This volume in the Law in India Series offers critical insights into the complex ongoing debate on Hinduism and its relationship to human rights. The secular and religious realms constitute two main sources of value formation in the modern world. The human rights tradition embodies the former. The author forges a link between human rights discourses and the normative moral discourse within Hinduism to establish a conceptual approach to the issue in a given cultural ethos. The book offers a rich synthesis of interrelated issues about human rights, from a variety of Hindu and non-Hindu viewpoints. The author critically analyses the key issues to establish that there is room for classical or traditional Hindu concepts and ideas in the current international debates on human rights. Sharma examines the place of human rights in Hinduism from an interdisciplinary perspective covering a wide gamut of themes such as the caste system (varna, jati), stages of life (asrama), the four ages (yugas) and freedom of conscience. Written in a lucid style, this book will be useful for scholars and students of law, religion, and philosophy. It will also be of interest to general readers interested in issues of Hinduism and human rights.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arvind Sharma
ARVIND SHARMA was born in Varanasi, India. He earned a B.A. in History, Economics, and Sanskrit from Allahabad University in 1958 and continued his interests in economics at Syracuse University, earning an M.A. in 1970. Pursuing a lifelong interest in comparative religion, Dr. Sharma gained an M.T.S. in 1974 and then a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University in 1978. He succeeded to the Birks Chair of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and was the first Infinity Foundation Visiting Professor of Indic Studies at Harvard University. He has published over fifty books and five hundred articles in the fields of comparative religion, Hinduism, Indian philosophy and ethics, and the role of women in religion. Widely cited as an authority on Hinduism, amongst his most note-worthy publications are The Hindu Gita: Ancient and Classical Interpretations of the Bhagavadgita (1986), The Experien-tial Dimension of Advaita Vedanta (1993), Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Pre-eminent Scholars from Each Tradition (1994), The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective (1995), Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (2000), and The Study of Hinduism (2003).
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