Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchDouglas Ober, "Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Episode 99
Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten u…
3 years, 4 months ago
Simon Paul Cox, "The Subtle Body: A Genealogy" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Episode 265
How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many…
3 years, 4 months ago
Loriliai Biernacki, "The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Episode 264
In the early 11th century, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta proposed panentheism-seeing the divine as both immanent in the world and at the sam…
3 years, 4 months ago
Anantanand Rambachan, "Pathways to Hindu-Christian Dialogue" (Augsburg Fortress, 2022)
Episode 262
Hindus and Christians have a long history of interaction on the Indian subcontinent. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, with the increas…
3 years, 5 months ago
Ashok Gopal, "A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B. R. Ambedkar" (Navayana, 2023)
Episode 191
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) is perhaps the most iconised historical figure in India. Born into a caste deemed ‘unfit for human association’, h…
3 years, 5 months ago
How Do We Know What We Know?: A Day School from Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
Episode 272
The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies is holding a Day School on "How Do We Know What We Know?" Today I talked to Gavin Flood bout the day school, disc…
3 years, 5 months ago
Elise Coquereau-Saouma and Daniel Raveh, "The Making of Contemporary Indian Philosophy: Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya" (Routledge, 2022)
Episode 261
This book engages in a dialogue with Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya (K.C. Bhattacharyya, KCB, 1875-1949) and opens a vista to contemporary Indian philo…
3 years, 5 months ago
Baba Padmanji, "Yamuna's Journey" (Speaking Tiger Books, 2022)
Episode 136
In 1856, the East India Company imposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, allowing widows to remarry after their husband’s death. The Act was controver…
3 years, 5 months ago
Moyukh Chatterjee, "Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities" (Duke UP, 2023)
Episode 190
In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, …
3 years, 5 months ago
Farah Godrej, "Freedom Inside?: Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Episode 15
Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate…
3 years, 5 months ago