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) (ಬಾಲಗಙ್ಗಾಧರ 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 |
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]
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.
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]