instruction at private ones), but as interpreted by several government
commissions—the Radhakrishnan Commission (1948–1949), the Secondary
Education Commission (1952–1953), the Sri Prakasa Committee (1959–1960),
and the Kothari Commission (1964–1966)—that prohibition does not ban
teaching about religions. Indeed, the commissions found such education
desirable as a way to promote morality (Khan 2005; Llewellyn 2005). Further-
more, some activity in India has treated the study of religion as a separate
academic domain. In 1967, a consultation on the study of religion took place
in Bangalore involving Indian academics and professors from Harvard
University (Khan 2005). Several decades later, two IAHR-related conferences
took place in Delhi, ‘Religions in the Indic Civilization’ (December 18–21,
2003) and ‘The Culture and Religious Mosaic of South and Southeast Asia:
Conflict and Consensus through the Ages’ (January 27–30, 2005). Nevertheless,
in South Asia specific departments of religious studies are extremely rare. The
only such department in India may be the Guru Gobindh Singh Department
of Religious Studies at Punjabi University, Patiala, founded in 1967 following
a recommendation of Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Llewellyn unpublished; Khan
2005: 8790). In a survey of the Commonwealth Universities HandbookJ. E.
Llewellyn (unpublished) found that only 5 percent of graduate institutions in
India offer anything that might at all be associated with the study of religions.
Using the same source, Abrahim Khan (2005) found that only thirteen
institutions throughout the whole of South Asia ‘offer one or more courses on
the study of religion as a subject either at the undergraduate or at the post-
graduate level’, among them the department of world religions at the University
of Dhaka, Bangladesh, founded as a department of comparative religion in
1999 and renamed the next year (Khan 2005: 8791).
As Robinson’s chapter makes clear, however, anyone who concluded from
the preceding paragraph that religion was little studied in South Asia would
be seriously mistaken. Scholars in South Asia study religion to a considerable
degree. They simply do not institutionalize such studies in a distinct academic
unit. In this respect India presents an alternative model to the trend, prevalent
over the last fifty years, of establishing distinct programs, departments, and
institutes in religious studies. On that alternative model, academics with an
interest in religion would be dispersed throughout the university.
In accounting for a lack of religious studies in India, Abrahim Khan (2005:
8791) notes that in that part of the world religion—in Hindi, dharm—is
conceived of differently than it is in Europe, North America, and Australia; it
does not make a distinction between the sacred and the secular. Indeed, it is
often observed that the category ‘religion’ is an odd one. In this volume Satoko
Fujiwara notes that the Japanese use of shkyÿhas not been informed by the
same concerns for essence as European uses of ‘religion’ have been, although
she also points out that the term ‘culture’, popular with some critics of
‘religion’, is actually the more problematical term in the Japanese context. He312
GREGORY D. ALLES