Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism: New Essays in Perspective
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2023) | Viewed by 23644
Special Issue Editor
Interests: intellectual and cultural history of colonial India
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
This Special Issue aims to generate new scholarly thinking concerning the deeply intertwined subjects of Hinduism as a long-standing religious and cultural formation, representing a certain weltenschaung and its overt and tendentious political manifestations in recent times. It seeks to more critically understand the evolution of what is somewhat loosely called the ‘Hindu Right’, or, alternatively, ‘Hindu Conservatism’. This is a question that elicits not only historical interest, but a pressing need to interrogate the state of contemporary Indian polity and society. The subject brings forth a broad civilizational approach to the study of this problem, taking into account the abiding values and visions in Indic society as also the use of heuristic tools drawn from multiple modern disciplines. This is a subject that calls forth a humanistic understanding of our past, a serious concern for the present, academic rigor, critical insights, hermeneutic imagination, and a progressive vision of our future. It is my understanding that this is a subject that would be of great interest to students and scholars of history, politics, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, literature, and religious studies.
Contributions to this Special Issue are expected to link an understanding of our historical past to the consolidation of a progressive citizenry in the times to come. This calls for the separation of the enduring and instructive presence of the past in contemporary Indian life from that which must now be cast aside as something barren, obscure, regressive, and redundant. Today, everyday life in India is under the twin duress of material hardships and the erosion of our most cherished values and practices, backed by a constitution. Both these contribute to the weakening of the Indian present and pose threats for our foreseeable future. Additionally, worth interrogating is the growth of diasporic Hindu nationalism and the ways it affects developments in India.
Being numerically the largest religious community in India, a special responsibility devolves upon the Hindus to strengthen the sinews of democracy, promote social consensus and harmony, transform vicious and vacuous debates into constructive dialogues, allay fears in the minds of minorities and other deprived groups, and fight divisive and exclusionary forces, but above all, to respect human dignity and the sanctity of human life. Historically, even though Hindus have been the majority community in India for a long time, they were never majoritarian in their common cultural practice, as threatens to be the position today. Religious identities in India have indeed been the ground of simmering differences or discontent, and yet, the Indic civilization has been especially known to welcome and offer safe refuge to a number of faiths of both Indian and non-Indian origin. We have fought numerous wars but never religious wars. We have creatively borrowed religious and cultural ideas and idioms across traditions, thereby promoting eclecticism, pluralism, and composite cultures. Rarely, if ever, has a king or the ruling class in India imposed their personal faith on common subjects of the state. In running this projected volume, my overall concern has been to ensure that we never lose sight of the possible distinction between formal democracy and true democratization. The very foundations of our polity and culture rest on this.
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to contribute to the Special Issue of the Religions journal, bearing the above-mentioned title. This will be my second venture as Guest Editor for a Special Issue of Religions on Hinduism. The previous Special Issue, titled “Studies in Hinduism: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Developments”, has now successfully been transformed into a printed edition. I am especially drawn to the idea of editing a Special Issue on the afore-mentioned subject, since the matter in hand is both engaging and topical. It affects both the interested scholar and concerned citizen, and I hope for a good response from willing contributors to this timely and highly relevant enterprise.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Hindu self-understanding in the early modern era;
- Evolution of the Hindu political self;
- Colonial Hinduism: its cultural and ideological representations;
- Hinduism and Hindutva;
- Nationalism and the Hindi right;
- The future of Indian democracy, pluralism, and secular culture;
- Diasporic Hindu nationalism.
I look forward to receiving your valuable contributions.
Prof. Dr. Amiya P. Sen
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- Hindu
- Hinduism
- Hindutva
- composite
- plural
- polity
- secular
- democracy
- eclectic
- religion
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