Apratim Barua
Biographic Data
| ID | 707483 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Apratim Barua |
| GIVEN NAMES | Apratim |
| FAMILY NAME | Barua |
| SIGNATURE | BARUA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1202-0095 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
From Finitude towards Plenitude: Envisioning Reincarnation as a Crucible of Liberation
In the Vedāntic Hindu systems of thinkers such as Śaṃkara (c.800 ce) and Rāmānuja (1077–1157), reincarnation is associated with the soteriological quest for the termination of ignorance (avidyā) and suffering (duḥkha) and the attainment of a transcendental condition of perfection (mokṣa). The world is viewed as a moral stage across which human beings become rooted in the divine reality (brahman) through spirals of reincarnation. A certain diagnos…
The Nullity of Nescience: G. R. Malkani’s Contemporary Formulation of Advaita
This article is a conceptual exploration of a central argument developed by Ghanshamdas Rattanmal Malkani (1892–1977) to indicate that ignorance ( ajñāna ) does not have any nature and it should not be invested with any measure or degree of substantiality. In his writings in English, we find a contemporary way of working through some of the key problems that appear on premodern Advaita exegetical landscapes. One aspect of the distinctiveness of M…
Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination . By Tony Stewart
The Ultimacy of the Penultimate: The Advaita Allegories of Niscaldas (1791–1863)
The Sanskrit commentarial streams of Advaita Vedanta encompass a range of discursive styles such as systematized expositions of advaita, dialectical critiques of competing viewpoints, pedagogic outlines of spiritual disciplines, and so on. On this spectrum, the Yukti-prakas (‘The Light of Reasoning’) of Niscaldas (1791–1863) constitutes a distinctive style of presenting the viewpoints of Advaita through parabolic discourses which elaborate symbol…
The alchemy of suffering in the laboratory of the world: Vedāntic Hindu engagements with the affliction of animals
Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of…
Living in the World by Dying to the Self: Swami Vivekananda’s Modernist Reconfigurations of a Premodern Vedāntic Dialectic
This article is an exploration of the dialectic of this-worldly activism and the practice of self-effacement in Swami Vivekananda’s discourses. He often exhorts his audiences to cultivate the vigorous strength to live courageously in the world on the basis of their spiritual conviction that they are rooted in the true self ( ātman ) beyond all spatiotemporal limitations. The boundless ātman , to be realized by effacing the egocentric self, would …
The Mystery of God and the Claim of Reason: Comparative Patterns in Hindu-Christian Theodicy
In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by a…
The Agonistic Poetics of Dāsya-bhāva: The Soteriological Confrontation Between Deity and Devotee
The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, em…
The Hindu Cosmopolitanism of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble): An Irish Self in Imperial Currents
Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), a prominent disciple of the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, creatively reconfigured some traditional Vedantic vocabularies to present the “cosmo-national” individual as one who is not antithetical to but is deeply immersed in the densities of national locations. As we situate Nivedita’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” in post-Saidian academic cultures, one of the most striking features of her reiteration of …
The Feminization of Love and the Indwelling of God: Theological Investigations Across Indic Contexts
Our essay is a thematic exploration of the malleability of idioms, imageries, and affectivities of Hindu bhakti across the borderlines of certain Indic worldviews. We highlight the theological motif of the feminine-feminised quest of the seeker (virahiṇī) for her divine beloved in some Hindu expressions shaped by the paradigmatic scriptural text Bhāgavata-purāṇa and in some Punjabi Sufi articulations of the transcendent God's innermost presence t…
The science of the self ( ātmavidyā ): The reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities
ABTRACTA distinctive claim of some of the configurations of ‘modern Hinduism’ is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides us with a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada, and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as …
Revisiting the Gandhi–Ambedkar Debates over ‘Caste’: The Multiple Resonances of Varņa
While Gandhi and Ambedkar hold similar standpoints on the relation between religious orderings of the world and shapes of social existence, they sharply diverge, on certain occasions, regarding the question of what the crucial terms ‘caste’ and varņa refer to, so that they often seem to be talking past each other. Gandhi sought to cut through various traditional forms of Hindu socio-religious practices and develop a Hinduism which is grounded in …
