The historian Brian Stock used the phrase “textual community” to designate a collection of people whose social and religious lives are organized in relation to a special text. Members of a textual community attempt to order their everyday lives in close correspondence with what their chosen text prescribes – or, at least, what they believe it prescribes. It is not essential that every member of a textual community be able to read or recite the central text. What is necessary, however, is that some members are accepted by the rest as having the authority to explain and interpret the text.

Stock’s conceptual model is the foundation of RELI 113. The class looks at the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Devî Mâhâtmya, two texts from India and the communities that have been organized in response to them. We will use the Bhagavad Gîtâ and the Devî Mâhâtmya in order to consider stories that South Asian peoples tell themselves about themselves; to understand their expressions of communal identity. As social bases for social union, texts also occasion discord and dissent. Accordingly, we will also consider the battle for interpretive authority as a factor in communal strife.