PDNRL No. 38 Karin Preisendanz and Johanna Buss (eds.): Transposition and Transformation, Controversy and Discovery. On the Christian Encounter with the Religions of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century India. Wien 2021, Hardcover, 277p. EUR 28.-

Introduction (vii)

Laudation (xxiii)

Devotional Christianity and Pre-Indology in Early Eighteenth-Century Kerala: Johann Ernst Hanxleden, S.J., alias Arnos Padiri, Scholar and Poet (1)

The Emergence of Resistant Judaism in Colonial Bombay: Christian Missionaries, Cochin Jews, and the Hebraization of India’s Bene Israel Jews, 1738–1905 (49)

“… But Knows Not of His Need of the Atonement”: Rammohun Roy’s Selective Construction of Christianity in His Precepts of Jesus and the Dispute about “True Christianity” in Early Nineteenth-Century Calcutta (125)

The Scottish “Discovery” of Jainism in Nineteenth-Century Bombay (193)

Vera Höke holds a master’s degree in Religious Studies and South Asian History from Heidelberg University. She currently works on the finalization of her Ph.D. thesis which is devoted to a later branch of the Brahmos led by the famous — and to some extent notorious — Brahmo Keshab Chandra Sen. In her thesis, she demonstrates how Sen sought to construct his very own universal religion by merging in­fluences of English and American Unitarianism and New England Transcendentalism with notions and concepts of bhakti as well as with Advaita Vedānta current in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Höke is affiliated to the Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt, where she partici­pated in the interdisciplinary research group “Religious Individuali­zation in Historical Perspective” and continues to contribute, as an associated doctoral researcher, to the Kolleg’s agenda in her area of specialization.

Mitch Numark is Associate Professor of History at California State University Sacramento. He received his BA from Pitzer College (Claremont, CA) and his MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has taught South Asian, British, and Jewish history at Pitzer College, the University of Oklahoma, UCLA, Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME), and California State University Sacramento. He has published research articles in Jewish Social Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, and Journal of Scottish Historical Studies. In 2012, he received the De Nobili Research Library Prize for the best essay on the topic “Dimensions of the Christian Encounter with the Religions of India.” His recent publications include “Per­spectives from the Periphery: The East India Company’s Jewish Sepoys, Anglo-Jewry, and the Image of ‘the Jew’”, in On the Word of a Jew: Religion, Reliability, and the Dynamics of Trust, edited by Nina Caputo and Mitchell B. Hart (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019).

Christophe A. M. Vielle holds a doctoral degree (1996) in Oriental Philology and History from the Catholic University of Louvain. He specialized in Indology and, in 1998, was chosen for the Michael Coulson Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. As re­search associate of the Belgian Foundation for Scientific Research (FNRS), he is affiliated to the Oriental Institute in Louvain-la-Neuve, where he coordinates Indological research and functions as general editor of the series “Publications de l’Institut orientaliste de Louvain” and “Anecdota Lovaniensia Nova.” In charge of the courses on Sanskrit and classical Indology at the Catholic University of Louvain since 1996, he was appointed as professor there after his habilitation (Doctorat d’Agrégation de l’enseignement supérieur) in 2007. His primary research interests are in the philology of Itihāsa–Purāṇa, Kāvya and Śāstra, the historiography and epistemology of Western (pre-)Indology, and in the cultural history and anthropology of premodern Kerala (according to Sanskrit, Malayāḷam and Western sources) where he has travelled extensively. He has received the 2013 Colette Caillat Prize in Indian Studies, awarded by the Institut de France, for his work on the editio princeps of the eighteenth-century Sanskrit grammar by the Jesuit Johann Ernst Hanxleden.