 Hello everyone, it's nice to see you all and thank you for joining us. Today's webinar is a joint collaboration between the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and Project Noon. I am Saad Ismail, editor of Project Noon, an Indian-based forum dedicated to critically and creatively exploring Hindu-Muslim dialogue. Allow me to briefly introduce today's event. The webinar is an introduction to Hindu worldviews by Dr. Ankur Barua, senior lecturer in Hindu studies at Cambridge University. His primary research interests are Vedantic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality. He is the author of several books, most recently exploring Hindu philosophy, as well as the Hindu self and its Muslim neighbours, contested borderlines on Bengali landscapes, which translates for the first time a series of writings by Rabindranath Tagore on the Hindu-Muslim question while situating the contours of evolving interactions between the two communities in the history of Bengal. Now today's event will also introduce an extended series of lectures that Dr. Barua will deliver in the month of August. To be clear, today's webinar and the following lecture series are aimed at the modest endeavor of understanding Hindu religious traditions and worldviews. This aim is modest compared to the more ambitious and robust activity of making significant comparisons between Hindu and Muslim traditions. This ambitious project will be version 2.0 of our present efforts. But before we start making comparative assessments, we will have to take a deep plunge into one of these two oceans at a time, first understanding Hindu worldviews, second independently understanding Muslim worldviews, and finally beginning to make meaningful points of contrast and comparison between the two. So before we make any meaningful comments of agreement or disagreement, we must first understand things for what they are. This is the heart of what is known as the phenomenological method in the academic study of religion. It is also at the heart of the Prophet Muhammad's prayer, my Lord show me things for what they are, reality for what it is. This is the spirit in which we hope to proceed. One final remark about the August lecture series. They will consist of presentations by Dr. Barua on various aspects of Hindu traditions followed by a 10 to 15 minute response from a respondent who could be either a Muslim or a non-Muslim, a scholar or a non-scholar. So if you're interested in becoming a respondent for one of the August sessions, let me know by getting in touch where the contact form on the Project Noon website, which can be found at projectnoon.in slash contact. Additionally, to attend the event in August and receive the details of the meeting prior registration is required at the Cambridge Interfaith Program website, the link to which will be shared in the description box below. Now without any further ado, I ask Dr. Barua to offer his presentation of 30 minutes or so following which we will have an open Q&A. Hello everyone, I welcome all of you to this webinar in the next 35 minutes or so. I will introduce you to the 10 online weekend lectures on Hinduism that I will give in August and tell you why I am giving these lectures in the first place. Thereafter you can ask me any questions you may have about these lectures and more generally about Hindu-Muslim relations. Let me begin by saying that at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, where I am based, I mostly research and give lectures on various philosophical, social, religious and social-political dimensions of Hindu worldviews. I add mostly because the significant proportion of my academic publications relates to comparative engagements with Christian doctrine and in recent years with Hindu-Islamic spiritual visions. On this occasion, I will keep to one side these comparative intellectual exercises. Let me explain what I mean when I say that I research and give lectures on Hindu worldviews. You would have noted that the description of the lecture series contains the phrase for Muslim audiences. That is, these 10 lectures constitute an introduction to Hinduism for individuals from Muslim backgrounds. Initially, I considered dropping that phrase. On reflection, however, I concluded that given that my long-range objective in giving these 10 lectures is to raise the quality and the level of mutual intelligibility across Hindu-Muslim borderlines, I should let it remain. Here are two reasons. The first has to do with a certain style of studying or teaching religion in academic contexts. And the second relates to my religious affiliations or subjectivities. Let me begin with the first reason. You may have watched the video where I introduced this webinar and the 10 lectures. As I indicate there in lecture one, I will outline a methodology of critical sympathy in the study of religion. Now this point relating to methodology is so crucial that I have decided to spend some time outlining it today so that when we get to the lectures in August, I can direct audiences to this discussion or ask them to revisit it. If you are not a student of what is called the academic study of religion, you may be surprised or perplexed or astounded to hear that you do not have to be a practicing Hindu to teach Hinduism, a practicing Muslim to teach Islam and so on. Note that I do not say you cannot be. Instead I say you do not have to be. That is, I do not say you cannot be a practicing Hindu and teach Hinduism or you cannot be a practicing Muslim and teach Islam. Instead I say you do not have to be a practicing Hindu in order to teach Hinduism and you do not have to be a practicing Muslim in order to teach Islam and likewise with respect to Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and so on. Now in many parts of South Asia and many other parts of the world pretty much the only reason why you would study a religious tradition is