‘And as long as my spirit dwells in my body, maiden with the serene smile! I will be yours, this is the solemn truth I tell thee.’ The quotation is a translation of Otto Fredrik Tullberg’s (1802–1853) inscription on a stone in Uppsala. In the 1830s, Tullberg carved out these lines in Sanskrit, derived from the fifth song of the story of Nala and Damayanti in Mahabharata, as a declaration of love to his fiancé Sophia Ridderbielke (Bhikhabhai 2016). The Orientalist Tullberg is often recognized as the founder of Indological studies and the first to introduce an interest for Indian religions in Swedish academia.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of the study of Indian religions at Swedish universities, which started in the nineteenth century with an Orientalist and philological study of classical language and texts and evolved into comparative Indo-European languages and Indology. As the discipline of History of Religions was established in the twentieth century, the study of Indian religions was gradually separated from linguistics and came to include theoretical and methodological approaches from humanities and social sciences that combined ethnographic research on contemporary religions with studies of history, languages and texts. The overview illustrates how the fields of research have expanded and diversified to include Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh traditions which trace their origins to India and historically expanded to greater Asia and later globally through an extensive migration, as well as ideas and practices derived from the Indian traditions in movements that operate transnationally across borders. While the international study of the Asian religions has developed into specialized and interdisciplinary research fields of Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina and Sikh studies, Sweden has never developed corresponding research environments. Rather, the study of Indian religions has been firmly incorporated within the discipline of History and Anthropology of Religion and worked closely with the philological study of Indian languages and texts....