Anne E. Monius

Anne Elizabeth Monius (February 17, 1964 – August 3, 2019) was an American Indologist and religious scholar. She was a professor of South Asian Religions at the Harvard Divinity School, best known for her analyses of literary culture to reconstruct the history of faiths in South India.

Life

Monius was born in New Hampshire to Felix and Eleanor Monius, who were farmers. Her grandfather was an immigrant to the US from Lithuania.

Monius attended Hollis Area High School in Hollis, New Hampshire, where she was valedictorian in 1982. She then went to Harvard University to study theoretical astrophysics. Inspired by a course on Indian civilisation by Diana L. Eck, she switched majors to South Asian religions.

She died of natural causes on August 3, 2019, at the age of 55.

Career From 1997 to 2002, Monius taught in the department of religious studies at the University of Virginia. She joined the Harvard Divinity School in 2002, where she continued till her death.

From 2010, Monius was the editor of the American Academy of Religion's book series Religion in Translation, a continuation of the Texts and Translations series that she co-edited since 2004.

Research Monius studied in Chennai for two years, researching two Buddhist texts in the Tamil language, the only ones that have survived to date. This formed the basis of her doctoral dissertation, which she expanded to her 2001 book, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India.

In her studies of the South Indian bhakti tradition, Monius established that it was predominantly a Saivite movement than a Vaishnavite one. She showed that the Tamil litterateurs did not restrict themselves to their local geography but wished to expand the scope of the Tamil bhakti universe to northern India, including the Himalayas, which are considered to be Shiva's domains, albeit with an understanding that the essential core was a Tamil one.

Continuing with the theme of religious ecumenism, Monius discussed the presence of the Hindu god Krishna in two Tamil texts, the Buddhist Manimekalai and the Jaina Cilappatikaram. Krishna's cosmic dance is described, as well as other figures from Krishna-lore (notably Balarama and Radha).

At the time of her death, Monius was working on a book to be titled Singing the Lives of Śiva’s Saints: History, Aesthetics, and Religious Identity in Tamil-speaking South India, that examined the formation of Śaiva identity in Tamil Nadu under the Cholas from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. She was also part of a team of scholars translating the Tamil version of the Rāmāyaṇa.

Selected works