Episode 407: What is Hinduism? Part 2

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Shownotes
(because citations are political)

THE HISTORY OF WORLD (RELIGIONS), PART I continues with WHAT IS HINDUISM? (PART 2). Because face it: you really should know more, and you just don’t even if we just gave you a whole episode about it. We won’t cover everything else you need to know in another 40+ minutes, but we sure will get your interest piqued and definitely 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 two guest experts! Dr. Shreena Nikita Gandhi and Dr. Dheepa Sundaram. Y’all are in for a treat.

Dr. Shreena Gandhi is a Fixed Term assistant professor of religious studies at Michigan State University, where is primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas. Her research looks at the impacts of race, gender and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces; she also works on a collaborative project on how to transform U.S. religious history into an anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-sexist discipline which helps move forward the goals of decolonization.

Dr. Dheepa Sundaram is a cultural theorist and scholar of performance, ritual, and digital culture in South Asia and assistant professor at the University of Denver. Her research examines the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics, online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence.



In this episode, we talked (again!) about Hindu traditions in a few ways: plural, lived, with references to texts but not only texts. We tried to keep this episode contemporary, but if historical is more your jam, check out the last episode.

Today, our lesson plan was relatively but deceptively simple: how do Hindus do what they do today, and where can we specifically see plurality (even when the world religions model asserts singularity or homogeneity).

We keep saying that religion is what people do. But, when we say that, most of us are thinking about this moment. Our go-to thought isn’t, say, 1546. So thinking about contemporary practices is, frankly, just a useful way for us to get our nerds to see what people do, like with video or images or in their mind’s eye.

  • We talked about why and how religion and politics matter. Ilyse talked about Dalit women as an example of why and how we can see religion, politics, and access just by knowing more about religious systems and histories.

  • We talked about the Ramayana, again, but this time as a way to explore how contemporary Hindus interpret and use this ancient epic.

One way we talked about Ram and Ramayana was to talk about Ramnamis, a Dalit movement that interprets the Ramayana and Rama in a way that priorities and validates members of this caste (among other minoritized and oppressed communities). We talked about their famous tattooing and print practices.

We also talked about the Ramcharitmanas in this capacity. It’s a poem from the 16th century by a notable figure named Tulsidas. It’s in an Eastern dialect of Hindi, on purpose—most historians agree that Tulsidas, who was very, very literate and prolific, purposefully wrote the Ramcharitmanas in this dialect of Hindi to make it accessible. Ramnamis perform this text at an annual religious festival.

The other way we talked Ramayana was to talk about the ways the Hindu right and Hindutva broadly has reimagined Rama as the rightful Hindu king of a solely Hindu India. In other words we talked about how the Ramayana is being repurposed as a Hindu nationalist text, including how the phrase “Jai Shree Ram” (“Victory to Lord Ram”) has become a dog whistle, a chant thrown at low-caste or Muslim Indians during acts of violence.

(image from here)

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

  3. We looked at just one thing—the Ramayana—and saw just a fraction of the ways it plays out among contemporary Hindus, and we confronted religion, caste, class, gender, region, language, and more. All of these matter; all of these comprise Hindu traditions; to understand Hindu traditions we have to see the multiplicity.

Little Bit, Leave It

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

Megan said she wants her students to know that, yes, ethno-nationalism and religious nationalism are important when we talk about contemporary religions, including Hindu traditions. But that’s not all we should know.

Ilyse cares that you 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 against each other, against scholars on the internet, against whole groups legally, over who gets to count as Hindu & who is allowed access to Hindu texts and spaces. It’s important. Period. The end.
.

If you dont know, now you know

(the segment where we get one factoid)

Megan talked about how complicated religio-racial identification is, especially in the US.

Ilyse talked enough and noped out of this week’s assignment.


Homework!

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

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

  • On Ramnamis:

  • On Ramcharitmanas:

    • Tiwari, Bhavya. "Babri Mosque, Bollywood, and Gender: Ramcharitmanas as World Literature." A Companion to World Literature (2020): 1-12. 

    • Text available in a few places. This site is the least glitchy, last time IRMF checked.

  • On nationalism, the recent Hindutva as Political Monotheism by Anustup Basu is crucial.   

Megan did the right thing and suggested you all read what our guest experts wrote. She recommends:

Nerds of the Week!

Thanks for listening, rating and reviewing. This week’s nerds are: FIJKLM, FLIJK5 and our favorite hater IamBigDaddy69.

it’s good to be the queens