
Ken Chitwood
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Comparative Theology ◽  
Religious Traditions

Abstract This review essay analyses three books of comparative theology between Christian and Hindu traditions in South Asia in order to address two interrelated questions: 1) do they hint at an ‘ethnographic turn’ in comparative theology? And 2) if so, what might that mean for both ethnographic theology and comparative theology as they continue to develop as disciplines? Through an interpretive, exegetical review of these works, the article observes how an evolving appreciation for ethnography in comparative theology – and an attendant and analogous turn toward comparison in ethnographic theology – could bring more texture and critical reflection to the comparison of theologies across religious traditions, a more expansive capacity to ethnographic theology, and bring both fields into more fruitful dialogue. It argues that such developments are needed in a world where the lived navigation of hyper-diversity and multiplying difference are increasingly the norm.

Shared Virtue: The Convergence of Valued Human Strengths across Culture and History

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Dahlsgaard ◽  
Christopher Peterson ◽  
Martin E. P. Seligman
Keyword(s):  
Positive Psychology ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Moral Behavior ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Positive Traits

Positive psychology needs an agreed-upon way of classifying positive traits as a backbone for research, diagnosis, and intervention. As a 1st step toward classification, the authors examined philosophical and religious traditions in China (Confucianism and Taoism), South Asia (Buddhism and Hinduism), and the West (Athenian philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) for the answers each provided to questions of moral behavior and the good life. The authors found that 6 core virtues recurred in these writings: courage, justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. This convergence suggests a nonarbitrary foundation for the classification of human strengths and virtues.

Renunciation in the Religious Traditions of South Asia

Man ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Burghart
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Religious Traditions

Unforgetting Chaitanya

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Varuni Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Cultural Complex ◽  
Historical Figures ◽  
History Of

What role do premodern religious traditions play in the formation of modern secular identities? What relationship exists between regional devotional cultures, key bhakti figures, and anticolonial nationalism in South Asia? What are some of the multiple sites of forgetting and unforgetting that determine how we receive iconic historical figures in the present? Unforgetting Chaitanya addresses these questions by examining late nineteenth-century transformations of Vaishnavism in Bengal—a religious tradition emanating from the figure of Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533), and articulated in this region through various bodily and artistic practices. Building upon the concept of viraha as longing for the absent one within the Vaishnava worldview, this book argues that educated and middle-class Hindu Bengalis, the bhadralok, (re)turned to Chaitanyite Vaishnavism as a unique expression of excavating their authentic selves. It argues that by searching for literary and historical pasts, discovering long lost sacred spaces, recovering manuscripts, and disciplining Vaishnava practices across sects and castes, the Bengali Hindu middle-class successfully forged a respectable, bhadralok Vaishnavism. The book engages with questions around memory and history, poetics and praxis, and sacred space and print culture in the making of modern Vaishnavism as a devotional and cultural complex, simultaneously. Thus, Unforgetting Chaitanya argues for the methodological relevance of relocating the study of Bengali or Gaudiya Vaishnavism within the historical, intellectual, and cultural context of colonial Bengal, where it assumed its modern form. In doing so, this interdisciplinary book contributes to the fields of both Religion and History of South Asia.

Establishing Tamil Ritual Space: A Comparative Analysis of the Ritualisation of the Traditions of the Tamil Hindus and the Tamil Roman Catholics in Norway

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knut Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
The South ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Ritual Space ◽  
Roman Catholics

AbstractThe purpose of this essay is to make a contribution to the study of religious pluralism in the south Asian diasporas. The essay compares the establishment of ritual traditions of the Tamil Hindus and the Tamil Roman Catholics in Norway. There are several parallel developments, and the essay identifies some of these similarities. It is argued that features sometimes assumed to be unique of the Hindu diaspora may not always be so, but may be common features of several of the religious traditions of south Asia in the diaspora. Attention to the plurality of religious traditions in the south Asian diasporas is therefore sometimes a better strategy than the study of each religious tradition in isolation.

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