RELS 3101

Through a close reading of narrative and other forms of story literature, this course explores the twin themes, fundamental to all South Asian religions, of renouncing and embracing the world. Reading materials will draw from Hindu, Indian Buddhist, Jain and Sikh narrative literature from antiquity through to the modern period, first staking out examples from the polar extremes of world-denying asceticism vs. this-worldly domesticity. Subsequently, and for the bulk of the course, we explore multiple examples of the complex, nuanced, and conciliatory postures falling in between these two extremes, as expressed in South Asian mythologies, biography, hagiography, poetry, and fiction.