Karen Pechilis, “South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today” (Routledge, 2012)

03/06/14 • 68 min

If you’re going to teach a broadly themed survey course, you’ll probably need to assign some readings. One option is to assemble one of those photocopied course readers, full of excerpts taken from different sources. However, what you gain in flexibility may be sacrificed in coherence of presentation. A textbook produced by a single author might be more nicely packaged for student consumption, but then, how many different things can one author be an expert in? The best of both approaches would be found in a single-volume collection of essays, written by experts in their respective fields, newly commissioned for the volume in question, and all presented according to a shared format.

Karen Pechilis and Selva J. Raj‘s South Asian Religions: Tradition and Today (Routledge, 2012) provides just such a collection, designed with both faculty and students in mind. Contributors to the book include Vasudha Narayanan, M. Whitney Kelting, Sunil Goonasekera, Nathan Katz, M. Thomas Thangaraj, Karen G. Ruffle, Joseph Marianus Kujur, and Pashaura Singh.

In this interview, editor Karen Pechilis discusses her decisions behind the form and content of the book, shares her experiences using the book in one of her own classes, and unexpectedly turns the tables on the interviewer regarding how he came to be interested in such things.

This podcast is dedicated to the memory of Selva J. Raj.

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This podcast is dedicated to the memory of Selva J. Raj.

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undefined - Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal” (University of California Press, 2011)

Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal” (University of California Press, 2011)

What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity. In her new book, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (University of California Press, 2011), she challenges the myth that Western rule secularized non-Western societies. Pedagogy for Religion focuses on missionary schools and their influence in Bengal from roughly 1850 to the 1930s. Sengupta’s conclusions are drawn from reading what she calls the “mundane aspects of schooling,” rather than high religious discourse. The replication of religious, gender, and social identities, as they were established through textbooks, objects, language, and teachers, redefined modern definitions of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. Altogether, Sengupta demonstrates that modern education effectively deepened the place of religion in colonial South Asia. However, this contemporary return to religion was not a “backward” or “irrational” resurgence of religious beliefs and practices. Religion was transformed into the carrier of modernity and education became the means for recreating religious identity.

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Barbara Harriss-White, “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy” (Three Essays Collective, 2013)

Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas (Three Essay Collective, 2013) is a wonderful new book by Barbara Harriss-White and small team of collaborators – Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee – published by the Three Essays Collective.

The book explores the ways in which economic liberalisation interacts with caste, specifically in reference to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, otherwise known as Dalits and Adivasis. A truly unique book, both in terms of how the data has been gathered and presented, the essays are variously wide and deep and ask a host of questions to inspire future research.

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