Hindu studies personal statement example

Why do you want to study this course or subject?

My interest in Hindu studies began with a mismatch. At home, my grandmother's account of the Ramayana centred on Sita's endurance and on particular verses she sang; in my Religious Studies lessons, Hinduism arrived as a tidy list of beliefs about karma, dharma and moksha, illustrated by a photograph of a temple. Neither was wrong, but the distance between them made me curious about how a tradition with no single founder, scripture or authority came to be described as one thing at all. I want to spend three years on that question properly: how texts, rituals, regional languages and colonial scholarship have shaped what we now call Hinduism. Reading parts of the Bhagavad Gita in translation alongside my grandmother's Tamil devotional songs showed me how differently authority can be located, in a philosophical dialogue or in a poet's voice. I was struck, studying Advaita Vedanta and then Ramanuja's qualified non-dualism for coursework, that both claim the same Upanishadic passages and argue with real precision about what they mean. That is the kind of argument I find genuinely absorbing. I also want the tools I currently lack: Sanskrit, so that I am not always reading at one remove, and a proper grasp of historical method, so that I can weigh claims about the antiquity of practices rather than repeating them. Studying the tradition academically does not feel like a threat to how I was raised. It feels like taking it seriously enough to ask harder questions of it.

How have your qualifications and studies helped you to prepare?

A level Religious Studies has given me most of my analytical grounding. We study philosophy of religion and ethics alongside a developed unit on Hinduism, and the essay work has taught me to separate a textual claim from a theological interpretation of it, which matters enormously in this field. My extended coursework compared conceptions of liberation in Advaita Vedanta with the devotional emphasis of bhakti poetry, and the hardest part was resisting the temptation to make them agree. History has been just as useful. Our unit on the British in India led me to read about how nineteenth-century officials and scholars categorised religious communities for administration, and I began to see that some familiar descriptions of Hinduism have a datable, political history. English Literature trains a different muscle: close attention to imagery, voice and repetition, which I found transferred well when reading translated hymns where the same epithet returns in every verse. Beyond the syllabus I have read Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History, which showed me how much can be recovered by reading for the voices the main narrative tends to omit, and I have worked through introductory Sanskrit material online, learning Devanagari and the present tense. Progress is slow and I have no illusions about my level, but I can now recognise roots in words I had only ever heard sung, which has been quietly satisfying.

What else have you done to prepare outside of education, and why are these experiences useful?

For a sixth-form community project, three of us compiled a guide to places of worship within two miles of our college, including two Hindu temples, a gurdwara and a Pentecostal church in a former shop. My job was arranging and conducting the visits, which meant repeated phone calls, explaining our purpose to committee members who were understandably cautious, and rewriting my questions when I realised I was asking people to summarise their beliefs rather than describe what actually happens on a Tuesday evening. The finished guide is now used by our RS department with Year 9 classes, and seeing younger students use something I helped make was the most rewarding part of my time at college. I volunteer on Saturday mornings at a Tamil language and music club run from a community hall, where I supervise the youngest group, hear their reading aloud and set out chairs and instruments. Teaching a seven-year-old why a word changes shape has forced me to understand grammar I had absorbed without thinking. My paid work is on the tills and in the plant area of a garden centre, where I deal with customers who want a shrub identified, a refund, or simply to talk. It has made me patient, clear and quick at explaining things to people who do not share my assumptions, which I suspect is half of what religious studies requires. I also sing with the club's group at its annual concert, where our small choir performed unaccompanied for the first time last spring.

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