Introducing Hindu Worldviews: Tradition, Transition, Translation offers an accessible yet intellectually rich introduction to the extraordinary diversity of Hindu thought and practice across three thousand years. Written for readers encountering Hindu traditions for the first time, the book provides a conceptual toolbox for understanding their texts, ideas, institutions, and lived expressions without reducing Hinduism to a single doctrine or timeless essence. Its central concern is with tradition, transition, and translation: the ways inherited ideas are transmitted, reinterpreted, and transformed as they move across historical periods and changing social worlds.Using what the author calls a “temporal telescope,” the book places contemporary forms of Hindu life within the longue durée of Indian religious and intellectual history. Beginning with Vedic understandings of sacrifice, cosmic order, and dharma, it follows the interiorization of sacrifice and the search for self-knowledge in the Upaniṣads before turning to the Bhagavad-gītā and its influential synthesis of action, renunciation, yoga, and bhakti. It then explores the major Vedāntic traditions and the continuing importance of gurus as interpreters of inherited wisdom in the complexities of everyday life.The book also confronts some of the deepest tensions within Hindu social and religious worlds. Its discussions of caste and equality examine the distance that can arise between visions of spiritual interconnectedness and structures of social hierarchy, while its treatment of gender asks how traditions centred upon the divine feminine and śakti relate to the lived realities of women. Throughout, ideas are considered together with the institutions and structures of power through which they acquire social force.The final movement brings these histories into the modern world, tracing the many ways Hindu thinkers, reformers, poets, and political figures have adapted, challenged, and reworked premodern inheritances in encounters with colonialism, nationalism, science, ecology, social equality, yoga, meditation, and other forms of modernity. Neither romanticizing Hindu traditions nor reducing them to their conflicts and inequalities, Introducing Hindu Worldviews presents Hinduism as a remarkably vital and internally diverse field of ideas and practices, continually negotiating continuity and change, authority and contestation, hierarchy and aspiration.
Ankur Barua
Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on Vedantic Hindu philosophy, comparative philosophy of religion, Hindu-Christian engagement, Indo-Islamic intellectual traditions, and the intellectual history of modern Hinduism. He is the author of The Divine Body in History: A Comparative Study of Time and Embodiment in the Theologies of St Augustine and Ramanuja; The Vedantic Relationality of Rabindranath Tagore: Harmonizing the One and Its Many; The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaisnava Milieus: Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth-Century Bengal; Exploring Hindu Philosophy; and The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes.
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