Encountering Violence in Hindu Universes: Situating the Other on Vedic Horizons
A study of Hindu engagements with violence which have been structured by scriptural themes reveals that violence has been regulated, enacted, resisted, negated or denied in complex ways.Disputes based on Vedic orthodoxy were channelled, in classical India, through the mythical frameworks of gods clashing with demons, and later in the medieval centuries this template was extended to the Muslim foreigners who threatened the Brahmanical socio-religi…
The Reality and the Verifiability of Reincarnation
We investigate the topic of reincarnation by revisiting a recent debate from the pages of the journal Philosophy East and West between Whitley Kaufman, who presents five moral objections to karma and reincarnation as an explanation for human suffering, and Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis, who seek to respond to Kaufman's critiques. Our discussion of four of the problems analysed in their exchange will suggest that while the rejoinders of Chadha a…
The Silences of Ramana Maharshi: Self-enquiry and Liberation in Samkhya Yoga and Advaita Vedanta
Both Samkhya-Yoga and Advaita Vedanta grapple with a conceptual tension which informs their understandings of spiritual practice--that while embodied selves seek liberation from the structures of worldly suffering, they are essentially the immutable reality which is never subject to any empirical ills. Though the metaphysical visions of these systems sharply diverge, Advaitins such as Samkara were able to appropriate from Samkhya-Yoga certain pra…
Christian Visions of Vedānta: The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux
Various Roman Catholic figures during the last hundred years have engaged with vedāntic themes relating to self-enquiry. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual exercises, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), elaborated and practiced these themes through which they sought to articulate visions of the divine presence within humanity. This essay discusses one central aspect of their “experiments with truth,” namely, their e…
Returning Home to the Advaitic Self: Svāmī Rāma Tīrtha and His American Audiences
A recurring theme in the Advaita Vedānta traditions is the necessity of empirical purification through means such as the cultivation of virtues, the study of the Vedas, and so on, even though the transcendental self has never been subject to any form of bondage. The traditions seek to mitigate this paradox by employing the vocabulary of a shift across the 'levels' of truth-while the worldly self is, empirically speaking, moving towards the goal o…
Ideas of Liberation in Medieval Advaita Vedānta
Classical Indian soteriological systems such as the various forms of Vedānta, Yoga, Buddhism, and so on are characterised by dense interrelations between specific metaphysical accounts of the nature of reality, diagnoses of the human condition, and elaborations of praxes which will lead individuals towards human fulfilment. For these systems, the repeated cycles of life and death (saṁsāra) are a convenient summary of human ills, and they propose …
The God of the oppressed and the politics of resistance: Black and Dalit theologies of liberation
Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of su…
Interreligious Dialogue, Comparative Theology and the Alterity of Hindu Thought
A key question at the heart of contemporary debates over interreligious dialogue is whether the Christian partner in such conversations should view her interlocutors through the lens of Christian descriptions or whether any such imaging amounts to a form of Christian imperialism. We look at the responses to this question from certain contemporary forms of ‘particularism’ which regard religious universes as densely knit, and sometimes incommensura…
Jon Paul Sydnor, Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology
Jon Paul Sydnor, Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011. 226 pp. $45. ISBN 978-1608993086 (paperback)
Ideas of Tolerance: Religious Exclusivism and Violence in Hindu–Christian Encounters
This article explores, through some historical vignettes, the question of whether there are necessary connections between the Christian worldview and religious aggression, whether in the form of brutal extermination of the religious others or more subtly of interpretive violence on their cultural traditions. The Hindu ‘pluralistic’ attitude towards the religions is often put forward as a paradigm of an open-minded acceptance of their diversity. H…
Metaphors of Temporality: Revisiting the “Timeless Hinduism” versus “Historical Christianity” Antithesis
