• DOI:10.1186/S40613-016-0037-5
• Corpus ID: 31219360

Hindu studies in a Christian, secular academy

@article{Adluri2017HinduSI,
  title={Hindu studies in a Christian, secular academy},
  author={Vishwa Adluri},
  journal={International Journal of Dharma Studies},
  year={2017},
  volume={5},
  pages={1-31}
}

• Vishwa Adluri
• Published 6 February 2017
• Philosophy
• International Journal of Dharma Studies

Introduction The concept of dharma is central to Hinduism, underpinning its ideas of rebirth, existence, salvation, and even cosmogenesis. Yet this concept is seldom understood and frequently misrepresented. One of the key sources of difficulty is the confusion between substantive and normative senses of dharma, and the tendency to represent dharma as merely a social construct. More importantly, scholars have viewed dharma on analogy with Judeo-Christian ideas of the law, and drawn, from its seeming inability to provide justification, the negative conclusion that dharma is inefficacious in salvation. Yet this conclusion is premature, as this article will argue. I will focus on a recent interpretation of dharma in the Mahābhārata, Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetics of Suffering in the Mahābhārata (Hudson 2013), to show how Judeo-Christian ideas of the law—more specifically, a Protestant critique of Jewish law—stand at the background of many contemporary accounts of dharma. My aim in doing so, however, is less to critique this particular interpretation than to illustrate the latent Protestant foundations of the discipline of the history of religions. The wider argument I will make is that without much greater attention to the presuppositions of our work than hitherto, we risk degrading our scholarship to a mere restatement of Protestant norms and values, because of the way those norms and values have been inscribed at the heart of the academic study of religions (Smith 2010, 1139–170).