History Hour | Francis X Clooney | Western Scholars and the India We’ve Imagined
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HISTORY HOUR
Western Scholars
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Western Scholars
and the India We’ve Imagined
Westerners have been trying to understand the religions of India for a very long time, from the time of Alexander the Great to medieval travellers, from Christian missionary scholars to Orientalist scholars in the age of empire, from modern Indologists to spiritual seekers of every kind. This lecture, focused on constructions of Hindu traditions, proposes that the results of these Western efforts have been mixed bad and good: on the one hand, inevitably too detached from indigenous ways of self-understanding and too prone to impose Western understandings of history, religion, and human realities on Indian ways of living and thinking and practicing; on the other, successful in discovering, translating and interpreting Indian realities for the wider world, often with deep appreciation for Indian wisdom. Today Western scholarship is fortunately challenged by articulate self-understandings proposed by members of Indian religions themselves. It continues to have value, insofar as it is willing to see itself as in dialogue with traditional and contemporary modes of Indian self-interpretation. This lecture, which must be brief, will present an overview and then focus on several pluses and minuses of the Christian missionary tradition of scholarship.
Francis X Clooney
Francis X Clooney joined the Harvard Divinity School faculty in 2005, where he is the Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology. He earned his doctorate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 1984 and taught for 21 years at Boston College before coming to Harvard. From 2010 to 2017, he directed Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions.
Clooney’s scholarship focuses on theological writings in the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions of Hindu India and on the emerging discipline of comparative theology, which explores theological learning across religious boundaries. He has also written on Jesuit missionary traditions, early Jesuit reflections on reincarnation, and the practice of interreligious dialogue today. Among his major works are Thinking Ritually (1990), Theology after Vedanta (1993), Comparative Theology: Deep Learning across Religious Borders (2010), and His Hiding Place Is Darkness (2013). His recent publications include Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics (2019), Western Jesuit Scholars in India (2020), and St. Joseph in South India (2022). His memoir, Hindu and Catholic, Priest and Scholar: A Love Story, appeared in 2024. A festschrift honouring him was published in 2023. He served as President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (2022–23) and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Scranton and Le Moyne College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (2010) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025).
Anu K Antony
Anu Kottemkerry Antony is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Goa. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist working on the themes of religion, labour, subjectivity, gender, transnational migration, post-work and post-secular discourses. She was awarded the 2023-24 Raghunathan Family Fellowship by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University and continues as an associate of Harvard South Asia Institute. In 2022, she defended her PhD thesis titled ‘Constituting a Religious Subject: Calling, Prayer and Spiritual Labour among the Syrian Catholic Nuns of Kerala’ from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. She has published in international peer reviewed journals such as HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and Critical Research on Religion and is currently working on her monograph.
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