Download or read book Hindu Encounter with Modernity written by Shukavak Das and published by Sanskrit Religions Institute (S R I). This book was released on 1999 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bhaktivinode is presented from the perspective of his own times and in his own words. His writings, theology, and religious practices are thoroughly and systematically examined from a nonhagiographic viewpoint and the entire work is carefully annotated. Bhaktivinode's life straddled contemporary British society and ancestral Hindu culture. One was a modern, analytical world which demanded rational thought. The other was a traditional world of Hindu faith and piety, which seemingly allowed little room for critical analysis. Could he play a meaningful role in modern society and at the same time maintain integrity as a Hindu? This book systematically examines his reinterpretation and application of Hinduism in the context of rational thought. In this well-researched, comprehensive, and objective study Dr. Shukavak begins with a discussion of the "crisis of faith" many Hindus experienced during British rule in India. This is followed by a biographic narration of the life of Kedarnath Dutta concentrating primarily on his devotional development and struggle with the problems of tradition and modernity. Shukavak identifies the inner logic of Bhaktivinode's approach as it points backward to Caitanya and the Goswamis and forward to the challenges of rationalism and universalism. Kedarnath Dutta Bhaktivinode (1838-1914) was an English-educated member of the Bengali bhadralok in 19th century British India. He was an associate of such noteworthy men as: Kashiprasad Ghosh, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Keshub Chandra Sen, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Sisir Kumar Ghosh and the Tagore family. In his late twenties he discovered his "Eastern Savior", Caitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1533) and became a leader of the Caitanya Vaishnava movement in Bengal. He made a lifelong study of Vaishnava philosophy, theology, and literature; and he wrote or edited almost a hundred books in Bengali, Sanskrit, and English. Bhaktivinode's spiritual insights which divide religion into two constituent parts, the phenomenal and the transcendent allowed him to combine critical rational analysis with the best of Hindu mysticism, Krishna lila. This created a unique synthesis of tradition and modernity. Instead of relinquishing modernity, he utilized it in his writings; instead of rejecting the Hindu tradition in the presence of rational thought, he strengthened it.
Download or read book Hindu Catholic Encounters in Goa written by Alexander Henn and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The state of Goa on India's southwest coast was once the capital of the Portuguese-Catholic empire in Asia. When Vasco Da Gama arrived in India in 1498, he mistook Hindus for Christians, but Jesuit missionaries soon declared war on the alleged idolatry of the Hindus. Today, Hindus and Catholics assert their own religious identities, but Hindu village gods and Catholic patron saints attract worship from members of both religious communities. Through fresh readings of early Portuguese sources and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this study traces the history of Hindu-Catholic syncretism in Goa and reveals the complex role of religion at the intersection of colonialism and modernity.
Download or read book Hinduism and Modernity written by David Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This examination of Hinduism in the context of modernity will be of interest to all students of Hinduism, as well as to those interested in the sociology and history of religion. Shows Hinduism to be a highly dynamic world-view which challenges western notions of modernity. Considers a broad range of topics including women, the caste system, the self, divinities and gurus. Contains up-to-date discussions of modern Hindu culture and beliefs.
Download or read book The Life and Thought of Kedarnath Dutta Bhaktivinoda written by Shukavak Das and published by . This book was released on 1996-06-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Hinduism written by Richard S. Weiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Hindu Selves in a Modern World written by Maya Warrier and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-10 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores devotional Hinduism in a modern context of high consumerism and revolutionised communications. It focuses on a fast-growing and high-profile contemporary Hindu guru faith originating in India and attracting a transnational following. The organisation is led by a vastly popular female guru, Mata Amritanandamayi, whom devotees worship as an avatar and a healer of the ills of the contemporary world. By drawing upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among the mata's primarily urban, educated 'middle class' Indian devotees, the author provides crucial insights into new trends in popular Hinduism in a post-colonial and rapidly modernising Indian setting.
Download or read book Imperial Encounters written by Peter van der Veer and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.
Download or read book The Life and Thought of Kedarnath Dutta Bhaktivinode microform a Hindu Encounter with Modernity written by Brian D. (Brian Douglas) Marvin and published by National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada. This book was released on 1996 with total page 790 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hindu Pluralism written by Elaine M. Fisher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, Fisher argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism. This work provides a critical resource for understanding how Hinduism developed in the early modern period, a crucial era that set the tenor for religion's role in public life in India through the present day.
