#  Swayam Bagaria, Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies 

 



   ![Swayam Bagaria](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/hds2/files/bagaria-cir-detail-page-650.jpg?itok=M8wYi_ct) 

 

*Photo by Danielle Daphne Ang* “I think that academic research becomes most exciting when you work across disciplines, and especially when you work across disciplines that are as far from each other as possible,” says Swayam Bagaria, Assistant Professor of Hindu Studies. This approach was one that Bagaria developed as a PhD student at Johns Hopkins University under the tutelage of his advisor, renowned professor of anthropology Veena Das.

Bagaria, who majored in math during his undergraduate education at Grinnell College, discovered Das’s work by happenstance. In preparation for a course taught by a visiting South Asian historian, Bagaria searched the library for information about South Asian anthropology and found Das’s books. He was fascinated by the broad scope of her expertise.

“I had never encountered anybody with that kind of spread,” he recalls, “She worked across anthropology, Indology (the study of Classical Sanskrit texts), philosophy of language, public health, and law.” Making a drastic change from his math major, Bagaria applied to a PhD program in anthropology at Johns Hopkins in order to study with Das.

Bagaria found his PhD experience to be extremely intellectually stimulating, in large part because the smaller size of the university contributed to frequent exchanges with other departments such as public health, philosophy, and political theory. He also benefited from working with Das, whose breadth of research ranges from public health to philosophical and literary traditions in India to collective violence and urban transformations. In this rich environment, Bagaria learned from his advisor that an “atypical combination of disciplines and methods brings out a lot more in a topic than neighboring disciplines” as well as the importance of working “with people who have a very different way of engaging the world than you do.”

As a professor at HDS, Bagaria imbues his classes with this outlook, bringing a wide breadth of disciplines to bear on the subject matter. His course “Interreligious Dynamics of South Asia” is organized around ten factors that contribute to religious conflict, ranging from electoral cycles to labor markets to hate speech. Bagaria notes that this course offers an example of his inclination to "look at a subject with different frameworks and then juxtapose those frameworks to see how a question can be made richer, rather than easily answerable." Similarly, Bagaria’s signature course "Mind, Spirituality, and Mental Health in Hinduism” provides a variety of frameworks from which to approach assisting people who have psychological distress in India, from public health to medical anthropology to cross-cultural psychology to philosophy of mind.

Bagaria is a deep believer that the world needs people who understand the dynamics of religious traditions working in fields related to religion, but also in fields that are not adjacent to religion. As such, his aim is to teach ways of thinking that students can bring to a myriad of different professions. He designs his courses such that the information can “be received by students who might go into the academic and professional study of religion, but also those who are interested in working for media, public health, and consulting.” Bagaria notes, “I want students to feel as if they can take what they have learned from my courses and do very practical things with it.”

—*by Sarah Rubin*



 



 

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