Routledge Hindu Studies Series
About the Book Series
This series, in association with the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, intends primarily the publication of constructive Hindu theological, philosophical and ethical projects aimed at bringing Hindu traditions into dialogue with contemporary trends in scholarship and contemporary society. The series invites original, high quality, research level work on religion, culture and society of Hindus living in India and abroad. Proposals for annotated translations of important primary sources and studies in the history of the Hindu religious traditions will also be considered.
Debating 'Conversion' in Hinduism and Christianity
1st Edition
By Ankur Barua
June 28, 2018
Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of ‘conversion’ provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons...
Bhakti and Embodiment: Fashioning Divine Bodies and Devotional Bodies in Krsna Bhakti
1st Edition
By Barbara A. Holdrege
January 22, 2018
The historical shift from Vedic traditions to post-Vedic bhakti (devotional) traditions is accompanied by a shift from abstract, translocal notions of divinity to particularized, localized notions of divinity and a corresponding shift from aniconic to iconic traditions and from temporary ...
Textual Authority in Classical Indian Thought: Ramanuja and the Vishnu Purana
1st Edition
By Sucharita Adluri
January 22, 2018
Theistic Vedānta originated with Rāmānuja (1077-1157), who was one of the foremost theologians of Viśistādvaita Vedānta and also an initiate of the Śrīvaisnava sectarian tradition in South India. As devotees of the God Visnu and his consort Śrī, the Śrīvaisnavas established themselves through ...
Hindu Pilgrimage: Shifting Patterns of Worldview of Srisailam in South India
1st Edition
By Prabhavati C. Reddy
October 26, 2017
In recent years, changes in religious studies in general and the study of Hinduism in particular have drawn more scholarly attention to other forms of the Hindu faith that are concretely embodied in temples, icons, artworks, rituals, and pilgrimage practices. This book analyses the phenomenon of ...
The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi
1st Edition
By Makarand Paranjape
October 26, 2017
Who is responsible for the Mahatma’s death? Just one single, but determined, fanatic, the whole ideology of Hindu nationalism, the ruling Congress-led government whichfailed to protect him, or a vast majority of Indians and their descendants who considered Gandhi irrelevant? Such questions ...
Hinduism and Environmental Ethics: Law, Literature, and Philosophy
1st Edition
By Christopher Framarin
October 13, 2017
This book argues that the standard arguments for and against the claim that certain Hindu texts and traditions attribute direct moral standing to animals and plants are unconvincing. It presents careful, extensive, and original interpretations of passages from the Manusmrti (law), the Mahābhārata (...
A Woman's Ramayana: Candrāvatī's Bengali Epic
1st Edition
By Mandakranta Bose, Sarika Bose
October 12, 2017
The Rāmāyana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candrāvatī, a ...
Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology: A History of Reception in Premodern India
1st Edition
By Ajay K. Rao
October 12, 2017
The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki is considered by many contemporary Hindus to be a foundational religious text. But this understanding is in part the result of a transformation of the epic’s receptive history, a hermeneutic project which challenged one characterization of the genre of the text, as a work of...
Classical Vaisesika in Indian Philosophy: On Knowing and What is to Be Known
1st Edition
By ShashiPrabha Kumar
June 16, 2017
Vaisesika is one of the six systems of Hindu philosophy. It represents a pluralistic realism and is usually held to be an atomistic, metaphysical theory. This book explores the basic tenets of the Vaisesika classical school of Indian philosophy from a new perspective. It argues that it reveals an ...
Indian Thought and Western Theism: The Vedānta of Rāmānuja
1st Edition
By Martin Ganeri
May 25, 2017
The encounter between the West and India in the modern period has also been an encounter between Western modernity and the traditions of classical Indian thought. This book is the study of one aspect this encounter, that between Western scholasticism and one classical Indian tradition of religious ...
Pilgrimage in the Hindu Tradition: Salvific Space
1st Edition
By Knut A. Jacobsen
August 19, 2015
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 ...
Hindu Perspectives on Evolution: Darwin, Dharma, and Design
1st Edition
By C. Mackenzie Brown
July 31, 2015
Providing new insights into the contemporary creationist-evolution debates, this book looks at the Hindu cultural-religious traditions of India, the Hindu Dharma traditions. By focusing on the interaction of religion and science in a Hindu context, it offers a global context for understanding ...