Dr. Seema Chauhan

My expertise lies in South Asian religions from Premodern India, with a focus on Hinduism and Jainism.

Methodologically, I study sources that are typically read in distinct discplines: narratives, philosophy, and epigraphy. For instance, in 2023, I wrote about Jaina narratives in relation to systemaic philosophy in order to assign a new dating to one of the most influential Hindu philosophers. This approach allowed me to produce research that has significant implications for multiple field of study.

Thematically, my research pertains to the construction of identities. I recover the construction of religion, gender, and caste identities in premodern India in order to give a historical understanding to identities that have been misconstrued in India today as a result of the encounter with colonialism. This is best evidenced from my special issue and my monograph. My special issue, a collection of five peer-revewed articles, counters Hindu Nationalist discourse in Modern India which suggests that caste ideology was hegemonic in ancient India. I collated and edited new research on premodern Indian construcitons of caste to counter this rhetoric--the fact that my special issue on premodern Indian sources was accepted to the highest rated journal for Modern Asian studies is testament to the significant that the issue will have. My monograph, A Tale of Two Religions, has parallel implications for the history of religion. There, I show how premodern Jainas represented Hindu identity long before the British arrived in India and mislabelled Jainas as Hindus during the colonial regime. Across the world today, Jainas continue to be mistaken for Hindus as a result of Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, and orientalist scholars. My monograph is the first book-length study of Jaina representations of Hindus. It speaks to both community-level concerns of Jainas (who are mislabelled as Hindus in Europe and India) as well as the academic study of Jainism (which continues to be seen as a subset of Hindu studies because of mistakes about the way Jaina identity relates to Hindu identity).