S. N. Balagangadhara

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S.N. Balagangadhara

Balagangadhara at Rethinking Religion in India 2008
Full name S.N. Balagangadhara
Born January 3, 1952
Bangalore, India
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western & Indian Philosophy
School Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Comparative Science of Cultures
Main interests Religious Studies
Cultural Studies
Post-colonial Studies
Orientalism
Ethics
Political Philosophy
History of ideas
South Asian Studies
Notable ideas Explanatory Intelligible Account
Colonial Consciousness
Indian Renaissance

S.N. Balagangadhara (aka Balu) (ಬಾಲಗಂಗಾಧರ in Kannada) is professor at the Ghent University in Belgium and directs the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cutuurwetenschap (Comparative Science of Cultures).[1] He was a student of National College, Bangalore and moved to Belgium in 1977 to study philosophy at Ghent University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Prof. Etienne Vermeersch. His doctoral thesis (1991) was entitled Comparative Science of Cultures and the Universality of Religion: An Essay on Worlds without Views and Views without the World. Prof. Balu has been researching the nature of religion. His central area of inquiry has been the study of Western culture against the background of Indian culture.[1] His research programme is called in Dutch "Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap," which translates into "Comparative Science of Cultures." Prof. Balagangadhara has held the co-chair of the Hinduism Unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and gives lectures to a wide audience, from the European, American and Indian classrooms, through the scholarly conference halls, to the Hindu temples.

Contents

[edit] Research

From the 1980s onwards, S.N. Balagangadhara has been developing the research programme Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap (“Comparative Science of Cultures”) to study the cultural differences between Asia and Europe. He analyses western culture and intellectual thought through its representations of other cultures, with a particular focus on the representations of India. He studies how and to what extent the Christian religion shaped the West and the conceptual framework through which it understands India. Given the conceptual limitations that this has generated in the human sciences in general and the study of Indian culture in particular, Balagangadhara attempts at developing alternative descriptions of the Indian culture and its traditions. They provide an alternative way to access the Indian traditions and make their insights available for the development of new theories in the human sciences. As such, Balagangadhara attempts at translating the knowledge embodied by the Indian traditions into the conceptual language of the twenty-first century.[2]

Title Page "The Heathen in his Blindness..."

In his early work, Balagangadhara focused on religion, culture and cultural difference.[3] In scholarly circles, he is mainly known for the controversial claim that religion is not a cultural universal. He started with the following observations: most intellectuals agree that Christianity had a profound influence on western culture; that members from different cultures experience many aspects of the world differently; and that the empirical and theoretical study of both culture and religion emerged within the West. Balagangadhara proposed to think these ideas through, and argued that religion is important to the West because the constitution and the identity of western culture are tied to the dynamic of Christianity as a religion. He argued that the analytical tools with which the West has understood other cultures like India, are intrinsically shaped by Semitic and Christian theology. The doctrine that God gave religion to the humankind, Balagangadhara argued, lies at the heart of the originally ethnographic belief in the universality of religion:

In the name of science and ethnology, the Biblical themes have become our regular stock-in-trade: that God gave religion to humankind has become a cultural universal in the guise that all cultures have a religion; the theme that God gave one religion to humanity has taken the form and belief that all religions have something in common; that God revealed himself to humankind is sanctified in the claim that in all cultures and at all times there is a subjective experience of religion which is fundamentally the same; the idea that God implanted a sense of divinity in Man is now a secular truth in the form of an anthropological, specifically human ability to have a religious experience ... And so the list goes on, and on, and on. Theme after theme from the pages of the Bible has become the ‘but of course!’ of intellectuals—whether Jew, Muslim, Dinka, or Brahmin.[4]

Balagangadhara proposes therefore a novel analysis of religion, the Roman ‘religio’, the construction of ‘religions’ in India and the nature of cultural differences. He is currently working on two monographs, the first on the evolutionary explanations of religion, and the second on Indian traditions and the ethical domain.

[edit] Influences and Criticisms

Balagangadhara's work is widely cited by scholars in the field of religious studies. Richard King's acclaimed Orientalism and Religion (1999) draws from Balagangadhara's analysis of the history of the concept 'religion'.[5] More recently, Sharada Sugirtharajah’s Imagining Hinduism (2003) employed Balagangadhara's analysis of the influence of Christian thought on religious studies in her discussion of colonial scholarship.[6] South Asia specialist Peter van der Veer similarly refers to Balagangadhara's theory when he raises "the broad, historical question of the ways in which Western modernity has assumed universal importance and, more specifically, how a modern Western category such as religion has come to be applied as a universal concept."[7] Balagangadhara's theory of religion is therefore used now in general introductions to Hinduism.[8] Its implications for the discipline of anthropology are also present in recent sourcebooks on anthropology.[9] His work has impacted the disciplines of political philosophy,[10] and also cultural theory,[11] as well as studies in classical literature.[12] Balagangadhara's analysis of the European representations of non-Christian traditions also percolated into the field of feminist theory.[13]

Philip Almond and David Loy remain sympathetic to Balagangadhara’s theory but assert that the claims made about Christian influence are exaggerated.[14] Will Sweetman holds that Balagangadhara’s theory is based on a narrow understanding of both religion and Christianity. He argues that there are no reasons to accept the definition of religion as an explanatorily intelligible account of the cosmos as we would have to accept that religion should necessarily involve creeds, beliefs, scriptures and churches.[15] In his response to Sweetman, Balagangadhara shows how "Sweetman's representation of [his] 'argument' is flawed".[16] Sanjay Subrahmanyam has recently characterised Balagangadhara's work as "peculiar" and "confused", adding that "despite its 'cult' status in some circles, in reality [it] does not advance the discussion".[17]

[edit] Projects

[edit] Selected publications

[edit] Books

  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (1994). "The Heathen in his Blindness..." Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden, New York: E. J. Brill. pp. 563. ISBN 9004099433.  | Preview at Google Books | Find in libraries near you
  • S.N. Balagangadhara. (2005). "The Heathen in his Blindness..." Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. New Delhi: Manohar (Second and revised edition). ISBN 8173046085. 

