Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Indian Religions
Episode: Michael J. Altman, “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Description: Scholars regularly assert that at Chicago’s World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893 Swami Vivekananda initiated Hinduism in America. Many histories of Hinduism in America reproduce this type of synthesizing narrative. But how was Hinduism defined by Vivekananda and how was it understood by his American audience? How did it relate to the various South Asian religious practices and beliefs that are subsumed under this term Hinduism?
In Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford University Press, 2017), Michael J. Altman, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, tackles literary and...