• Religion, Colonialism, Modernity
• Media and religion
• Esotericism and modern Hinduism

Varuni Bhatia is the Director of the School of Arts & Sciences.

Varuni teaches History at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her research area is religion and modernity in colonial and contemporary India. Bhatia’s books and articles explore transformations of Hindu traditions, new cultural and media practices of religion, and religion at the intersection of nationalism and identity. In her first book, Unforgetting Chaitanya: Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2017), Bhatia explored the coalescing of a modern, reformed, and socially conservative Vaishnavism in colonial Bengal at the interstices of history, culture, and anti-colonial nationalism. Her forthcoming book is an Oxford India Short Introduction called Religion in India where she provides a readable and scholarly overview of religion’s lasting significance in contemporary India and its social, legal, and media landscapes. 

More recently, Professor Bhatia has been looking into the phenomenon of new media practices and the religious lives of Indians in contemporary India. She is currently working on her next book, provisionally titled Spiritual Journeys: Global Occult and the Secret Histories of Modern Hinduism, where she traces the global intellectual histories of several subterranean aspects of modern Hinduism that stand askance to its reformed aspects.

Professor Bhatia has a Masters and MPhil in History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and PhD in Religion from Columbia University, New York. She has previously taught at New York University and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.