IRR seminar: In Vino Veritas

Dr Ankur Barua - Faculty of Divinity, active member of CIP and of the research forum - discusses the poetry of Seyyed Hossein Nasr who articulates a shimmering vision of the world as rooted in and encircled by  a transcendental centre. The human person is portrayed as a pilgrim self whose progressively refined heart would discern the scintillating signs of the eternal one within finite entities.

He will offer some reflections – from a Vedāntic Hindu perspective shaped by the idioms and subjectivities of devotional love (bhakti) – on two of Nasr’s poems from the collection Poems of the Way. Across these religious borderlines, we notice a theological dialectic between the idiom of ecstatic love (‘išq, bhakti) and the idiom of humble submission (‘ubūdiyya, dāśya). This dialectic is the conceptual thread of a devotional cosmos where for the speakers of a “language of unsaying”, the world becomes the matrix of the sayable.

About the speaker

After a B.Sc. in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi, Ankur read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedāntic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality. He researches the conceptual constellations and the social structures of the Hindu traditions, both in premodern contexts in South Asia and in colonial milieus where multiple ideas of Hindu identity were configured along transnational circuits between India, Britain, Europe, and USA.

Some of these narratives are re-imagined in his work of historical fiction, The Harvest of Time—a publication CIP celebrated in 2023. On Ankur’s personal YouTube channel, he introduces Hindu visions without employing any technical jargon. 

An integral dimension of Ankur’s research is the comparative philosophy of religion. He studies the theological and the socio-political aspects of Hindu–Christian engagements. In recent years, his research focus has moved to an exploration of the intersections between the idioms of bhakti, yoga, tawḥīd, and taṣawwuf on the multiply-stratified postcolonial landscapes of South Asia.

The Inter-Religious Relations seminar home page provides information about previous speakers and sessions, as well as the general remit for events in the series.