Course Content

The current and mainstream narrative in western academia is that there are two kinds of Hinduism: traditional and neo and that there is a significant break or a fault line between them. The western narrative explicitly contends that neo-Hinduism has been shaped by the indigenous response of Hindus to the western construction of Hinduism during colonial times, and implicitly therefore states that the truth claims of Hindu sages like Swāmi Vivekānanda, Rāmakrishna, Paramahaṃsa Yogānanda, and Sri Aurobindo among others are suspect.

This course critically examines this dominant western narrative and shows that the “traditional” and “neo” Hinduism are on a continuum without the presence of any break between them.

The course, in the beginning, introduces writings of the western authors who claim that there is something called “neo-Hinduism,” which is significantly and characteristically different from “traditional Hinduism.” Once those claims are situated, the evidence of those claims are critically examined, which further lend insight into the agendas, motivations, and general ignorance of these writers who are behind the creation of the “neo-Hinduism” theory.

The course then veers into showing how contemporary Hinduism transcends the binary divide of traditional and neo, and that even when it has innovated and answered the contingencies and attacks of the colonial context, it has maintained its continuity with the past and that it has not made compromises with its core cosmology.