Religious history

New Book Announcement: “Yogis, Bhaktas & Sufis: Religious Traditions in Medieval North India, c. 1000-1450” by Subin Sabu

Yogis, Bhaktas & Sufis: Religious Traditions in Medieval North India, c. 1000-1450, Subin Sabu (Motilal Banarsidass Publishing House, June 2025)

Yoga has become highly popular worldwide and is generally received with enthusiasm in the western world. But it is mysterious in nature as, several interpretations have been offered by scholars from antiquity to recent times. Earlier, Yoga was practiced in the spiritual, philosophical and metaphysical sense in Indic traditions. In the medieval period, it was transformed by Hathayoga where physical exertions were applied to achieve the path of Samadhi. Also, it influenced two mainstream traditions prevalent in north India, Hinduism and Islam, in creating their respective mystical movements.

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New Book Announcement: “China’s Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival” by Paul P Mariani

China’s Church Divided: Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival, Paul P Mariani (Harvard University Press, July 2025)

An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.

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“Ancient India: living traditions” by Sushma Jansari and Sureshkumar Muthukumaran

Ancient India is a new publication and exhibition by the British Museum that explores the shared origins of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain devotional art in figurative imagery of India’s ancient nature spirits. These three of the world’s major religions originated in India and gradually spread to other regions of the world. Between 200 BCE and 600 BCE, representations of their deities and enlightened teachers underwent transformation from symbolic to human form.

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Podcast with Manu S Pillai, author of “Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity”

What is Hinduism? For centuries, that question was particularly thorny, both for local Indians and for colonial outsiders. People inside and outside the country tried to define what Hinduism was. Missionaries grappled with Hindu practices, finding both similarities and dangerous differences with their own Christian faith. The East India Company adopted several Hindu rituals to keep the peace, much to the chagrin of officials back in London.

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“Gods, Guns, and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity” by Manu S Pillai

In the early 19th century, Reverend Andrew Fuller, a leading evangelical, dismissed the possibility of any anti-colonial unity in India, claiming that “Hindoos resemble an immense number of particles of sand, which are incapable of forming a solid mass. There is no bond of union among them, nor any principle capable of effecting it.” Yet, over the next century, Fuller’s glib remark would be upended by the very forces he had underestimated. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rising wave of Hindu nationalism had begun to consolidate those so-called “particles of sand” into a powerful, collective identity.

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Podcast with with Toby Matthiesen, author of “The Caliph and the Imam: The Making of Sunnism and Shiism”

It was common during the years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to talk about the Sunni-Shia split—and how the sectarian violence was the result of a “centuries-long hatred” between the two different religious schools. But seeing this divide as the result of a longstanding feud—or to see it in the model of other religious schisms, like the Catholic-Protestant split and the centuries of war that followed—would be a mistake, argues Toby Matthiesen.

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“Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom” by Alexandra Kaloyanides

The impact of missionaries around the world has been widely condemned by anthropologists, historians and medical professionals. They have been accused of suppressing indigenous languages, religious and social practice, disrupting countries’ social fabrics and prohibiting contraception. Moreover, missionaries were, on the whole, stalwart defenders of European colonialism. However, that does not mean they are unworthy of  nuanced academic study, indeed given the immense socio-political and religious change they have fostered, academic engagement is crucial to understanding the outcomes of their activity. 

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