Exploring Orality and Audience in Early Indian Religious Scholarship

From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. 

In Religions of Early India: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2024), Richard Davis offers a history of India’s myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India’s religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity.

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