Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.

This chapter examines the sociopolitical history of the ‘euharmonic organ’, built by Henry Liston in 1817 for St Andrew’s, the first Presbyterian Church in India. Liston’s unique organ was adapted for performance of church music and common-practice repertory in a ‘natural tuning’, optimizing perfect consonance over practicality. Drawing on the arguments of political historian Timothy Mitchell, I argue that this unusual design feature was intended to afford sensations of musical space and time as organized in accordance with the topological and chronological propositions of colonial modernity. The first section investigates how the instrument’s purchase, contrary to the church’s prior rejection of organ music, altered how it construed the relation between reason and sensation, and why those changes were tolerated as necessary for establishing the Anglo-Indian Presbytery as equally progressive and modern to the Anglican Church of India. The second section draws on Liston’s musical historiography in addressing how the instrument was also envisioned as consistent with the church’s programs for ‘native education’. In an afterword, I reflect on the instability of the church’s musicological claims, by showing how Indian theorists successfully inverted what natural tuning represented in order to support claims that musical modernity originated in Hindustan, not Europe.

This chapter challenges the Gandhian narrative that Hinduism preaches peace. It argues that Hinduism is composed of many strands of thought that include both nonviolent traditions and martial violence.

Tolstoy had a sustained interest in a number of religions other than Christianity. This interest became urgent and comprehensive in the 1880s after his so-called conversion. In this chapter, I examine Tolstoy’s relation to Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism in terms of a crucial question that preoccupied the later Tolstoy: What is the good life? Indeed, I suggest that Tolstoy turned to these other religions precisely because of his concern to identify a universal wisdom about the good life. My examination proceeds through texts, such as War and Peace and A Confession, that exploit tropes, imagery, and parables drawn from Daoism, Buddhism, and the Hindu tradition. The upshot is to reveal the extent to which Tolstoy’s advocacy of self-resignation, the principal element in his attitude to nonviolent resistance, has roots in his investigation of these other religions, and not only in his interpretation of the Christian tradition.

This chapter considers thematic concerns addressed by some of the authors in the volume, from the perspective of those in the study of Hinduism and constitutional law. The focus is on three chapters in particular: Mark Nathan’s analysis of monasticism and celibacy in Korea; Richard Whitecross’ reflections on dual sovereignty in Bhutan; and Krishantha Fedricks’ writing on language ideology in Sri Lanka.

Psychology’s past in Eastern civilizations were an inherent part of the religious and moral philosophies. In an overview of those non-Western traditions in psychology, points of interaction between East and West occurred in Persia, which served as a crossroad between India and the Arab world. Ancient Indian culture followed the traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism. The writings of the Vedas, especially the Upanishads, provided the foundation for Hindu philosophy. In China, imported Buddhism taught that self-denial and proper thinking were necessary to achieve well-being. However, the older philosophical movement of Confucianism offered a stronger basis for Chinese intellectual progress. Both Buddhism and Confucianism were exported to Japan, where they were transposed into Japanese philosophies to support nationalistic aspirations. Two Middle Eastern cultures, Egyptian and Hebrew, are important as predecessors for the ancient Greeks whose philosophical formulations would provide the foundations for the emergence of psychology. Egyptian achievements in art and architecture left us a legacy, especially expressed in astronomy and medicine. The Jewish foundation of monotheism and law, along with an understanding of the person as a unity of spirit and matter, interfaced with the Greek culture that was to dominate the Mediterranean world.

The origin of the modern liberal conception of human rights has been traced to the concept of natural rights that has its source in natural law thought, leading some to draw a connection between Thomistic natural law and human rights. However, the Thomistic understanding of natural law is embedded in a religious framework, raising the relevance and possible relation of religious traditions to the contemporary concept of human rights. This chapter explores this relation in the context of Hinduism, which espouses a version of natural law in the idea of Dharma, and gives primacy to duty rather than rights. Can the fundamental tenets, principles and concepts of Hinduism help to develop conceptual groundwork for human rights without subscribing to the Western liberal conception of rights? Exploring this question, the chapter argues for human moral obligations as the link between natural law and human rights. It concludes that human moral obligations serve the same purpose as human rights without being embroiled in controversies that vitiate the Western liberal conception of human rights.

Chapter one introduces South Asia’s people, geography, and history until the late twelfth century, and examines indigenous religious traditions as well as ones introduced by forces from Central Asia and the Iranian world. For India, by which we mean historic South Asia, we discuss differences in the north and south by focusing on Chandella patronage in north India of temples at Khajuraho, and Chola rule in south India and the construction of the Rajarajeshvara temple in Thanjavur. Contemporary with the construction of the Rajarajeshvara temple is Mahmud of Ghazni’s rise to power in what is modern Afghanistan and his subsequent raids into India. While Ghaznavid sway over India was short-lived it paved the way for the introduction of Islam and Ghurid dominance.

There are a few hundred known sign languages around the world, and in such language communities, multilingualism is the norm. This multilingualism traverses modalities: signed, written, and, in some cases, spoken forms of language. Such a linguistic landscape inevitably leads to various forms of language contact between languages, including contact between two or more signed languages (characterised by lexical borrowing), signed language and spoken language (characterised by mouthings), and signed language and written language (characterised by fingerspelling, initialized fingerspelling). This chapter also covers sign language interference, code switching and code mixing, and the concept of bimodal bilingualism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of pidginization and creolization of sign languages and sign language endangerment, as well as general comments on the characteristics of contact between signed languages.

If democratic planning was to become a mass movement, as the government hoped, it would require the voluntary participation of Indian citizens. Chapter 5 examines how, in the absence of spontaneous participation, the state supported voluntary organizations to spread the message of the Five Year Plans and offer services toward their fulfilment. It analyses the paradox of the state intervening to stimulate voluntary support for its policies. The chapter traces efforts to involve youths through College and University Planning Forums, and other social groups through the Bharat Sewak Samaj (Service to India Society). It also analyses a curious experiment—the enigmatic Bharat Sadhu Samaj (Indian Society of Ascetics). A brainchild of Gulzarilal Nanda, the devout Minister for Planning, its goal was to publicize the Plans using Hinduism as a resource. The attempt reveals how the Nehruvian state propagated Five Year Plans—the very symbol of secular technocracy and scientific modernity—using saffron-robed Hindu monks and ascetics. The startling long-term fallout of this project was the Sadhu Samaj’s drift towards Hindu nationalism. Ultimately, this religious venture underlines the awkward relationship and largely failed wedding of technocratic and democratic dimensions of planning.

In the legal textual tradition of the Minhāj and the Tuḥfa, a particular subsequent text and its author mark a point from which to analyse Shāfiʿī experiments in the Indian Ocean rim. This chapter considers Fatḥ al-muʿīn, written by Aḥmad Zayn al-Dīn bin Muḥammad Ghazālī al-Malaybārī (d. ca. 1583), an autocommentary on his Qurrat al-ʿayn. Both the base text and the autocommentary form an independent family in the Shāfiʿī textual history with their own textual descendants, while they can also be considered as indirect progenies of the Tuḥfa, for they stimulated the Shāfiʿī legacy of Ibn Ḥajar and his oeuvre on the Malabar Coast and the wider territories around the Indian Ocean. They demonstrate how Indian Ocean Muslims made their way into the textual landscape of Shāfiʿīsm, and even into the heartlands of Islam. They added to the long pattern of Islamic thought in a traditional way and also advanced it. The chapter investigates how it criticised many methods and arguments of its intellectual predecessors and generated a different discourse within the school from its peculiar perspective from Malabar and the Indian Ocean at large.