Modern Yoga Research as a Discursive Formation

The practice of yoga is on the rise, as much as its academic scrutiny. Scholars, especially within the disciplinary boundaries of religious studies, South Asian studies, Indology, anthropology, and sociology, have recently started to critically inquire into the birth and transnational developments of modern forms of yoga, tracing their genealogies and textual roots. This expanding literature has in turn contributed to the constitution of the emergent and multidisciplinary field of modern yoga research, or yoga studies. The primary aim of this article is thus to analyze the field of modern yoga research as a ‘discursive formation’ (Foucault [1971]1972), that is, an ensemble of texts constituting – or contributing to the constitution of – a specific object of analysis, namely modern yoga. In so doing, it also aims to contribute to the advancement of the discursive study of religion more in general. The article relies on a ‘discursive study of religion’ approach (e.g., von Stockrad 2003, 2010, 2013) with a focus on its archaeological leaning (e.g., Foucault 1965, 1972, [1963] 1973, [1966] 2002). More specifically, I underline the affinity that modern yoga research’s discursive references have with a number of discursive currents that characterize the disciplines it emerged from, such as radical historicism, cultural relativism, modernism, Orientalism and neo-colonialism. Finally, I conclude by summarizing the main results of this contribution and exploring their relevance to the self-reflexive development of the overlapping fields of cultural analyses and the study of religion.

Elementary Algebra on Vedic Mathematics

The South Asian region has a long history of discovering new ideas, ideologies, and technologies. Since the Vedic period, the land has been known as a fertile place for innovative discoveries. The Vedic technique used by Bharati Krishna Tirthaji is unique among South Asian studies. The focus of this study was mostly on algebraic topics, which are typically taught in our school level. The study also looked at how Vedic Mathematics solves issues of elementary algebra using Vedic techniques such as Paravartya Yojayet, Sunyam Samyasamuccaye, Anurupye Sunyamanyat, Antyayoreva and Lopanasthapanabhyam. The comparison and discussion of the Vedic with the conventional techniques indicate that the Vedic Mathematics and its five unique formulas are more beneficial and realistic to those learners who are experiencing problems with elementary level algebra utilizing conventional methods.

Learning-free pattern detection for manuscript research:

Automatic pattern detection has become increasingly important for scholars in the humanities as the number of manuscripts that have been digitised has grown. Most of the state-of-the-art methods used for pattern detection depend on the availability of a large number of training samples, which are typically not available in the humanities as they involve tedious manual annotation by researchers (e.g. marking the location and size of words, drawings, seals and so on). This makes the applicability of such methods very limited within the field of manuscript research. We propose a learning-free approach based on a state-of-the-art Naïve Bayes Nearest-Neighbour classifier for the task of pattern detection in manuscript images. The method has already been successfully applied to an actual research question from South Asian studies about palm-leaf manuscripts. Furthermore, state-of-the-art results have been achieved on two extremely challenging datasets, namely the AMADI_LontarSet dataset of handwriting on palm leaves for word-spotting and the DocExplore dataset of medieval manuscripts for pattern detection. A performance analysis is provided as well in order to facilitate later comparisons by other researchers. Finally, an easy-to-use implementation of the proposed method is developed as a software tool and made freely available.

Banglascapes in Southern Europe: Im-mobilities, emplacements, temporalities

This special issue stems from a panel we organised at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in 2018, under the title ‘Banglascapes in Southern Europe: comparative perspectives’. Not all the panel participants from that conference feature in this special issue, and not all the authors included here were present at the conference. Nevertheless, the panel represents a first important moment in which we began to collect case-studies and insights on a relatively new aspect of the so-called Bengali, or Bangladeshi, ‘diaspora’.

Words and Pictures: Rāmāyaṇa Traditions and the Art of Ekphrasis

This article examines two ambitious enactments of the Rama story or Rāmāyaṇa, side by side: the 17th-century painted Mewar Rāmāyaṇa and Vālmīki’s epic poem (ca. 750–500 BCE). Through a formal analysis of two crucial episodes of the tale, it highlights the creative tactics of each medium and stresses their separate aesthetic interests and autonomy. While A. K. Ramanujan’s notion of the “telling” has been immensely influential in South Asian studies to theorize the Rāmāyaṇa’s multiplicity, that concept tends to privilege speech-based embodiments. I propose, by contrast, that ekphrasis may be a more broadly applicable lens. Understanding ekphrasis as an enactment of the Rama story in any medium or in interart media, I advocate for considering poetry and painting on an equal plane as opposed to the standard view of the Mewar paintings as visual translations of linguistic phenomena. Ekphrasis, as a gateway to the maker’s creative process and preoccupations, is central to the paper’s argument, as is the role receivers play in the act of Rāmāyaṇa making.

Book review: Ritanjan Das. 2018. Neoliberalism and the Transforming Left in India: A Contradictory Manifesto

Ritanjan Das. 2018. Neoliberalism and the Transforming Left in India: A Contradictory Manifesto. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge/Edinburgh South Asian Studies. 227 pp., Price £120.00, ISBN: 978-1-138-73229-2 (Hardback), ISBN: 978-1-315-18851-5 (e-book).