Arun Brahmbhatt | Publishing Hindu Devotion in the Twentieth Century

The Moynihan Institute’s South Asia Center presents Arun Brahmbhatt, assistant professor of religion, Syracuse University.

Though printing arrived in the Indian subcontinent just decades after Gutenberg in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the nineteenth century and beyond that saw the widespread adoption of these technologies and the emergence of a vibrant local publishing industry. This talk explores a specific aspect of this history: the production of sacred texts and images within Hindu sampradāyas (denominations) in the twentieth century. While there has been a growing body of scholarship on South Asian print culture over the past few decades, few have addressed how the printed word and image worked together to shape religious communities.

Drawing on a range of textual and visual printed materials, I examine how religious communities in the twentieth century made use of a variety of forms of print to support a devotional ethos that was located within a broad continuum of traditions rooted in bhakti and Vedanta. This research draws in part on materials from the H. Daniel Smith Poster Collection at the Syracuse University Library Special Collections.

This talk is generously co-sponsored by the departments of Religion and Anthropology.

Arun Brahmbhatt is an assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University. His research investigates how religious traditions and communities in South Asia have navigated the forces of colonial modernity, focusing on both continuities and disjunctures with the premodern past. His book project, Debating Sanskrit: The Scholastic Imperative in Modern Hinduism, employs archival and textual approaches to examine the sustained deployment of classical Sanskrit in Gujarati religious communities from the nineteenth century to the present day. He is further interested in South Asian print culture, especially in relation to religious narratives and visual art.