This article introduces the three articles in this special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies on the South Asian festival of Indra. Practiced throughout royal capital cities of medieval India, the festival’s only full performance takes place in Kathmandu, Nepal, which was ruled until recently by a hereditary Hindu king. The festival’s central object is a tall wooden pole, cut and pulled from a nearby forest and installed outside the palace. The three articles in this issue detail and expand upon various themes within the classical festival and in contemporary performances: danger (bhaya) in the Sanskritic festival, icons of Indra in the Newar performance in Kathmandu, and Jain performances in classical texts and modern Jaipur. To introduce these examples, this article details the various ways that the festival has traditionally signaled innovation, used recognized forms of donation and decoration, and juxtaposed the veneration of goddesses with the annual worship of Indra. It concludes by briefly looking at several performances of the festival throughout the global Newar diaspora.
The iconographic evolution of the god Indra in Nepal is remarkable in every respect. While images of Indra gradually vanished from the Indian subcontinent starting in the twelfth century, the Kathmandu Valley—the heart of Newar culture—not only preserved the deity but developed distinct characteristics and novel representations for him. This article examines the unique qualities of Nepalese Indra statuary (wood, metal, and stone), demonstrating how these enduring iconographic models are inextricably linked to Indrajātrā, the annual royal festival. To contextualize these artistic forms, the study explores the local myths underpinning the festival, specifically highlighting the significant role of Newar Buddhism and the identification of Vasundharā as Indra’s mother. The analysis considers both “high art” statuary and more popular imagery that portrays Indra as a phallic deity associated with fertility and death. Ultimately, the article advocates for a multidisciplinary approach that integrates art history with ethnography to fully grasp the complexities of Newar religious art.
This essay represents the third installment of a four-part exchange titled “The Question of Ramakrishna’s Influence on Aurobindo: A Dialogue Between Peter Heehs and Swami Medhananda.” It critically evaluates Medhananda’s “maximalist” claims concerning the impact of Sri Ramakrishna’s thought on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, specifically in regard to the concept of vijñāna. Through a rigorous textual analysis of Aurobindo’s 1912 letter to Motilal Roy and subsequent autobiographical notes, the essay argues that while influence is undeniable during a certain period, Medhananda’s claim that Aurobindo’s Yoga as a whole “derives” from Ramakrishna lacks valid textual support. In support of this, it argues that the influence of embodied teachers and that of post-mortem voices must be distinguished. The essay concludes that mere conceptual similarity does not entail historical influence and advocates a balanced approach that respects historical data and avoids speculative “argument by accumulation.”
This essay serves as the second installment of a four-part exchange titled “The Question of Ramakrishna’s Influence on Aurobindo: A Dialogue Between Peter Heehs and Swami Medhananda.” It offers a response to Peter Heehs’s critique of the claim that Sri Ramakrishna’s teachings on vijñāna significantly influenced Sri Aurobindo’s Vedāntic thought. Against Heehs, the essay argues that Ramakrishna’s conception of vijñāna—as the integral realization of the Divine as both personal and impersonal, the world as a real manifestation of the Divine, and the ability to move between līlā and nitya—provided a key hermeneutic framework for Aurobindo. Drawing on Aurobindo’s testimony, textual engagement with the Kathāmṛta, and doctrinal convergence, while employing Gary Browning’s criteria for influence, it defends the plausibility of Ramakrishna’s formative impact.
This essay concludes the four-part exchange titled “The Question of Ramakrishna’s Influence on Aurobindo: A Dialogue Between Peter Heehs and Swami Medhananda.” It moves beyond narrow critical objections to reaffirm a cumulative, evidence-based case for Sri Ramakrishna’s formative influence on Sri Aurobindo. The essay contends that Heehs’s methodology—characterized by excessive pedantry and a reliance on late, contextually conditioned statements—obscures more robust contemporaneous evidence. Drawing on Aurobindo’s own testimony, his engagement with Ramakrishna’s Bengali teachings, and specific conceptual continuities—particularly regarding vijñāna and the īśvarakoṭi—it demonstrates that all three of Gary Browning’s criteria for intellectual influence are satisfied. The essay concludes that acknowledging Ramakrishna’s influence clarifies, rather than diminishes, Aurobindo’s originality within the context of modern Vedānta.
This essay initiates a four-part exchange titled “The Question of Ramakrishna’s Influence on Aurobindo: A Dialogue Between Peter Heehs and Swami Medhananda.” It critiques Swami Medhananda’s recent arguments for a profound direct influence of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda on Sri Aurobindo. While acknowledging a significant spiritual influence, the essay uses philological and historiographical arguments to show that Medhananda overstates the case for direct textual or intellectual influence, particularly regarding the concept of vijñāna. It concludes that while interesting parallels exist, each master’s ideas are best appreciated within their own unique philosophical and spiritual frameworks.
Bagḍwāl worship is a traditional ritual in Garhwal, Uttarakhand, centered on the veneration of Jītū Bagḍwāl, a mortal figure turned bhūmyāl (protector of the land). The ceremony centers on an affective folk ballad recounting his abduction by mountain spirits (āñcharī), enacted through drumming, dance, and divine embodiment. Utilizing the theoretical frameworks of “natureculture” and “eco-sociality,” this article posits the ritual as a dynamic interface between sound, topography, and spirit. Its recent revival reveals how Himalayan cosmologies remain dynamically entangled with their terrain, histories, and deities. Sensory elements, particularly the drumming and narration of bards, facilitate a state of divinization wherein practitioners embody these deities. This study shows that the worship is not merely a request for protection, but a profound expression of communal bonding. Ultimately, Bagḍwāl worship demonstrates the efficacy of ritual in mediating collective identity, healing, and ecological belonging within Himalayan traditions.
