Detail from the cover of The Harvest of Time (Barua, 2023)
Dr Ankur Barua (pictured, right) is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the University of Cambridge. Immersed in inter-religious relations all his life, he found new inspiration under the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic:
The extra alone time prompted him to record and share versions of devotional chants he had been taught as a young child. The results are available on his YouTube channel (via YouTube.com), together with commentary on each song-text’s religious reverbations.
This labour became a shared endeavour, as Ankur invited Divinity students to join his music-making. Last May, CIP was delighted to co-sponsor a Mehfil—a small and festive gathering with poetry or classical music performed for a small audience—drawing on this creative collaboration: Meccan messages, Indic idioms.
A novel undertaking
Refreshed by a research sabbatical, Ankur was also nurturing a second creative project: his first novel. Released in October 2023 by Austin Macauley Publishers, The Harvest of Time follows a young Cambridge Divinity student attempting to retrace his great uncle’s steps on a trip to India. The full tale features Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Hindu encounters, drawn together by an inherited vow.
Professor Douglas Hedley explains:
“Our colleague Ankur is a philosopher, a scholar of Hinduism and comparative religion, and an erudite man of letters. All three aspects of his oeuvre coalesce beautifully in his debut novel, The Harvest of Time. The protagonist is an idealistic student at the renowned Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge who journeys to the Indian subcontinent in search of meaning. It is a captivating novel of love and violence, contemplation and action, while also a narrative about the complexity of Hinduism in the modern age, and the author presents—didactically, but subtly—a series of instructive and haunting vignettes of life in London, Cambridge, Delhi and Kathmandu.
“In the midst of lustrous images of Trinity College Cambridge and Connaught Circle in Delhi, and sparkling evocations of Ram Mohun Roy and Tagore, Marxists, Moghuls, Missionaries, and jaded officers of the Raj, Ankur furnishes a fine tale of adventure, and an illuminating story about that arresting polyphony of voices and perspectives that is the contemporary Indian cultural landscape.”
Foundational research
These creative efforts stand outside the traditional remit of a Cambridge academic. Yet Ankur has not been neglecting his research: in 2022, his study The Hindu Self and Its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes (Lexington Books) followed hot upon the heels of a study of nineteenth-century inter-religious relations, The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Hindu Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Brill, 2021).
And over the summer, Ankur led dozens of participants through a ten-part exploration of Hinduism, introduced in a manner intelligible to Muslim audiences—and with a changing array of Muslim respondents. The series was co-developed with Dr Said Ismail and the India-based NGO, Project Noon. An accessible companion volume is planned.
Noting this diverse and multifaceted set of outputs, one can only wonder: What next from this innovative exponent of inter-religious studies? (Spoiler: very possibly a collaborative introduction to Islam for Hindu audiences.)
