Antonio de Nicolas

Jun 26, 2023 | academic.oup.com | Carolyn Chen |Simon Coleman |Aditi Banerjee |Antonio de Nicolas

THE QUESTION of who has the right to speak for Hinduism—the subject of a special issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JAAR) in 2000—remains deeply contested (Caldwell and Smith 2000). Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a scholar often invoked in these debates, famously and controversially proposed “no statement about a religion is valid unless it can be acknowledged by that religion’s believers” (Smith 1959, 42; Sharma 2016; McCutcheon 2006).