International Journal of Hindu Studies 

About: International Journal of Hindu Studies is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Hinduism & Philosophy of religion. It has an ISSN identifier of 1022-4556. Over the lifetime, 359 publications have been published receiving 1676 citations.

Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking

Abstract: Poet and polymath A. K. Ramanujan once wrote a serious article that he playfully titled, "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" It began by querying its own question, for Ramanujan was aware of the risk of essentialism (and its past deployment by Orientalists, Marxists, nationalists, and so on) when approaching a vast region of perhaps greater ethnic and linguistic diversity than Europe.1 Yet as a trained linguist and folklorist, he was indeed interested in the recurring patterns and themes that lend a distinctive flavor to South Asian culture?a flavor that may be especially recognizable to an outsider, or to an insider who steps out. That Indian popular films likewise have a definite "flavor" is generally recognized (and one indigenous descriptor of them is indeed as mas?l? or "spicy"), even by Anglo Americans who encounter them while surfing cable TV channels?and not simply because the actors happen to be Indian. The films look, sound, and feel different in important ways, and a kind of cinematic culture shock may accompany a first prolonged exposure. An American film scholar, after viewing his first "mas?l? blockbuster," remarked to me that the various cinemas he had studied?American, French, Japanese, African?all seemed to play by a similar set of aesthetic rules, "but this is a different universe." Experienced viewers are familiar with the some times negative responses of neophyte visitors to this universe: the complaint that its films "all look the same," are mind-numbingly long, have incoherent plots and raucous music, belong to no known genre but appear to be a mish-mash of several, and are naive and crude imitations of "real" (that is, Hollywood) movies, and so on?all, by the way, complaints that are regularly voiced by some Indians as well, particularly by critics writing in English. They also know that millions of people, including vast audiences outside the subcontinent, apparently understand and love the "difference" of these films.

Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

Abstract: Postmodernism, now fading partly into orthodoxy, partly into irrelevance, brought two new academic metaphors into common usage, especially in the fields of cultural studies and anthropology. The first is the metaphor of writing, derived mainly from work by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Using this metaphor, we can talk of discourses, textualities, inscriptions, readings, and deciphering. All experience and explanation is modeled on the act of reading and textual reception. For example, bodies may be described as “cultural artifacts, fabricated both in the writing and reading of ‘body texts.’...As soon as one ‘knows’ one’s own or another’s body, it has been written discursively;...Anatomy, epidemiology, psychology, medical sociology and other body-texts frame bodies...which exercise power over its reading” (Fox 1997: 45). The second decisive metaphor, associated in particular with Michel Foucault’s work on the history of madness and the evolution of clinics, is that of the human being as a body. For Foucault, the medical encounter is

Fortuitous convergences and essential ambiguities: Transcultural political elites in the medieval Deccan

Abstract: It is virtually axiomatic that 'Hindu* and 'Muslim' are fundamental and inescapable categories of identity in modern South Asia and that each is in large measure constituted in opposition to its other.1 Yet, there is an abundance of evidence dating from the premodern period which suggests that this was not always the case. To judge from epigraphic data, the medieval Deccan was one historical milieu where the religious categories 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' appear to have been of minimal relevance as primary bases of identity. Instead, as Cynthia Talbot (1995) has shown, identity was more likely to be cast in ethnic rather than religious terms, with designations such as Turuska,' 'P?ras?ka,' 'Telugu,' 'Karn?ta,' and 'Oriy?' figuring in inscriptions more frequently than 'Muslim' or 'Hindu.' Following this epigraphic cue, one might reasonably decide to avoid religious labels in discussing individual identity; but even so, one may still wish to distinguish analytically between the broader cultural traditions to which individuals belong. Accordingly, one could then speak of the 'Indie' languages, patterns of dress, systems of food, and other cultural practices that were favored by Telugus, Karnatas, and Oriyas, in contrast to the 'Islamicate' traditions followed by Turushkas and Parasikas. But even here things are not quite as clear-cut as they may seem, since indie' cultural forms and practices in the Deccan were often heavily islamicized' and vice versa At Vijayanagara, for example, men of the ruling elite dressed in public in an Arab-style tunic known in the local vernaculars as kab?yi (from the Arab qaba\ Wagoner 1996), while Ibrahim e?dil Sh?h II, one of the best known rulers of the neighboring kingdom of Bijapur, is remembered as the author of the Kit?b-i Nauras (from the Sanskrit navarasa, 'nine aesthetic moods'), an important Persian work dealing with classical Sanskrit rasa theory and written in a heavily Sanskritized vocabulary (Eaton 1978: 98ff.).

Body connections: Hindu discourses of the body and the study of religion

Abstract: In the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in the 'body' as an analytical category in the social sciences and humanities, particularly within the context of cultural studies. Studies of the body have proliferated, representing a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, linguistics, literary theory, art history, and feminist and gender studies. Despite the proliferation of scholarship on the body in the human sciences, until recently relatively few studies have focused on discourses of the body in religious traditions--on the ways in which the body has been represented, regulated, disciplined, ritualized, cultivated, purified, and transformed in different traditions. In recent years a number of scholars of religion have begun to reflect critically on the notion of embodiment and to examine discourses of the body in particular religious traditions. However, the body has yet to be adequately theorized from the methodological perspective of the history of religions. Hindu traditions provide extensive, elaborate, and multiform discourses of the body, and I would suggest that a sustained investigation of these discourses can contribute in significant ways to the burgeoning scholarship on the body in the study of religion. I have argued elsewhere (Holdrege 1999) that the Brahman. ical Hindu tradition in particular constitutes what I term an 'embodied community,' in that its notions of tradition-identity are embodied in the particularities of ethnic and cultural categories defined in relation to a particular people (IndoAryans), a particular sacred language (Sanskrit), and a particular land (,Ary,~varta). The body is represented in the Br~hman.ical tradition as a site of central significance that is the vehicle for the maintenance of the social, cosmic, and divine orders. The body is the instrument of biological and sociocultural reproduction that is to be regulated through ritual and social duties, maintained in purity,