One of the most frequently-made statements about Christianity concerns its “historical” character—its grounding in a set of episodes in the life of the Israelite people that culminated in the climactic Christ-event, an event that brought into sharper focus than before a redemptive process that has been going on since the beginning of times and will last till the end of times. The assertion of this central aspect of Christian self-understanding ha…
The Dialectic of Divine ‘Grace’ and ‘Justice’ in St Augustine and Sri-Vaisnavism
This article is an investigation into whether it is possible to trace certain parallels between the conception of the divine reality as ‘gracious’ from within the contextualized vocabularies of both Christian thought and some forms of South Indian Vaisnavite devotional belief and practice. We explore the nature of a certain dialectic that appears in the thought of St Augustine, namely, between God’s prevenient grace and God’s justice: on the one …
God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism
Revisiting the Gandhi–Ambedkar Debates over ‘Caste’: The Multiple Resonances of Varņa
While Gandhi and Ambedkar hold similar standpoints on the relation between religious orderings of the world and shapes of social existence, they sharply diverge, on certain occasions, regarding the question of what the crucial terms ‘caste’ and varņa refer to, so that they often seem to be talking past each other. Gandhi sought to cut through various traditional forms of Hindu socio-religious practices and develop a Hinduism which is grounded in …
The Mystery of God and the Claim of Reason: Comparative Patterns in Hindu-Christian Theodicy
In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by a…
The God of the oppressed and the politics of resistance: Black and Dalit theologies of liberation
Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of su…
Interreligious Dialogue, Comparative Theology and the Alterity of Hindu Thought
A key question at the heart of contemporary debates over interreligious dialogue is whether the Christian partner in such conversations should view her interlocutors through the lens of Christian descriptions or whether any such imaging amounts to a form of Christian imperialism. We look at the responses to this question from certain contemporary forms of ‘particularism’ which regard religious universes as densely knit, and sometimes incommensura…
God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism
God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism
Metaphors of Temporality: Revisiting the “Timeless Hinduism” versus “Historical Christianity” Antithesis
One of the most frequently-made statements about Christianity concerns its “historical” character—its grounding in a set of episodes in the life of the Israelite people that culminated in the climactic Christ-event, an event that brought into sharper focus than before a redemptive process that has been going on since the beginning of times and will last till the end of times. The assertion of this central aspect of Christian self-understanding ha…
The Dialectic of Divine ‘Grace’ and ‘Justice’ in St Augustine and Sri-Vaisnavism
This article is an investigation into whether it is possible to trace certain parallels between the conception of the divine reality as ‘gracious’ from within the contextualized vocabularies of both Christian thought and some forms of South Indian Vaisnavite devotional belief and practice. We explore the nature of a certain dialectic that appears in the thought of St Augustine, namely, between God’s prevenient grace and God’s justice: on the one …
Jon Paul Sydnor, Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology
Jon Paul Sydnor, Ramanuja and Schleiermacher: Toward a Constructive Comparative Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011. 226 pp. $45. ISBN 978-1608993086 (paperback)
Ideas of Tolerance: Religious Exclusivism and Violence in Hindu–Christian Encounters
This article explores, through some historical vignettes, the question of whether there are necessary connections between the Christian worldview and religious aggression, whether in the form of brutal extermination of the religious others or more subtly of interpretive violence on their cultural traditions. The Hindu ‘pluralistic’ attitude towards the religions is often put forward as a paradigm of an open-minded acceptance of their diversity. H…
The God of the oppressed and the politics of resistance: Black and Dalit theologies of liberation
Theologians from the Black communities in the USA, South Africa and other places, and Dalit groups in India have struggled with a dialectic between the retrieval of subjectivity within political spaces inflected by ‘race’ and ‘caste’ and the opposition to these essentialist categorisations. On the one hand, their politics of resistance has been predicated on their specific Black or Dalit identities, while, on the other hand, the postulation of su…
Interreligious Dialogue, Comparative Theology and the Alterity of Hindu Thought