This article examines the Integral Advaitic response to the problem of evil through a comparative analysis of Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), and Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950). Integral Advaita views the world as God’s self-concealed play of “hide-and-seek” (līlā), in which God manifests as the universe and all living souls under a cloak of self-fashioned ignorance (māyā) for the sport of self-discovery. This account offers a nuanced theodicy that replaces the retributive and punitive intentions attributed to God in traditional, karma-based Vedāntic theodicies with creative, sportive, and teleological ones. At the same time, significant internal differences within the Integral Advaitic family merit reflection. This article provides an Aurobindonian critique of the “soul-making gymnasium” theodicy presented by Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to highlight two distinct problems. The first—the problem of impermissible dualism—suggests that Ramakrishna and Vivekananda’s reliance on karma as the root cause of suffering stands in tension with their non-dualist Advaitic commitments. The second—the problem of gratuitous suffering—argues that suffering becomes gratuitous under the circular logic of their theodicies, in which the soul, eternally free and one with the Divine, inexplicably subjects itself to suffering only to return to a bliss it already possessed in unmanifest planes of existence. Attending to these problems can deepen our understanding of the Integral Advaitic worldview, which offers a spiritually rich and philosophically sophisticated exploration of divine providence.
In traditional religious settings and in literature, laments—and particularly women’s laments—serve to reinscribe and witness to particular loss in all its human power; they enact a systematic attentiveness to pain, overwhelming emotion experienced with and within acts of language. Though they weep, shriek, or sigh, women’s laments are also artful and ethical; they give structure and rhythm to rage, moving from “experience to art, from tears to ideas,” troubling the traditional binaries of “raw” emotion and “secondary” reflection. This article focuses not on ritual forms of lament and their ethnographic transcriptions, but on three seminal examples of literary transformations of male and female lament in Sanskrit epic and kāvya literature, lament (vilāpa) as an oral-derived literary form of affect, a powerful form of ethical witness self-consciously deployed by the epic bard of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and one of the most accomplished of all Sanskrit poets, Kālidāsa (c. 350–340 CE). The article will focus on the laments of two captive wives from the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, Sītā, our epic heroine, and Mandodarī, the enemy queen; and the lament of Sītā’s grandfather-in-law King Aja from Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃsa, male lament “in the mirror of women’s tears.”
This article seeks to put Judith Butler’s theorization of gender as performative in active dialogue with Śaṅkara’s perspectives on the formation of the “I.” Butler argues that gender has no ontological essence and that the sense of its reality is achieved through the constant reiteration of actions and language. As such, epistemologies that invoke performative gender conceptions should be abandoned, as they are doomed to further reify these oppressive constructs as ontologically real. Śaṅkara, from his own distinctive socio-ritual background, argues that all phenomenal traits are unreal, that is, lacking in any ontological stability. However, he simultaneously asserts that developing provisionally valid understandings of these attributes, without mistakenly positing their ontological depth, is in fact possible. The aim of this article is to put this latter perspective on epistemology—denoted by the term “non-realism”—in conversation with certain contemporary feminist debates on gender, to argue that the deconstruction of gender does not necessarily imply an inability to make gender-related epistemological claims.
In 1782–83, a Peśvā mandate declared that the Mahānubhāvs—pioneering Marathi scholars and ascetics of the Deccan—were to be expelled from all religions, excluded from the six Hindu philosophical traditions, and relegated outside the caste system. This article is an investigation of the historical processes and actors that consolidated the official ban and socio-religious expulsion of Mahānubhāv ascetics and the shifting limits of Hinduism that they illuminate. In doing so, the article explores the functional, conceptual, and devotional worlds recorded in bilingual (Marathi and Persian) mandates and land grants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a period that is referred to as a “long period of silence” in modern historiography on the Mahānubhāvs. This archive suggests that the simultaneous visibility of Mahānubhāv public comportment (ācārdharma) and the culture of secrecy that imbued the theological and textual basis of Mahānubhāv ācārdharma posed a great challenge to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orthodoxies. While the term mahānubhāv (and its variants) emerges as a caste-adjacent category that operates alongside a social order that is not all-encompassing, by the late eighteenth century, we see the culmination of a slow-brewing, broad-scaled, and violent shift. Hierarchies within the Mahānubhāv community, as well as frequent disputes with landlords, revenue collectors, Brāhmaṇs, and other ascetic communities, undergird Mahānubhāvs’ assimilation/ousting from caste Hindu and Muslim communities of the Deccan, ultimately altering their standing vis-a-vis Hinduism.
This article discusses the translation of the Sanskrit Gīta Goviṇda by Jayadeva into English by William Jones (1792) and a lesser-known set of translations of Caturbhuja Miśra’s Brajbhāṣa text Śrī Premasāgar into Hindi by Lallu Lal (1810) and English by Frederic Pincott (1805) and William Charles Hollings (1848). Among these translations, Jones and Hollings make specific decisions at the level of content that alter the larger narrative of Kṛṣṇa worship. Jones, for instance, omits parts of the text he considers sexually explicit and thus too “bold” and “luxuriant” for European readers. The translators of Miśra’s text, on the other hand, work primarily to educate Englishmen about what they consider to be Hinduism and also make changes. They expand the text by adding sections that directly address the colonial context of the text’s production and use. Whether by contracting or expanding the texts, this article demonstrates how these translators’ textual decisions became cultural interventions in the present and future practices of Hinduism.
