This dissertation examines the attacks on “idolatry” by two prominent nineteenth-century Hindu reformers, Rammohun Roy and Dayananda Sarasvati. Their iconoclastic fervour in the context of Hindu India appears (at face-value) as an anomaly because image-worship is widely perceive…
This thesis will seek to explore the dynamics of religious patronage in colonial and pre-colonial India by tracing the history of a religious community from Western India called the Pusti Mārga. This community was founded in North India by the sixteenth century philosopher Valla…
While religious borders separate communities and contribute to inter-religious violence, the definitions of those borders frequently arouse intense debate. In South Asia, religious borders led to the Partition of India and Pakistan, which pressured Sindhi Hindus, like other comm…
My dissertation addresses the political, economic, and sociocultural dynamics of Tamil ethnic and cultural identity in contemporary Malaysia and Bangalore, South India. In both sites, a heightened sense of Tamil identity is occurring in response to state policies and discourses …
Candi Loro Jonggrang, the largest Hindu complex of insular Southeast Asia (240 structures), was consecrated in 856. This Saivite site marks the dramatic end of a dynastic era of foreign occupation in Central Java and the re-invigoration of a local line of rulers. Although necess…
Developing countries have unique challenges and minimal resources resulting in vulnerability to psychological distress. International research suggests youth in developing countries are often impacted by adversity. Resilience reduces the effects of adversity. Kent, Davis and Rei…
In the anthropological study of Bali, the underlying analytical framework has been characterized by a stereotypical, and sometimes misleading division of Balinese culture into discrete categories of Old-Balinese or "Bali Aga" and Hindu-Javanese types of social organization. This…
This dissertation examines Insider Movements, a missiological strategy where adherents of a high-religious system retain their socio-religious birth identity as a means of preventing extraction, thereby aiding the evangelistic and church planting task by keeping the social and f…
In his novels on India, Rushdie finds it necessary to employ the mythical mode which accommodates the deeply religious as well as the secular side of the nation. Especially in Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh, the Hindu gods dance through his pages, taking on the myt…
By the end of the nineteenth century an apparatus of disciplining modernity had cleansed and regulated the performance of music in Western India. In a new cultural public sphere, an emerging bourgeoisie was presented Sanskritized entertainment in the form of Marathi music drama.…
In this thesis I theorize Indian revolutionary V.D. Savarkar's seminal text "Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?" (1923), comparing related themes in Carl Schmitt's Weimar writings: national myth (1923) and the friend-enemy distinction (1932). Responding to the first phase of mass-mobiliz…
This dissertation examines the recent nuclear security problematique in India under the Hindu Right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. It represents an analytical hybrid of realism and critical social constructivism as its theoretical framework and the concept of post-colo…
Wayang kulit (shadow puppet theater), as practiced in Java, Indonesia, has long been understood to be primarily a "classical" or "high" art form. The story-episodes performed, depicting the actions of Hindu gods and heroes, are typically conceived as signs of the "syncretism" of…
The Lingsar temple festival is the largest and most important religious celebration in Lombok, the island just east of Bali in Indonesia. Both the migrant Hindu Balinese, a religious and political minority, and a portion of the Muslim Sasak, the majority culture, participate in …
This study isolates a set of ideas from the large corpus of information on possession and unmāda in Indian literature and culture. I trace the history of the concept of unmāda from the Āyurvedic texts (ca. 3rd–7th centuries C.E.), where it is an undesirable condition, to the lat…
Scholarship on the history of modern India has associated Banaras Hindu University, founded in 1915, with the rise of Hindu nationalism. The intentions of the Pandit Malaviya, probably the most well-known promoter of Hinduism, to foster Hindu identity and unity at BHU have been …
This study tries to understand how the postcolonial state in India has treated its religious minorities since independence (1947-1997) by examining the official policy of secularism which, in the Indian context, stands for 'equal respect for all religions.' I argue that since th…
The Hindu nationalist movement in India is usually represented, and often represents itself, as a movement united in its efforts to purge the country of all Muslim and Christian influences and establish India as a Hindu nation. The movement legitimises its exclusionary rhetoric …