because you are already a member or follower of the tradition and because you think that the study will enhance your ability to see the world through the prism of that tradition. Having said that a basic presupposition of the academic study of religion is that the scholar can begin to cultivate the virtue of critical sympathy in which the scholar engages with a religious tradition from multiple perspectives such as historical, sociological, anthropological, scriptural and philosophical. Let me highlight the phrase critical sympathy. If you are hearing it for the first time you may think it contains a logical contradiction. You may ask yourself can I be critical about something or someone if I am sympathetic towards that thing or person? Conversely can I be sympathetic if I am critical? I would like to think that in our different ways we are all familiar with contexts where we have indeed exercised some measure of critical sympathy. For instance when John Smith a friend tells us that through such and such a pathway he has developed such and such a habit we may critically advise John to break out of this habit even as we sympathize with him. On the one hand we do not simply denounce John as stupid or irrational or perverse. On the other hand we may indicate to John why we think his habit is injurious to his psychosomatic well-being. That is with John we seek to walk on the difficult middle part between downright condemnation and unreflective approval. You can see why I characterize this discipline cognitive as much as existential as a virtue. One becomes more and more skillful in adopting or inhabiting critical sympathy through an ongoing practice. To turn from our friend John to a religious tradition such as Hinduism is some more Christianity to study such a tradition from the standpoint of critical sympathy is to begin to situate oneself on its horizons from a range of scholarly perspectives by avoiding two positions. The first position is a form of romanticization in which you would declare a particular religious tradition to be the greatest thing ever in the world that contains readymade solutions to all human problems and live it adept. Now there will be no problem at least according to me in adopting this position in a specific context such as a church, mosque, temple, gathering of friends or relatives and so on. But with respect to the virtue that I'm highlighting this position is not sufficiently critical. For instance it does not tell us that this religious tradition has been the site of multiple readings or interpretations that this religious tradition has been interrogated or even reworked in diverse ways by its own followers that this religious tradition seems to have engaged with changing social circumstances in seemingly contradictory ways and so on. Let's move to the second position which is the polar opposite. This is a form of a demonization in which you would denounce a particular religious tradition as completely devoid of any spiritual substance existential significance or moral gravity. With respect to the virtue that I'm highlighting this position is not sufficiently sympathetic or empathetic instead by reading the key scriptural texts of this religious tradition alongside its members by observing how its members grapple with everyday complexities relating to love, hope, loss and dying and so on. One may begin to discern some dimensions of meaning or value in it. Note that I say may begin and not will begin. Critical symmetry is not an established fact but an ongoing practice. Now here are three concrete examples of scholarly perspectives with respect to the study of Hinduism which require or presuppose some measure of critical sympathy. Number one, you may wish to study through a philosophical lens how the relation between the human self and the divine self or to put it more directly between the human soul and God is worked out in Hindu scriptures. Number two, you may wish to explore through a historical lens in what ways the concept of sacrifice or prayer or meditation has shifted between 1500 BCE and 1500 CE and number three. You may wish to understand through a sociological lens how some foundational Hindu texts represent the geopolitical or cultural outsider. Next, here are three concrete examples of scholarly perspectives with respect to the study of Christianity which require or presuppose some measure of critical sympathy. Number one, you may wish to study through a philosophical lens. The mainline Christian claim that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures divine and human. Number two, you may wish to explore through a historical lens how the concept of just war has developed from Saint Augustine in the 5th century to Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century to our times. Number three, you may wish to investigate through a sociological lens the intersections or oppositions between Christian values and modes of social protest in contemporary Latin America. Hopefully, by now you would appreciate the point that regarding the academic study of religion, the fundamental criterion is not whether you are a member of a certain religious tradition but whether you are cultivating a certain style of critical sympathy. For instance, many of my students at the Faculty of Divinity come from Christian backgrounds and they may or may not be practicing Christians when such a student writes a solid essay on a certain Hindu conceptual constellation or spiritual practice. This thought will never come to my mind. Oh my god, that is a very good essay for someone who is a Christian. This is because what matters in a specifically academic context is not what one's ultimate faith commitments are or are not but whether someone has paid careful attention to the source texts, read these materials in constructive dialogue with the recent scholarship, watched some YouTube videos or clips from Bollywood movies where