Welcome to Eternal Path Musings, a weekly newsletter for the modern and curious Hindu, featuring highlights around: religious texts, practice, history, politics, people, and ways to better our engagement and personal progress.
We’ll be experimenting a bit with the style and format over the coming weeks. This week we highlight: a new Video History resource, the topic of sense-making, and an aesthetic!
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Video Highlight: Odd Compass
Odd Compass is a new history channel devoted to Indian and Hindu history topics, and they recently published a fantastic and informative video on the Goa Inquisition, a violent period of Portuguese Catholic conquerors conducting untold horrors on Goan Hindus. Follow them on YouTube and check them out on Instagram!
Philosophy Highlight: Sense-Making
Indu Viswanathan has a great tweet linked here, imploring Hindus to make sure that Hindu traditions aren’t explained and made sense of through Western modes of thought. Sense making is described as “the ongoing retrospective development of plausible images that rationalize what people are doing.”
One tangible example of colonized sense-making is Hindus operating under the implicit assumption that “polytheism = bad” when describing Hinduism both internally and externally. We covered in Week 34 why this is problematic. Another more recent example is the debate between True Indology and IPS officer D. Roopa on twitter, where the latter defended a government ban on firecrackers for Deepavali by claiming it was never a part of Hinduism, and furthermore compared firecrackers to the uncommon tradition of Sati. Making sense of a Hindu tradition through demands of strict textual references, along the lines of D. Roopa, is also a flawed and colonized way (check out our Week 32 issue) of treating Hinduism, a religion often more focused on praxis than in actual philosophical belief.
Aesthetic: Batu Caves, Malaysia
