The Future of Religious Studies in India (PDF)

Clemens Cavallin is Associate Professor of Religion, Philosophies of Life and Ethics at Nord University, Norway and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His recent publications include a book on ritual theory, namely, Ritualization and Human Interiority (2013), and On the Edge of Infinity (2017), a biography of the Canadian novelist and painter Michael D. O'Brien. Together with Åke Sander, he managed go:India, a cooperation program between the university of Gothenburg and several Indian universities (2011-2013).

Åke Sander is Professor Emeritus in psychology and sociology of religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research has focused on understanding the phenomena of religion and religiosity and their influence on people's ways of experiencing, thinking, feeling, and acting. Since the early 1970s, he has spent several years in South Asia studying Indian society and Indic religious and cultural traditions. In addition to empirically oriented research, he has an interest in the theoretically oriented study of the workings and potentialities of the human mind (especially in relation to so-called alternative states of mind), the phenomenology of religion (with focuses on religious experience, religious consciousness, and mysticism). He has also worked on the nature of religious change in the late-modern globalized world and challenges arising in communication between persons with different cultures, religions, and patterns of interpretation. Together with Clemens Cavallin, he managed go:India, a cooperation program between the university of Gothenburg and several Indian universities (2011-2013). He has published several books and over 100 papers.

Sudha Sitharaman is Professor of Sociology at Pondicherry University, India. Her PhD (2004) from the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, India (awarded by Osmania University, Hyderabad, India) titled Society and Religious