Episode 406: What is Hinduism? Part 1

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

THE HISTORY OF WORLD (RELIGIONS), PART I continues with WHAT IS HINDUISM? (PART 1). Because face it: you really should know more, and you just don’t. We won’t cover everything you need to know in 40+ minutes this time, but we sure will get your interest piqued and, hopefully, point you to where you can learn more.

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

Today, we’re talking about Hindu traditions across two episodes for two reasons: first, because like we’ve been telling you for 35+ episodes, religion is imperial. The fact that most “world religions” textbooks include Hinduism but rarely account for its vast complexity? Is both white supremacist nonsense and Euro-American imperialism at work.

And second, because we think you can’t call yourself religiously literate without actually knowing Hinduism is, how it came about, and why it matters—to scholars, regular folk, and practitioners. Hindu traditions have beautiful, intricate practices that are also deeply pragmatic and always changing, rooted in a South Asian milieu but also global, and guess what? Because there are Hindus all over the world, this is a global religion—meaning it has boundaries but also can teach us about this world religions problem.

We know we can’t include everybody’s everything. So in a world or global or comparative religions class (or textbook), we make choices about what to include and who to leave out. Same for this podcast. Our goal for today and also for this season is to show you that those choices are political, that they have consequences, and that they—like the study of religion itself—have their roots in white supremacy and imperialism, whether we recognize it or not. 

Hindu traditions are the first we’ve covered in HISTORY OF THE WORLD (RELIGIONS) that actually get a lot of play, a lot of coverage in classrooms and textbooks. But that doesn’t mean we think you know what it is, or that those textbooks get it right. But we aren’t going Hinduism alone:

We were joined on this episode by guest expert Dr. Arun Brahmbhatt.

Dr. Arun Brahmbhatt is assistant professor of South Asian religions at St. Lawrence University. His work centers on Hindu traditions, and more generally, religion in colonial India. More specifically, he researches the use of Sanskrit in the modern period and Sanskrit’s connections with more modern languages like Gujarati and Hindi.

Check the homework for our links to Dr. Brahmbhatt’s work!

In this episode, we talked about Hindu traditions in a few ways: plural, lived, with references to texts but not only texts. We tried to keep this episode historical, so that next episode can be a bit more contemporary.

So what are some of those basics?

Something like 1.4 billion people in the world identify as Hindu, which is about 15 or 16% of the entire world. So clearly, if religion is what people do, a whole heck of a lot of people do religion as Hindus. And, as you might already imagine, 1.4 billion people now (and countless before now) can’t possibly agree on every ethical, philosophical, practical, ritual, gendered, casted (etc) aspect of Hinduism.

Ilyse had a lot to say about language this go around.

  • We talked about Hinduism v. Hindu traditions. Ilyse had a ball explaining that that “-ism” means Hinduism is not native, like religion is not native. She also explained that she personally uses both terms—because she speaks American English and that’s how language works—but prefers Hindu traditions given that it foregrounds plurality of practice.

  • We talked about Sanskrit, and how this ancient language is both deeply important to Hindu traditions and if we only focus on Sanskrit as the sacred Hindu language, we miss a whole lot of how Hindus do religion.

  • We talked about Ramayana, originally a Sanskrit epic tale from which many Hindus draw meaning, ethics, philosophy, cultural touchstones, and more. The Ramayana is the tale of Ram (or Rama), one of the avatars (or incarnations) of Vishnu, one of the big, important deities. We talked about the Ramayana in this episode and next, in part because Ilyse loves it so much, and in part because it has so many interpretations—it’s an easy place to highlight that plurality we’re after.

  • We talked imperialism because, hi hello, that’s our entire thing. And also because India was a site of massive imperial practices—as IRMF has argued in her work, India was almost a blueprint for how to do imperialism for the British. Hindu traditions are both uniquely affected by imperial control and irreducible to that historic period.

Be sure to check out the glossary—these episodes have a lot of vocabulary and we’ve got you hooked up there.

TL;DR: this episode did the following

  1. World religions is problematic AF—even for religions that supposedly “do OK” within it, as Hinduism has done.

  2. Hindu traditions demand and deserve our attention, systematically (like in institutions of higher and primary/secondary education) and as scholars of religion looking to know the most about how people make sense of this wild world we share.

  3. Hindu traditions are varied, multiple, and complex, even if/when they are presented as uniform or simple.

Little Bit, Leave It

(the segment where we leave you with a little bit to remember)

Megan admitted that in her many degrees in religion, she never had to take a class on Hinduism. Which tells you what you need to know.

Ilyse kept it together and just said that you should know about Hindu traditions because they’re big, they’re messy, they aren’t monolithic, and far too many folks are out here in the world doing violence over who gets to count as Hindu.

If you dont know, now you know

(the segment where we get one factoid)

Megan talked about how the one line about Hanuman in Black Panther undid her—and there were no religion nerds around. If a religion reference happens in the woods…

Ilyse talked about how lived Hindu practices are both tied to and separate from texts, and one of the places we can see that is in how deities are honored. Some like ghee, others flowers, some others coconut—and these preferences are often rooted not in text at all, but in tradition, culture, region.


Homework!

(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)

Ilyse lost her mind, nerds, because she couldn’t stop listing readings. Beware the nerd in her element:

Megan admitted that for the first time ever, she had less to say and assign that IRMF. But she recommends:

Nerds of the Week!

Thanks for listening, rating and reviewing. This week’s nerds are: JACK83642, PKeatra, & Mimi62916. You make our whole day.

it’s good to be the queens