News

In 2009–10 we expanded our online course offering to four courses per term to a total of 146 students compared to 78 the previous year. These courses are ‘Understanding Hindu Identity’, ‘Vedas and Upanishads’, ‘Mahabharata and Ramayana’, and ‘Bhagavad-gita’. It is expected that at least two new courses are to be added in 2010–11: ‘Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, and the Goddess: Readings from the Puranas’, and ‘A History of Yoga’.

In December 2008 a gathering of CED alumni in Leicester became the inaugural meeting of the Friends of the OCHS-Leicester (FOCHS-L). Since then, monthly fund- and awareness-raising activities have been held and 30 kind Leicester Friends have signed up for monthly standing orders.

As the FOCHS-L developed from our CED courses, it’s not surprising that the events have been largely educational with lectures on Hinduism in its modern contexts. Extra special thanks are due to Raj and Ramila Chauhan of Aartus and their team for making this all happen.

OCHS Friends Harish and Gita Patel, Raam Chauhan, and Aarti Hansrani, all took to the hills. Harish and Gita to the Andes; Aarti and Raam to Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike, and Snowdon. All in support of the OCHS.

The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies (OCHS) celebrated thirteen years of growth from humble beginnings in a suburban house to one of the world’s leading Hindu Studies centres building bridges between academia, tradition, business, and government.

On 1 February 2010, HE Nalin Surie, India's High Commissioner to the UK delivered the Ford Lecture. Below is the transcript.

The findings of the 2007 OCHS Shivdasani Conference, Archaeology and Text, have been published by Oxford University Press. The collection is edited by OCHS Shivdasani fellow, Himanshu Prabha Ray (JNU).

Hindu leaders have launched an action plan for long-term environmental change following a meeting with His Royal Highness The Prince Philip and His Excellency Ban-ki Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations. The Bhumi Project (Sanskrit for ‘Mother Earth’) was launched as part of this week’s Many Heavens, One Earth summit at Windsor Castle, attended by over 200 faith leaders from nine major world religions.

Sanskrit was recently approved by the Board of the Faculty of Theology to be taught at the level of the preliminary exam (first year).

This means that Sanskrit will be taught in Theology alongside New Testament Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Pali.

Dear Friends,

We have the mists and mellow fruitfulness of autumn, the beautiful canopies of changing colour, and the crisp crunch of leaves underfoot, but the temperature is worthy of remark. An Indian summer they call it,

The conference ‘Thinking Inside the Box: the idea of a category in Indian philosophy’ was held at Somerville College, on the weekend of 10–11 October.

An international group of highly regarded speakers addressed the issue of categorisation in a number of different Indian philosophical traditions.

During the course of the conference a number of themes and issues began to emerge. One was the general problem of categorisation.