Religious Studies Director Presents Inaugural Lecture

Ravi Gupta, director of the Religious Studies program in the Department of History, has long thought about a dispute in academia circles: “Who owns religion?”

Gupta shared the question recently as a speaker for Utah State University’s Inaugural Lecture Professor Series. The reoccurring lectures, hosted at the USU president’s home, celebrate and acknowledge a faculty member’s advancement to full professor.

Gupta is an Oxford University-trained scholar of world religions, renowned for his translation into English of an ancient, central text of Hinduism. In History, he holds the endowed Charles Redd Chair of Religious Studies. Amid that, he told an audience of friends, family and colleagues, he’s found that “professors of religion inevitably find themselves pushed to play roles beyond what they signed up for—to interpret and evaluate the traditions they teach.”

And that leads to a sensitive subject: Is a religious tradition best translated by a “neutral” academic or an actual practitioner of the religion.

It’s “an uncomfortable reality,” Gupta said, that collaboration between scholars and practitioners “is not something that arises automatically.” Indeed, he said, “the relationship between them has often been fraught with tension and mistrust, and this mistrust has a history that spans decades.”

The solution, he has concluded, may be found in the simple virtue of humility. He describes the trait as “methodological humility” — methodological because it’s less about spiritual tradition and more about “a willingness to learn from the other.”

For those practitioners who are willing to consider an academic exploration of their religion, said Gupta, “humility means that we are willing to take the time to understand the principles underlying academic work …  and that we are willing to listen and engage even when the topic becomes uncomfortable.”

On the other hand, he said, academics struggling to find an objective viewpoint must be “willing to give the benefit of doubt to the tradition (and … ) be willing to see our work through the eyes of tradition.” Scholars, he added, should “hold ourselves accountable, not just to our peers, but to the communities that we study.”

Dialogue can only flourish when both sides approach the conversation with humility, he said. “Each side brings different strengths that support the other’s weaknesses.”

In addition to his recent promotion to full professor, Gupta has been recognized by the College of Humanities and Social Sciences as its 2017 Teacher of the Year. A member of the CHaSS faculty since 2013, Gupta teaches courses on World Religions, Hinduism, Religion in Performance and Sanskrit.

Gupta received his doctorate at the University of Oxford, where he remains a Permanent Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He is the author or editor of four academic books, including a translation from Sanskrit of the Bhagavata Purana, a devotional text of Hinduism. He translated the text in collaboration with Oxford scholar Kenneth R. Valpey, and it was published in  November by Columbia University Press. Gupta has written widely and lectured worldwide on Vaishnava philosophy.

The professor is a native of Boise, where he spent many years in his parents’ Indian restaurant, bussing tables, running the cash register and “introducing customers to basmati rice and cabbage pakoras,” he says. He now lives in Logan with his wife Amrita and their two children. His passion is visiting national parks across the United States, and he goes to great lengths to get another stamp on his NPS Passport.

Related sites: http://religiousstudies.usu.edu/

Writer and  contact: Janelle Hyatt, 435-797-0289, Janelle.hyatt@usu.edu