Rethinking Vernacular Hinduisms of South Asia and Beyond

REGISTRATION CLOSED

A 2020 special issue of the Journal of Hindu Studies titled “Vernacular Hinduisms” focused on what editors James Samuel Bradbury and James Madaio called the “vernacular turn” in religious studies. They characterized this turn through three key frameworks: (1) an interpretive rather than substantive approach that examines diverse Hindu traditions as “the result of inhabitations of particular everyday contexts, which are open to innovation, experimentation, and transformation” rather than as deviations from official forms; (2) a rejection of the official/popular binary in favor of examining “how forms of authority and legitimacy themselves [are] constituted as a result of vernacularizing processes;” and (3) a methodology that locates textual, oral, and sonic practices within “broader contextual webs of transmission, interpretation, power, pedagogy, and contemplative praxis.” This conference builds on these insights and revisits some of the questions, assumptions, and conclusions of the special issue.

Firstly, this conference intends to explore how both “vernacular” and the Sanskritic written-textual lived Hindu ritual worlds have been navigated, interpreted, and experienced together within and among various caste communities and examines how they generate polyvalent systems of religious authority, theories of divine presence, and ritual grammars and repertoires. Secondly, this conference evaluates the “region” as a lifeworld. We will focus on how interlocutors offer divergent oral and written narratives of the past to navigate competing networks of power. These regional worlds often exist in a state of paradox: they actively reject the pressure to “sanskritize,” yet simultaneously seek legitimacy by creating links to “imagined” Sanskritic and Brahmanical written textual traditions. Thirdly, we will explore how our understanding of Hindu traditions changes when we use the vocabulary of local interpretative categories drawn from the heteroglossic register of the vernacular languages, including examining what is gained—or lost—in translation and transliteration, and how shifting our focus to these terms helps us identify how language can shape local orthopraxy and determine the authenticity and efficacy of the ritual repertoire. Finally, the conference centers on questions of structural inequality and contemporary politics. We ask: how do caste and gender hierarchies replicate themselves through vernacular ritual systems? Furthermore, we seek to understand how these traditions are being mobilized to generate regional discourses of Hindu nationalism, and conversely, what unique forms of resistance these vernacular spaces might offer.

This conference is open to Yale affiliates only. Please bring your Yale ID for verification upon arrival.