Discourse of Advaita : Hinduism and the Vedanta Myth

The teaching tradition of Advaita Vedanta is one of the most widely represented forms of Indian religion both outside of India and on the subcontinent itself. The reasons for this popularity are complex and an understanding of it involves an analysis of colonial discourse and the ongoing interest in the tradition by Orientalists and Indian nationalists, as well as an understanding of pre-colonial practices of Brahminization. The academic study of Advaita Vedanta has been continuous since the origins of Indology and the comparative study of religion. In spite of this interest, the tradition has often been represented simplistically as a type of mysticism and as the essence of Hinduism. With this, little attention has been paid to the teaching methodologies (prakriyas) presented in the Upanisads or the traditional understanding of words as a means of knowledge (sabda pramana). One result of the new understanding of ‘birth of language’ and modern trends of secularization has been the discrediting of scriptural authority and the revelatory dimension of religion. More recently, the discipline of religious studies has become involved in debates of method and theory which attempt to move beyond the study of ‘origins’ and towards an understanding of power-knowledge relations and the privatization of religion. Nevertheless, the approach of Indology, while currently conducted across a range of area studies, is still largely limited to philological and textual analysis. This study takes an Indo-critical and structuralist approach to the discourse of Advaita in an attempt to understand Vedanta as an indigenous epistemic tradition, or form of Indian constructivism, while at the same time widening the scope of postcolonial theory and semiotic studies of religion. The Upanisads provide a variety of generic attributes, paradigmatic elements which I delineate, but it is their institutionalization as epistemic and mystic genres of traditional and neo-colonial discourse that l primarily analyze. The broad methodological stance of this study stems from an attempt to come to terms with ethnographic observation of the actual event whereby Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1930-) teaching in India and the West assumed the role of a guru, as he had discerned it in the Upanisads. It also began with the attempt to provide theoretical hypotheses for the cultural and ideological context within which this event took place