[edit] Book Chapters

  • Balagangadhara, S.N. (2009) "Spirituality in Management Theories: A Perspective from India" in S. Nandram & M. Borden (Eds.) "Spirituality and Business: Exploring Possibilities for a New Management Paradigm". Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Balagangadhara, S.N.; Bloch, Esther, De Roover, Jakob (2008), "Rethinking Colonialism and Colonial Consciousness: The Case of Modern India." in S. Raval (Ed.), Rethinking Forms of Knowledge in India. Delhi: Pencraft International, pp. 179–212.
  • Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), “Foreword.” In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii-xi.
  • Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Balagangadhara on the Biblical Underpinnings of 'Secular' Social Sciences." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. 123–31.
  • Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), “India and her Traditions: A Reply to Jeffrey Kripal.” In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. 429–447.
  • Balagangadhara, S.N. (2006), “Secularisation as the Harbinger of Religious Violence in India: Hybridisation, Hindutva and Post-coloniality.” In Schirmer, Saalmann & Kessler (Eds.), Hybridising East and West, Tales Beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity. (Series Southeast Asian Modernities, vol. 2). Berlin: Lit Verlag, pp. 145–182.

[edit] Articles

  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (2005). "How to Speak for the Indian Traditions". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (4): 987–1013. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfi112. 
  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (1998). "The Future of the Present: Thinking Through Orientalism". Cultural Dynamics 10 (2): 101–23. doi:10.1177/092137409801000202. 
  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (1988). "Comparative Anthropology and Moral Domains". Cultural Dynamics 1 (1): 98–128. doi:10.1177/092137408800100106. 
  • Balagangadhara, S. N. (1987). "Comparative Anthropology and Action Science: An Essay on Knowing to Act and Acting to Know". Philosophica 40 (2): 77–107. ISSN 0379-8402. 

[edit] External links

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[edit] References

 Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references (quick guide), or an abbreviated title. (July 2010)
  1. ^ a b ANANTHARAMAN, SUDHA (2007-12-09). "In search of new idioms". The Hindu. http://www.hindu.com/mag/2007/12/09/stories/2007120950090400.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-07. 
  2. ^ See for instance Balagangadhara, S. N. (2005). "How to Speak for the Indian Traditions". Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73 (4): 987-1013. ISSN 0002-7189
  3. ^ Balagangadhara, S. N. (1994). "The Heathen in his Blindness..." Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion. Leiden, New York: E. J. Brill
  4. ^ Ibid., pp. 226-27.
  5. ^ Richard King, 1999, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and "the Mystic East" (Routledge, 2009).
  6. ^ Sharada Sugirtharajah, 2009, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (Routledge, 2003). Also see Timothy Fitzgerald (ed.), Religion and the Secular (Equinox Pub., 2007).
  7. ^ Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia (Princeton University Press, 1999), 4.
  8. ^ See J. E. Llewellyn, Defining Hinduism: A Reader (Routledge, 2005)
  9. ^ See Vivek Dhareshwar, "Valorizing the Present: Orientalism, Postcoloniality, Human Sciences," in H. Moore and T. Sanders (eds.), Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology (Blackwell Publishing, 2006) 546-552
  10. ^ See Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "On the Possibility of Religious Pluralism," in Thomas Banchoff (ed.), Religious Pluralism, Globalization, and World Politics (Oxford University Press, 2008), 65-88; and L. Cady, "Categories, Conflicts, and Conundrums: Ethics and the Religious/Secular Divide," in P. French and J. Short (eds.), War and Border Crossings (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 143-164
  11. ^ See Joan G. Miller, "Cultural Conceptions of Duty: Implications for Motivation and Morality," in D. Munro, J. Schumaker, and S. Carr (eds.), Motivation and culture (Routledge, 1997), 178-192).
  12. ^ See D. C. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome: Cultures, Contexts, and Beliefs (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  13. ^ See Pui-lan Kwok, Postcolonial imagination and feminist theology (Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).
  14. ^ Almond, 1996, ‘The Heathen in His Blindness?’ in Cultural Dynamics 8, pp. 137-45 and Loy, 1996, ‘…While the Scholar in His Wisdom Bows Down to the Truth’ in Cultural Dynamics 8, pp. 147-60.
  15. ^ Sweetman, 2003, ‘Hinduism and the History of Religion: Protestant Presuppositions in the Critique of the Concept of Hinduism’ in MTSR 15, pp. 329-53.
  16. ^ "About Sweetman": http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenInHisBlindness/message/802 and http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheHeathenInHisBlindness/message/4899
  17. ^ Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Monsieur Picart and the Gentiles of India,” in Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, ed., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010, 214.
  18. ^ The Hindu, Online edition of India's National Newspaper, Monday, Aug 13, 2007
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