a certain ritual is presented, spent some time in a Hindu temple in London or Delhi, talked to some Hindu neighbors or friends and so on. At this stage, let me remind you and myself what I am doing here. I am outlining some reasons, two reasons, why the description of the lecture series says for Muslim audiences. As you can see in one sense, the sense being the standpoint of critical sympathy, these lectures are not limited to Muslim audiences. The academic content of these 10 lectures in August should be accessible to people from any background, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish and non-stick and so on. However, the first reason why I have kept that phrase is because there is a specific cognitive deficit with respect to the understanding of Hinduism and equally the understanding of Islam across many Hindu-Muslim borderlines. In a book titled Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution in 1959, C.P. Snow famously lamented the lack of mutual intelligibility across certain institutionalized divides between the sciences and the humanities. The heart of Snow's lament that even the language of everyday use in one group is incomprehensible to the other group can be re-situated across many Hindu and Muslim spaces. A constellation of diverse socio-political factors such as the non-inclusion of religion as a category of scholarly study in institutions of higher education, the inheritance of divisive cultural memories and so on has generated or reinforced the culture of apathy, suspicion or hostility. Characterizing this culture is a general unfamiliarity with basic Islamic idioms such as Tawheed, Namaz and Tasawuf and basic Hindu idioms such as Atman, Dharma and Samsara. One of the greatest paradoxes regarding the category of religion in South Asia is the following. On the one hand, depending on what you mean by the term religion, you will find religion everywhere. On the other hand, however, religion is not generally speaking a topic of careful informed and methodical inquiry. In other words, even though religion is seemingly omnipresent in South Asia, many people are hesitant to directly engage with it or even acknowledge its presence. Shaping this paradox is the presumption and this is a presumption which embodies anxiety that the only reason why someone would discuss a religious viewpoint with you is to indoctrinate you. And yet the bread and butter of my everyday academic life comprises numerous ongoing conversations about religion with students from various religious backgrounds, Christian, Jewish or Muslim, or none at all. Against this backdrop in these 10 lectures, I seek to raise the level and the quality of religious literacy with some core theological visions, ritual practices, spiritual disciplines and social institutions. These 10 lectures do not presuppose any acquaintance with Hindu beliefs and practices and are open to anyone with internet accessibility. Each lecture aimed at the horizon of translation will be followed by a reflection offered by a scholar of Islam or by an activist working on Hindu-Muslim relations at the grassroots. Hopefully these 10 lectures will be followed by another series of 10 lectures on Islam to be given by various scholars of Islam. Let me spell out my long-distance vision of the impact of these two series of lectures. 10 years from today that is in 2033, an individual from a Muslim background, let's call her Amina, will give a lecture on Hinduism at Benaras Hindu University and the audience consisting mainly of Hindu scholars will be deeply impressed by her depth of critical understanding and sympathetic familiarity with respect to Hindu social religious systems. Again, 10 years from today, an individual from a Hindu background, let's call her Bhakti, will give a lecture on Islam at Aligarh Muslim University and the audience consisting mainly of Muslim scholars will be deeply impressed by her depth of critical understanding and sympathetic familiarity with respect to Islamic social religious systems. Will this indeed happen in 2033? If I'm still around in 2033, will I indeed get to hear to such lectures? I hope I will. So you may think of my exercise of giving 10 lectures in August as part of the groundwork towards enabling or promoting a culture where Hindus and Muslims would have the confidence to ask and negotiate difficult questions as we call them. One of the many reasons why the cultivation of critical sympathy is so vital to the academic study of religion is that it generates as well as sustains and intellectual ethos in which people can raise difficult questions and engage with them in a thoughtful, informed and systematic manner. For instance, with respect to South Asia, if I were to start talking about the relation between religion and violence, religion and conversion, religion and social stratification, religion and nationalism, religion and revolution and so on, some of you may feel anxious or hesitant or perturbed because these themes are, as we say, highly sensitive or even toxic. At the same time, the fact of the matter is that I routinely have such discussions with students and colleagues. Once you accept certain basic rules of engagement, such as giving reasons for one's claims, trying to substantiate one's claims with various types of evidence and so on, these rules become the parameters guiding the unfolding conversation. In just 10 lectures, I will not directly undertake such conversations, but hopefully I will be able to give you the basic idioms so that you feel confident to discuss difficult questions across Hindu-Muslim borderlines with people around you. At present, there are various structural impediments on the pathway of fostering understanding across the Hindu-Muslim borderlines. By structural impediments, I mean socio-economic and socio-cultural asymmetries or inequalities that we have inherited from the last 200 years or the last 500 years in different