A key question at the heart of contemporary debates over interreligious dialogue is whether the Christian partner in such conversations should view her interlocutors through the lens of Christian descriptions or whether any such imaging amounts to a form of Christian imperialism. We look at the responses to this question from certain contemporary forms of ‘particularism’ which regard religious universes as densely knit, and sometimes incommensura…
Ideas of Liberation in Medieval Advaita Vedānta
Classical Indian soteriological systems such as the various forms of Vedānta, Yoga, Buddhism, and so on are characterised by dense interrelations between specific metaphysical accounts of the nature of reality, diagnoses of the human condition, and elaborations of praxes which will lead individuals towards human fulfilment. For these systems, the repeated cycles of life and death (saṁsāra) are a convenient summary of human ills, and they propose …
The Silences of Ramana Maharshi: Self-enquiry and Liberation in Samkhya Yoga and Advaita Vedanta
Both Samkhya-Yoga and Advaita Vedanta grapple with a conceptual tension which informs their understandings of spiritual practice--that while embodied selves seek liberation from the structures of worldly suffering, they are essentially the immutable reality which is never subject to any empirical ills. Though the metaphysical visions of these systems sharply diverge, Advaitins such as Samkara were able to appropriate from Samkhya-Yoga certain pra…
Christian Visions of Vedānta: The Spiritual Exercises of Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux
Various Roman Catholic figures during the last hundred years have engaged with vedāntic themes relating to self-enquiry. Two Benedictine pioneers of these spiritual exercises, Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux (Swami Abhishiktananda), elaborated and practiced these themes through which they sought to articulate visions of the divine presence within humanity. This essay discusses one central aspect of their “experiments with truth,” namely, their e…
Returning Home to the Advaitic Self: Svāmī Rāma Tīrtha and His American Audiences
A recurring theme in the Advaita Vedānta traditions is the necessity of empirical purification through means such as the cultivation of virtues, the study of the Vedas, and so on, even though the transcendental self has never been subject to any form of bondage. The traditions seek to mitigate this paradox by employing the vocabulary of a shift across the 'levels' of truth-while the worldly self is, empirically speaking, moving towards the goal o…
Encountering Violence in Hindu Universes: Situating the Other on Vedic Horizons
A study of Hindu engagements with violence which have been structured by scriptural themes reveals that violence has been regulated, enacted, resisted, negated or denied in complex ways.Disputes based on Vedic orthodoxy were channelled, in classical India, through the mythical frameworks of gods clashing with demons, and later in the medieval centuries this template was extended to the Muslim foreigners who threatened the Brahmanical socio-religi…
The Reality and the Verifiability of Reincarnation
We investigate the topic of reincarnation by revisiting a recent debate from the pages of the journal Philosophy East and West between Whitley Kaufman, who presents five moral objections to karma and reincarnation as an explanation for human suffering, and Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis, who seek to respond to Kaufman's critiques. Our discussion of four of the problems analysed in their exchange will suggest that while the rejoinders of Chadha a…
The science of the self ( ātmavidyā ): The reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities
ABTRACTA distinctive claim of some of the configurations of ‘modern Hinduism’ is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides us with a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada, and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as …
Revisiting the Gandhi–Ambedkar Debates over ‘Caste’: The Multiple Resonances of Varņa
While Gandhi and Ambedkar hold similar standpoints on the relation between religious orderings of the world and shapes of social existence, they sharply diverge, on certain occasions, regarding the question of what the crucial terms ‘caste’ and varņa refer to, so that they often seem to be talking past each other. Gandhi sought to cut through various traditional forms of Hindu socio-religious practices and develop a Hinduism which is grounded in …
The Agonistic Poetics of Dāsya-bhāva: The Soteriological Confrontation Between Deity and Devotee
The devotional literatures across the Hindu bhakti traditions of medieval India are shaped by distinctive styles of affective responses to the divine reality. A theme which recurs in several layers of their songs is a theological dialectic between divine majesty and divine accessibility; the divine is not only simply transcendent in the sense of being a distant deity but is also immanently present in and through a range of human sensitivities, em…
