Mythologist | Author | Speaker | Illustrator
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Articles
Glamour of vengeful gods
Faith now manifests not as patience, but as impatience, even intolerance…
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Articles
Is Hinduism A Religion, A Myth Or Something Else?
Words are not ‘objective truths’ as we assume, but ‘subjective truths’, imbued with power and embedded in politics…
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Articles
How Indian sages viewed violence (and why western mythology has such different ideas about it)
In Greek myth, violence is part of a movement from chaos to order. But Indian myth lays out that as long as violence exists, it will beget violence…
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Articles
How a new akhara of transgendered people stole the spotlight at the Ujjain Kumbh
Thousands of devotees lined up to seek the blessings of the kinnar order…
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Articles
Equality & loss of diversity
Why do we assume that every member of civil society will respond exactly the same way? Why do we get upset when others do not react the same way as we do?…
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Passport shame: What’s really at the heart of the California textbook row on Hinduism?
It is a battle that will not die down, for it reveals a great split in the Indian American community…
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Articles
Are Indian courts and activists denying the gods their gender and sexuality?
This de-sexing of gods and goddesses makes it difficult to explain the exclusion of women from the presence of celibate gods…
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Articles
The everlasting flame
The agiary is off limits to non-Parsis, but the basis of the exclusion may be common to the Vedas and the Avesta…
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Articles
A ritual cleansing
Notions of reform are often based on ‘assumptions of deformity’, which are dependent on ‘assumptions of normality’…
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Articles
Shrine a light
That a Muslim tomb is the most popular image of India may exasperate some but the Taj Mahal is emblematic of the many kinds of pilgrimages we undertake…
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Articles
Beyond Hinduism: Is caste a religious or a regional problem?
Which mythology – religious or secular – shapes the South Asian mind?…
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Articles
Misogyny in Buddhist Lore
The world is conditioned to see the Ramayana and Manu-Smriti as anti-women, but not the Buddhist lore…
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Articles
The complete man
There are two Krishnas… The first is historical (a person), the second mythological (an idea)…
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Articles
Scanners for menstrual blood
The practice of restricting access to menstruating women is rooted in the pre-modern belief that links purity and power to bodily fluids…
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Articles
14 things historians taught me
The best thing they passed on is that no knowledge is fixed and finite…
