This article takes stock of existing scholarly literature on corporate Hinduism and charts a course for future studies of the same. So far, this literature has focused on business gurus who deploy ...Hindu texts and ideas in order to justify, organize, and lend meaning to business practices centered around knowledge work in the corporate sector both in India and globally. I argue that further scholarship should pay closer attention to the sites and institutions whereby these gurus gain their authority as well as their platform. These now include business schools, research centers, and corporations. Such a focus reveals that corporate spaces are increasingly becoming loci of authority for the production of new forms of religion.
Salvific space is one of the central ideas in the Hindu traditions of pilgrimage, and concerns the ability of space, especially sites associated with bodies of water such as rivers and lakes, to ...grant salvific rewards. Focusing on religious, historical and sociological questions about the phenomenon, this book investigates the narra- tives, rituals, history and structures of salvific space, and looks at how it became a central feature of Hinduism.
Arguing that salvific power of place became a major dimension of Hinduism through a development in several stages, the book analyzes the historical process of how salvific space and pilgrimage in the Hindu tradition developed. It discusses how the traditions of salvific space exemplify the decentered polycentrism that defines Hinduism. The book uses original data from field research, as well as drawing on main textual sources such as Mahābhārata, the Purāṇas, the medi-eval digests on pilgrimage places (tīrthas), and a number of Sthalapurāṇ as and Māhātmyas praising the salvific power of the place. By looking at some of the contradictions in and challenges to the tradition of Hindu salvific space in history and in contemporary India, the book is a useful study on Hinduism and South Asian Studies.
Yoga, karma, meditation, guru - these terms, once obscure, are now a part of the American lexicon. Combining Hinduism with Western concepts and values, a new hybrid form of religion has developed in ...the United States over the past century. In Transcendent in America, Lola Williamson traces the history of various Hindu-inspired movements in America, and argues that together they constitute a discrete category of religious practice, a distinct and identifiable form of new religion.Williamson provides an overview of the emergence of these movements through examining exchanges between Indian Hindus and American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and illuminates how Protestant traditions of inner experience paved the way for Hindu-style movements' acceptance in the West.Williamson focuses on three movements - Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, and Siddha Yoga - as representative of the larger of phenomenon of Hindu-inspired meditation movements. She provides a window into the beliefs and practices of followers of these movements by offering concrete examples from their words and experiences that shed light on their world view, lifestyle, and relationship with their gurus. Drawing on scholarly research, numerous interviews, and decades of personal experience with Hindu-style practices, Williamson makes a convincing case that Hindu-inspired meditation movements are distinct from both immigrant Hinduism and other forms of Asian-influenced or New Age groups.
This book deals with ritual healing in the Central Himalayas of north India. It focuses on the cult of Bhairav, a local deity who is associated with the lowest castes, the so-called Dalits, who are ...frequently victims of social injustice. When powerless people are exploited or abused and have nowhere else to go, they often turn to Bhairav for justice, and he afflicts their oppressors with disease and misfortune. In order to end their suffering, they must make amends with their former victims and worship Bhairav with bloody sacrifices. Many acts of perceived injustice occur within the family, so that much of the book focuses on the tension between the high moral value placed on family unity on the one hand, and the inevitable conflicts within it on the other. Such conflicts can lead to ghost possession, cursing, and other forms of black magic, all of which are vividly described. The book includes a personal account of the author's own experiences in the field as well as descriptions of blood sacrifice, possession, exorcism, and cursing. The book begins with a straightforward description of the author' s fieldwork and goes on to describe the god Bhairav and his relationship to the weak and powerless. Subsequent chapters deal with the lives of local oracles and healers; the main rituals of the cult and the dramatic Himalayan landscape in which they are embedded; the moral, ritual, and therapeutic centrality of the family; the importance of ghosts and exorcism; and practices of cursing and counter-cursing. The final chapter examines the problematic relationship between ritual healing and modernity.
Hindu nationalism Jaffrelot, Christophe
2007., 20090110, 2009, 2007, 2007-01-01, 20070101
eBook, Book
Hindu nationalism came to world attention in 1998, when the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won national elections in India. Although the BJP was defeated nationally in 2004, it ...continues to govern large Indian states, and the movement it represents remains a major force in the world's largest democracy. This book presents the thought of the founding fathers and key intellectual leaders of Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj, through the independence period, to the present. Spanning more than 130 years of Indian history and including the writings of both famous and unknown ideologues, this reader reveals how the "Hindutuva" movement approaches key issues of Indian politics. Covering such important topics as secularism, religious conversion, relations with Muslims, education, and Hindu identity in the growing diaspora, this reader will be indispensable for anyone wishing to understand contemporary Indian politics, society, culture, or history.
In Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds, Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger analyzes the agency of materiality—the ability of materials to have an effect on both humans and deities—beyond human ...intentions. Using materials from three regions where Flueckiger conducted extensive fieldwork, she begins with Indian understandings of the agency of ornaments that have the desired effects of protecting women and making them more auspicious. Subsequent chapters bring in examples of materiality that are agentive beyond human intentions, from a south Indian goddess tradition where female guising transforms the aggressive masculinity of men who wear saris, braids, and breasts to the presence of cement images of Ravana in Chhattisgarh, which perform alternative theologies and ideologies to those of dominant textual traditions of the Ramayana epic. Deeply ethnographic and accessibly written, Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds expands our understanding of material agency as well as the parameters of religion more broadly.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships Open Book Program—a limited competition designed to make outstanding humanities books available to a wide audience. Learn more at the Fellowships Open Book Program at https://www.neh.gov/grants/odh/FOBP, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at https://soar.suny.edu/handle/20.500.12648/8716.
Hindu nationalism has emerged as a political ideology represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. This book explores the campaign for Hindu unity and organisation in the context of the Hindu-Muslim conflict ...in colonial north India in the early twentieth century. It argues that India's partition in 1947 was a result of the campaign and politics of the Hindu rightwing rather than the Islamist politics of the Muslim League alone.
The book explains that the Mahasabha articulated Hindu nationalist ideology as a means of constructing a distinct Hindu political identity and unity among the Hindus in conflict with the Muslims in the country. It looks at the Mahasabha's ambivalence with the Indian National Congress due to an extreme ideological opposition, and goes on to argue that the Mahasabha had its ideological focus on an anti-Muslim antagonism rather than the anti-British struggle for India's independence, adding to the difficulties in the negotiations on Hindu-Muslim representation in the country. The book suggests that the Mahasabha had a limited class and regional base and was unable to generate much in the way of a mass movement of its own, but developed a quasi-military wing, besides its involvement in a number of popular campaigns.
Bridging the gap in Indian historiography by focusing on the development and evolution of Hindu nationalism in its formative period, this book is a useful study for students and scholars of Asian Studies and Political History.
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