The Hindu Cosmopolitanism of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble): An Irish Self in Imperial Currents
Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble), a prominent disciple of the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda, creatively reconfigured some traditional Vedantic vocabularies to present the “cosmo-national” individual as one who is not antithetical to but is deeply immersed in the densities of national locations. As we situate Nivedita’s “vernacular cosmopolitanism” in post-Saidian academic cultures, one of the most striking features of her reiteration of …
The Feminization of Love and the Indwelling of God: Theological Investigations Across Indic Contexts
Our essay is a thematic exploration of the malleability of idioms, imageries, and affectivities of Hindu bhakti across the borderlines of certain Indic worldviews. We highlight the theological motif of the feminine-feminised quest of the seeker (virahiṇī) for her divine beloved in some Hindu expressions shaped by the paradigmatic scriptural text Bhāgavata-purāṇa and in some Punjabi Sufi articulations of the transcendent God's innermost presence t…
The Mystery of God and the Claim of Reason: Comparative Patterns in Hindu-Christian Theodicy
In a comparative study of karma theodicy and atonement theodicy, as developed by some Hindu and Christian theologians, this article argues that they present teleological visions where individuals become purged, purified, and perfected in and through their worldly suffering. A karma theodicy operates with the notion that there is some form of proportionality between past evil and present suffering, even if such correlations can only be traced by a…
Living in the World by Dying to the Self: Swami Vivekananda’s Modernist Reconfigurations of a Premodern Vedāntic Dialectic
This article is an exploration of the dialectic of this-worldly activism and the practice of self-effacement in Swami Vivekananda’s discourses. He often exhorts his audiences to cultivate the vigorous strength to live courageously in the world on the basis of their spiritual conviction that they are rooted in the true self ( ātman ) beyond all spatiotemporal limitations. The boundless ātman , to be realized by effacing the egocentric self, would …
The alchemy of suffering in the laboratory of the world: Vedāntic Hindu engagements with the affliction of animals
Traditionally, the problem of evil, in its various formulations, has been one of the strongest objections against perfect being theism. In the voluminous literature on this problem, the motif of evil has usually been discussed with respect to human flourishing. In recent decades more focused attention has been paid to animal suffering and the philosophical problems that such suffering poses for perfect being theists. However, this growing body of…
The Ultimacy of the Penultimate: The Advaita Allegories of Niscaldas (1791–1863)
The Sanskrit commentarial streams of Advaita Vedanta encompass a range of discursive styles such as systematized expositions of advaita, dialectical critiques of competing viewpoints, pedagogic outlines of spiritual disciplines, and so on. On this spectrum, the Yukti-prakas (‘The Light of Reasoning’) of Niscaldas (1791–1863) constitutes a distinctive style of presenting the viewpoints of Advaita through parabolic discourses which elaborate symbol…
From Finitude towards Plenitude: Envisioning Reincarnation as a Crucible of Liberation
In the Vedāntic Hindu systems of thinkers such as Śaṃkara (c.800 ce) and Rāmānuja (1077–1157), reincarnation is associated with the soteriological quest for the termination of ignorance (avidyā) and suffering (duḥkha) and the attainment of a transcendental condition of perfection (mokṣa). The world is viewed as a moral stage across which human beings become rooted in the divine reality (brahman) through spirals of reincarnation. A certain diagnos…
The Nullity of Nescience: G. R. Malkani’s Contemporary Formulation of Advaita
This article is a conceptual exploration of a central argument developed by Ghanshamdas Rattanmal Malkani (1892–1977) to indicate that ignorance ( ajñāna ) does not have any nature and it should not be invested with any measure or degree of substantiality. In his writings in English, we find a contemporary way of working through some of the key problems that appear on premodern Advaita exegetical landscapes. One aspect of the distinctiveness of M…
Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination . By Tony Stewart
Philosophy (24 works) · Theology (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Religious studies (15 works) · Indian and Buddhist Studies (14 works) · Hinduism (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Religious Studies (8 works)