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Front Cover

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Negotiating Historical Change Hindu Style

Authors:Katherine Young, Sanjay Kumar
Series:Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:Paperback
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About the Book
How has the Hindu tradition maintained a sense of continuity with Vedic authority while responding to profound historical change? Negotiating Historical Change Hindu Style examines the intellectual and cultural strategies through which inherited ideas, institutions, and forms of authority were repeatedly reinterpreted in response to changing social, political, philosophical, and religious circumstances. Rather than treating continuity as passive survival, the book presents it as an active process of interpretation, argument, accommodation, and reform.

Drawing on a series of historical case studies, Katherine Young and Sanjay Kumar explore some of the major challenges encountered by the tradition: the rise of asceticism and the ideal of liberation; tensions between established dharmic norms and the complexities of lived experience; the incorporation of empirical medicine into a Vedic framework of knowledge and authority; the expansion of Bhakti traditions into new linguistic and cultural worlds; competition among Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist communities; and medieval attempts to reconcile Vedic authority with increasingly influential devotional and temple traditions.

Across these cases, the authors show that adaptation was often guided by recognizable intellectual resources, including principles of interpretation associated with Mimamsa, Nyaya, Vyakarana, and other traditions of reasoning. At the same time, change was never socially neutral. Reinterpretation could broaden religious possibilities, but it could also reinforce boundaries of caste, gender, status, and belonging. The book therefore asks not only how traditions survive change, but also who benefits from particular forms of continuity and who may be excluded by them.

By bringing together textual interpretation, social history, religious change, and questions of inclusion and exclusion, Negotiating Historical Change Hindu Style offers a distinctive account of Hindu continuity as a historically negotiated achievement rather than an unchanging inheritance.
About the Authors
Katherine Young

Katherine K. Young is James McGill Professor Emerita in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University. Her scholarship encompasses Hinduism, the history and comparative study of religions, gender and religion, ethics, caste, and South Indian Srivaishnavism. She is the author of Turbulent Transformations: Non-Brahmin Srivaisnavas on Religion, Caste and Politics in Tamil Nadu and, most recently, The Tamil Veda and Tangled Tales: A New Approach to Srivaisnava History (2024), which re-examines the historical formation of the Srivaishnava tradition through texts, inscriptions, sacred sites, and changing processes of canonization.
Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar is a scholar of Sanskrit and Indian religions whose research focuses particularly on Hindu traditions, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Yoga, Dharmashastra, and Sanskrit textual traditions. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from McGill University for a comparative study of Draupadi in Vyasa’s Mahabharata and the television series Mahabharat, produced by B. R. Films, and holds an MPhil in Sanskrit from the University of Delhi, for which he critically edited an unpublished seventeenth-century commentary on Patanjali’s Yogasutras. He has taught Sanskrit and Indian religions at McGill University and the University of British Columbia and has undertaken extensive research on Sanskrit texts, Yoga philosophy, epic literature, and the continuing interpretation of Hindu tradition.
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