regions of South Asia. These inheritance is shaping differential access to basic resources. In the fields of primary education, medical care, employment in government services, and so on, constitute some of the most challenging roadblocks to negotiate on a pathway towards comprehension or intelligibility. Often these contexts of real-world asymmetry become active sides for the generation of misrepresentations of the other based on limited knowledge. We do not know and we do not care to know, and we do not even realize that we have reached a stage where we do not care to know. In this way, a vicious feedback spiral is generated. On the one hand, conditions of material inequality are conducive to the generation of misrepresentations, and on the other hand, such misrepresentations are invoked to endorse or legitimize existing conditions of material inequality. In a way, this tragic dialectic is not limited to Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. One could even say that the global history of humanity indicates that we are competing often with brutal violence for scarce resource, scarce goods on a fragile planet with limited resources. In these 10 lectures, I will not even try to directly solve this problem of cosmic proportions, but hopefully I will be able to impress on you how crucial it is to circumvent the vicious loop between structural inequality and individual misrepresentation. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, all it takes to circumvent this vicious loop is, as we say, to walk a few miles in the shoes of the other person, because when you do so, you begin to understand why the person does walk in the somewhat peculiar or strange manner. This just doesn't mean that you too have to start walking in that way, but when you're able to place yourself on another person's horizon, you may see some aspects of your humanity reflected in or embodied by that person. Underlying this image is a certain topic, namely the politics of friendship to which I often return in my academic publications. What type of friendship, if any, is possible across individuals, across groups, across communities, who inhabit social-cultural backdrops structured by forms of hierarchy, inequality, and oppression? I raise this question with the hope that you will reflect on it. Let me return to a point I made at the beginning. Namely, in the academic study of religion, you do not have to be a practicing Hindu to teach Hinduism and you do not have to be a practicing Muslim to teach Islam, but this is not to say that you cannot be a practicing Hindu if you are teaching Hinduism and this is not to say that you cannot be a practicing Muslim if you're teaching Islam. Let me now ask a question about moving across religious borderlines. If you are a practicing Hindu, what reason may you have to try to become someone like Bhakti and if you are a practicing Muslim, what reason may you have to try to become someone like Amina? In these 10 lectures, I will not directly address this question relating to transversal movement across Hindu-Muslim borderlines, but my hope is that if you are a practicing Muslim, you will be able to return to a particular verse in the Quran and envision Hindu-Muslim engagements through a tafsir in a different light and if you are a practicing Hindu, you will be able to return to a particular verse in the openitions on the Bhagavad Gita and envision Hindu-Muslim engagements through a bahasya in a different light. In these 10 lectures, I will not tell you precisely how to undertake this cross-border enterprise, but if I can be a catalyst for such an enterprise, that would bring me great joy and that brings me to my second reason for keeping the phrase for Muslim audiences in the title. Generally speaking, I do not ask my students about their religious affiliation and generally speaking, my students do not ask me about my religious affiliation to use the language of Hollywood movies in the academic study of religion. Generally speaking, one discusses one's religious affiliation on a strictly neat to no basis. However, as it so happens, I sometimes give lectures on Hinduism to students at the Christian seminary and their Muslim institution in Cambridge and I'm aware that in these pedagogic settings, I unwittingly generate an asymmetry. I know quite a lot about the religious affiliations of my audience, but my audience does not know anything about mine. So, on this occasion, let me tell you in the mode of FYI for your information that in my self-understanding, I am some kind of a Roman Catholic. When people hear this description, they usually have two questions. Number one, what on earth is that? Number two, how on earth did you become that? Without launching out in the deep autobiographical territory, I will outline two responses and indicate their significance for the 10 lectures. Here is the first response. The negative way to present the description, some kind of a Roman Catholic is as follows. If tomorrow the Vatican were to summon me to present an account of my Catholicism, my confession will not pass the relevant desks. To put it bluntly from the Vatican's point of view, I'm a heretic and in a way I'm okay with that. The positive way to present the description, some kind of a Roman Catholic is as follows. My guru, my worship is the 13th century Catholic Saint Francis and I will skip some crucial details and tell you that when I was 21 years old, I took a vow in front of an icon of Saint Francis to dedicate my life to transiting across the borderlines of Christians, Hindus and Muslims and that brings me to the second response. When my Hindu mother died, when I was a teenager, I was consumed by this question. What happens to people who die without responding in faith to the Christian gospel? For almost three decades now, I have grappled in one way or another with this most magnificent question and yet I am now the wilder and