The body-mind challenge: Indian religious thought and problems of translation

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences</strong> <strong>CSSS Colloquium</strong> <strong>Dr. Sukanya Sarbadhikary</strong> (Presidency University, Kolkata) a paper on <strong>The body-mind challenge: Indian religious thought and problems of translation</strong> Date :<strong> March 10, 2016 (Thursday)</strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>Recent studies of South Asian religious traditions have critiqued western philosophical understandings of mind-body dualism and furthered the productive notion of mind-body continuum. Based on intensive fieldwork among two kinds of devotional groups of Bengal, claimants of an orthodox Vaishnavism, who focus on participating in the erotic sports of the Hindu deity-consort Radha-Krishna in/through imagination, and a quasi-tantric group, which claims to physically apprehend Radha-Krishna's erotic pleasures through direct sexual experience, I demonstrate how although they exemplify opposed religious practices, both groups embody rarefied phenomenological states of cognition and embodiment, such that they fall on a mind-body continuum. I argue that the mind-body complex has intensely nuanced articulations in both experiential and discursive domains of non-western religious contexts, and indeed, that terms like 'mind' , body' and 'senses' need thorough recasting before they can stand for the hyper-differentiated discourses and states of these religious experiences. I do not however propose the redundancy of translatory possibilities, but suggest an acute sensitivity to 'translatability', the phenomenological conditions which facilitate differentiated articulations, their possibilities and impossibilities. <strong>Bio:</strong> Sukanya Sarbadhikary is assistant professor of Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. She is the author of The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-Vaishnavism (University of California Press, series: South Asia Across the Disciplines, 2015). She is interested in the anthropology of religion, religious studies, the anthropology of the body, emotion and senses, and Indian performative traditions.