Norvin Hein Papers

An Ohio native, Norvin Hein (1914-2018) earned a B.A. from the College of Wooster (1937), a B.D. from the Yale Divinity School (1946), and a Ph.D. from Yale University (195O). He spent most of the war years in India, working as an English instructor, for the Army Y.M.C.A., and as a chaplain’s yeoman in a U.S. Maritime Service training station. He returned to Yale in 1945, and in 1950 began a distinguished, thirty-five-year-long academic career that included positions as Instructor in Comparative Religion (1950-52), Assistant professor (1952-58), Associate professor (1958-75), and Director of S.T.M. Studies (1973-76) at the Divinity School, then Professor (1975-85) and Director of Graduate Studies in Yale’s Department of Religious Studies (1977-85). Hein’s experiences in India set the course for his academic career. The religious practices that he had observed in India—religious street theater, especially—awakened him to an essential site-specific aspect of religion and forms of devotion that sprang from agrarian tradition. This became the focus of his dissertation and an eventual book, The Miracle Plays of Mathura (1972), following which Hein authored and contributed to more than a dozen books and published over two-dozen scholarly articles and reviews on various aspects of Hindu religious practices, especially folk plays. Among his more enduring scholarly contributions was the 100-page section on Hinduism that he wrote for the well-known Religions of the World textbook (2^nd ed. 1988), which enjoyed an extended life through the publication of several subsequent editions. At the time of his death, he was Divinity School’s oldest living faculty member.

Archival collections

• Norvin Hein Papers (Record Group 310)

Digitized materials

• Chapel Sermons, January 28 and 29, 1952
• Protestant Views of Hinduism, 1600-1825. Paper presented at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the Association of Professors of Mission, Evangelical Theological Seminary, Naperville, Illinois, June 7-9, 1956 (typescript)
• "The Rām Līlā," The Journal of American Folklore  71, no. 281 (Jul. - Sep., 1958): 279-304.
• “The Rise of the Cult of Gopāla,” (typescript dated November 4, 1983)
• “The Rāmcaritmānas in the Life of Kṛṣṇa-Devotees” (typescript dated December 9, 1984)
• “The Gītā Exegesis of Mahatma Gandhi” (typescript dated November 23, 1985)
• “The Revolution in Kṛṣṇaism: The Cult of Gopāla,” History of Religions 25, no. 4 (May 1986): 296-317.
• “Epic Sarvabhūtahite: A Byword of Non-Bhārgava Editors,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 67, no. 1/4 (1986): 17-34.
• Foreword to Dance of Divine Love: The Rāsa Līlā of Krishna from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, India's Classic Sacred Love Story, by Graham M. Schweig (Princeton University Press, 2005), xi-xvi.
• "Hindu Formulas for the Facilitation of Change," (undated typescript)
• Early Protestant Views of Hinduism, 1600-1825 (undated typescript)
• Early Protestant Views of Hinduism, 1600-1825, in Early Proceedings of The Association of Professors of Mission. Volume I: Biennial Meetings from 1856 to 1958. Edited by Robert A. Danielson and David E. Fenrick (Wilmore, Kentucky: First Fruits Press, 2015), 29-60.

The Wedding of Indira Nehru [Gandhi]

• 50 ft. 10 mm. Kodachrome motion picture film, 00:08:25 min. (1942)
• "The Wedding of Indira Nehru - A Film Script" (February 17, 1999)
• "The Wedding of Indira Nehru - A Film Script" (2007, revised March 14, 2009)

Select bibliography

Click here for a select bibliography of the writings of Norvin Hein.