Vimarsh on Hindutva and Religion | Prof Arvind Sharma

Описание: Prof Arvind Sharma, formerly of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion in the School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He has also taught in the United States (Northeastern, Boston, Temple, Harvard), Australia (Queensland, Sydney) and India (Nalanda). He has published extensively in the fields of Indian religions and comparative religion.

He is the general editor of the Encyclopaedia of Indian Religions (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017-) and his book on the Manusmṛti is currently awaiting publication. He was also instrumental in the adoption of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions, at a global conference held in Montreal, in 2016.

Hindutva for Our Times

The concept of Hindutva was given its classical formulation by V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) in his seminal work: Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?. The book was published in 1923. It is perhaps appropriate, as part of centenary celebration of the publication of this book, to examine how the core concept of Hindutva could be applied to our own times, when that concept has become central to many modern discussions. If we identify the underlying feature of Hindutva ideology to be the assertion of Hindu identity, especially in the political sphere, then the question arises: What form might such self-assertion assume in our own times?

The lecture, titled “Hindutva and the Religion”, will examine the role played by the Western concept of religion, once it was been applied to India, and suggest that the use of this word has seriously distorted the religious reality of India, which is best described in terms of dharma––a word, which, significantly, does not appear in the Indian Constitution.