across all these years I found myself slipping further and further away from the official teachings of the Catholic Church, hence the description of myself as some kind of a Catholic. Now here's a crucial question. Why am I telling you all this? I indicated to you that one significant hurdle on the pathway of Hindu-Muslim understanding is the persistence of some long-range dimensions of material inequality. My 10 lectures in themselves cannot remove or counteract this inequality. Another equally significant hurdle on this pathway is the question of what happens to those individuals who are not able for whatever reason to respond to the preaching of Islam. This hurdle turns up of course as much in Christian-Muslim dialogue as in Hindu-Muslim dialogue but from the perspectives of these 10 lectures I'm more interested in the latter than in the former. So one reason why I have answered a question that will generally speaking not be put to me by my own students at the faculty of Divinity is this. I wish to place all my cards on the interreligious table and tell you that regarding such cosmological questions of an individual's post-modern destiny I have nothing to declare but my ignorance. Here is another reason. Across the theological universes of Hindus and Muslims of Muslims and Christians and of Hindus and Christians there are as we know some fundamental conflicts of truth claims. Is reincarnation real? Did Jesus truly die on the cross? Does God have one unique incarnation on many avatars? Is our common human nature corrupted by some radical defect or is our common human nature pure in its intrinsic depth? Can we meaningfully speak of some form of distinction in the being of God without this distinction implying some mode of polytheism? I take these types of truth claims seriously. So seriously indeed that as I just indicated I have spent almost three decades studying them. Now one question which my students indeed put to me is this. Given that Hindus, Muslims and Christians sometimes have such significant divergences in their truth claims how do you live with this epistemic diversity? After 30 years of wrestling with God my one word answer is simply this. Patience. I have resigned myself to the possibility that I will not know the truth with the fullness that my heart passionately desires on this side of the grave or on this shore of the cremation gut. And so I must wait as patiently as I can for the other side or shore to arrive one day. Now I do not offer this response in a prescriptive mode to tell you what you should believe. If you are a practicing Muslim what you do believe regarding such matters should would be shaped by your reflective engagements with the words of the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad just as if you are a practicing Hindu what you do believe regarding such matters may be shaped by the instructions of your Guru who has conveyed to you the teachings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. This set of motives is called epistemic peer conflict and it will possibly come up in the Q&A during the 10 lectures. Two verses of his song from the Bollywood movie Om Rao Jaan summarized my entire academic career. They are the quintessence of all the books and articles I have published and all the lectures I have given. The one whom I desired I did not find yet on this pretext I got to see the whole world. In this case the one I desired namely the answer to the question about my Hindu mother I have not found at least not so far but as a result of setting out on this journey I got to see the many worlds of Christians Hindus and Muslims. Having laid out some methodological contours and indicated some tools with which we may navigate religious universes let me turn to the question of thematic content. What will I discuss in these 10 lectures? After outlining some key notions from the paradigmatic scriptural foundations of the Vedas roughly 1500 BCE and openations roughly 800 BCE I will highlight the centrality of the Bhagavad Gita roughly 200 CE. Too many Hindu understandings of the interrelations between the human cells the natural world and the divine reality. I will sketch some commentarial developments of these themes roughly 8th century CE onwards in Vedantic visions and explore how these visions complexly intersect with patterns of social stratification styles of aesthetic creativity and imaginations of the ideal polity. Here is an overview of the 10 lectures. Lectures 1, 2, 3 and introduction to a methodology of critical sympathy in the study of religion be the social-cultural and social-religious meanings of the world Hindu see Vedic ritual imaginations of the world as a sacrificial order yajna dharma and the the motive of self-knowledge jnana vidya in openations. Lecture 4 and introduction to the central themes of the Bhagavad Gita. Lectures 5 to 6 and introduction to Vedantic notions of the human self Jiva Atman and its relation to the divine reality Brahman Ishwara. Lecture 7 to 8 and introduction to the divine feminine Devi Shakti and an exploration of the locations of Hindu spirituality on every delineation structured by distinctions of caste, varnal jati and gender street dharma. Lectures 9 to 10 and introduction to the multiple styles of post-1757 Hindu world views which have sought to rework pre-modern scriptural texts and practices in active engagement with the idea of the West. In conclusion, let me say that I hope to see many of you in August and I look forward to engaging with the questions that you may have after each lecture. These lectures are a complete package in which I will present certain themes in the form of an unfolding narrative. This means that a subsequent lecture will make sense to someone if they have attended the previous lecture or lectures too. However, for various reasons, some people may be able to attend only a few of the lectures and that would be fine too. Thank you.