The DSR Lecture Series speaker for the January 22, 2026 event, DSR PhD alumnus Arun Brahmbhatt, is an assistant professor of religion at Syracuse University. His research investigates how religious traditions and communities in South Asia have navigated the forces of colonial modernity, and focuses both on continuities and disjunctures with the premodern past. Brahmbhatt‘s book project, Debating Sanskrit: Scholastic Imperatives in Modern Hinduism, employs archival and textual approaches to examine the sustained deployment of classical Sanskrit in Gujarati religious communities from the nineteenth century to the present day. Compiled by PhD student Shashank Rao, this interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What brought you to the study of religion—and the DSR in particular—and how would you say it’s shaped your approach to the study of religion?
I came to the study of religion in a roundabout way. As the child of South Asian immigrants growing up in the United States, I was encouraged to choose between becoming a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. Going into undergrad, I was on track to be a lawyer, but there was no pre-law option. We were advised to study something in the humanities. Though I first declared an English major, on a whim, I thought I would take an intro to Hinduism class. It was an eye-opening experience, because I realized that what I thought I knew about Hinduism was a drop in the ocean. The tradition is so diverse, and what I knew was one particular aspect of it. And that sort of set off this interest in wanting to learn about other religions, so then I decided to double major.
The DSR, and the University of Toronto, now has such a strength in South Asian religions and particularly in Sanskrit traditions. The DSR really prepared me for working in the discipline of religion, with the department’s emphasis on theory and method. The fact that our cohorts were extremely diverse, the fact that I was able to talk to professors from other disciplines, really set me up to engage with people who work in a range of different disciplines, a range of different methodologies within the study of religion.
In your dissertation, you focused on the commentarial traditions and primarily writings in Sanskrit. But in your talk, you mentioned that you’re moving to this project around devotional materials. What motivated that shift? Is that a methodological shift?
The dissertation was really focused on the scholastic materials of what I was calling “scholastic publics.” I was thinking about how the emergent Swaminarayan tradition [a Hindu community based in Gujarat, India, named after its founder, Swaminarayan, 1781-1830)], was committed to a scholastic project as a way of engaging with a broader intellectual world. I noted in the dissertation that this was just one aspect of the work that religious agents do. Intellectual work was not a siloed activity. For my book, I have been thinking much more about this broader framework.
In the Swaminarayan tradition, there isn’t a clear-cut division between scholarship and devotion.
There’s been a lot of recent work that has pushed beyond the binary of the intellectual and the devotional. And even within the Swaminarayan tradition, there are articulations of bhakti, devotion, that transcend the affective, emotional engagement with the divine. There is this concept of ekāntik bhakti (“singular devotion”), which talks about the interdependence of dharma (“duty”), jñāna (“wisdom”), vairāgya (“detachment”), and bhakti (“devotion”).
Recent scholarship on the Swaminarayan tradition has also found scholastic considerations in other types of texts. If you look at certain bhajans (“songs of prayer”) and kīrtans (“songs of worship”) in the poetic tradition of the Swaminarayan tradition, there isn’t a clear-cut division between scholarship and devotion; you will find scholastic considerations within the poetic corpus. You’ll find this within a broader literary framework, too. There is also a very strong tradition of sacred biography in vernacular languages. What I’ve been working on that with the book project, then, is to contextualize the scholastic material. The Sanskrit texts are not just “scholastic,” they are devotional.
For my upcoming work, I am shifting towards looking at visual culture more closely. It’s not a methodological shift, because I still consider visual material to be “text,” but it’s expanding the types of text that I am looking at. I’m really interested in how there are other sets of materials that are doing important work for the community. This shift towards devotion is an extension of my longstanding interests.
What do you see your project contributing to debates about religion and media?
In the current book, I look at how print technologies open up various avenues of engagement that previously would have been unavailable, or available to lesser degrees. With the advent of print, how is it that people can now engage with others in a more expanded fashion? So far, I have been thinking a lot about the production aspect of this engagement, about the agents who are responsible for authoring these texts, the venues that are being used to produce these texts. But I am also interested in the other side of the equation. Who is using these texts, this emerging technology? As I continue my work and especially as I move into visual culture, I really hope to incorporate more of an ethnographic lens.
Digital media and digital platforms are sometimes thought to be a more democratic and accessible medium. The immediacy of information affords a certain kind of accessibility that print culture is thought to do less. What do you make of accessibility of religious knowledge and tradition in print versus digital formats?
In one sense, the digital is an extension of print. If we use the Swaminarayan example, in the early nineteenth century, images of Swaminarayan were produced using woodblock prints.
These were cheaper to produce and circulate than painted images. A few decades later, these were made even more readily available with the popularization of lithography.
In the early 20th century, various Swaminarayan denominations began publishing magazines, periodicals, newsletters. In BAPS [a denomination of the Swaminarayan tradition that was established in 1907], this facilitated engaging with the guru of the community.
The shift from wood block prints to lithography to typeset print to the digital realm expands devotional engagement.
Reports of the guru’s travel would be circulated in these newsletters. They certainly printed books available at temple bookstores. But newsletters and magazines could be mailed to anyone with a subscription. This connects people to the guru, even if they don’t have proximate access to the guru.
Several decades later, when BAPS launched their website, it became one of the core ways that people engage with the guru.
The website started off more periodic, but now there is almost a daily update on where the guru is, what the guru is doing.
These are images of the guru through which people can have a daily darśan (“religious viewing”). And now you don’t need to have a subscription to that magazine. You don’t have to wait for that magazine to arrive at your doorstep.
You just open up your phone with your cellphone data. Digital access in India is increasingly even more readily available than it is in the United States and Canada; data is far cheaper in India.
This story shows how the shift from wood block prints to lithography to typeset print to the digital realm expands devotional engagement. What I would like to do, moving forward, is to track how this also shifts patterns of engagement among devotees.
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