Download or read book Vrindavan s Encounter with Modernity written by Samrat S. Kumar and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2019-02-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade traditional Indian temple towns have transformed into centres for urban lifestyles and tourist activities. One of these is the historic temple town Vrindavan in North India, on which this study focuses. Exploring the multiple socio-cultural realities present in the town, the author engages with the narratives of the residents as they respond to the socio-environmental changes against the backdrop of national and regional modernisation processes. Here the imaginaries of a mythic Vrindavan, with its pristine and sacred environment, are evoked in narrations on contemporary modernity.
Download or read book Modernity in Indian Social Theory written by A. Raghuramaraju and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike the West, India presents a fascinating example of a society where the pre-modern continues to co-exist with the modern. Modernity in Indian Social Theory explores the social variance between India and the West to show how it impacted their respective trajectories of modernity. A. Raghuramaraju argues that modernity in the West involved disinheriting the pre-modern, and temporal ordering of the traditional and modern. It was ruthlessly implemented through programmes of industrialization, nationalism, and secularism. This book underscores that India did not merely the Western model of modernity or experience a temporal ordering of society. It situates this sociological complexity in the context of the debates on social theory. The author critically examines various discourses on modernity in India, including Partha Chatterjee’s account of Indian nationalism; Javeed Alam’s reading of Indian secularism; the use of the term pluralism by some Indian social scientists; and Gopal Guru’s emphasis on the lived Dalit experience. He also engages with the readings on key thinkers including Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Ambedkar.
Download or read book Modern Hindu Personalism written by Ferdinando Sardella and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the life and work of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874-1937), a guru of the Chaitanya (1486-1534) school of Vaishnavism who, at a time when various interpretations of nondualistic Hindu thought were most prominent, managed to establish a pan-Indian movement for the modern revival of personalist bhakti - a movement that today encompasses both Indian and non-Indian populations throughout the world.
Download or read book Indian Thought and Western Theism written by Martin Ganeri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The encounter between the West and India in the modern period has also been an encounter between Western modernity and the traditions of classical Indian thought. This book is the study of one aspect this encounter, that between Western scholasticism and one classical Indian tradition of religious thought and practice: the Vedānta. In the modern period there have been many attempts to relate Western theistic traditions to classical Indian accounts of ultimate reality and the world. Parallels have usually been drawn with modern forms of Western philosophy or modern trends in theism. Modern Indological studies have continued to make substantial use of Western terms and concepts to describe and analyse Indian thought. A much-neglected area of study has been the relationship between Western scholastic theology and classical Indian thought. This book challenges existing parallels with modern philosophy of religion and forms of theism. It argues instead that there is an affinity between scholasticism and classical Indian traditions. It considers the thought of Rāmānuja (traditional dates 1017-1137 CE), who developed an influential theist and realist form of Vedānta, and considers how this relates to that of the most influential of Western scholastics, Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274 CE). Within what remain very different traditions we can see similar methods of enquiry, as well as common questions and concerns in their accounts of ultimate reality and of the world. Arguing that there is indeed an affinity between the Western scholastic tradition and that of classical Indian thought, and suggesting a reversal of the tendencies of earlier interpretations, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Asian religion, Hinduism and Indian philosophy.
Download or read book Temples of Modernity written by Robert M. Geraci and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-15 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temples of Modernity uses ethnographic data to investigate the presence of religious ideas and practices in Indian science and engineering. Geraci shows 1) how the integration of religion, science and technology undergirds pre- and post-independence Indian nationalism, 2) that traditional icons and rituals remain relevant in elite scientific communities, and 3) that transhumanist ideas now percolate within Indian visions of science and technology. This work identifies the intersection of religion, science, and technology as a worldwide phenomenon and suggests that the study of such interactions should be enriched through attention to the real experiences of people across the globe.
Download or read book Marriage and Modernity written by Rochona Majumdar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative cultural history of the evolution of modern marriage practices in Bengal, Marriage and Modernity challenges the assumption that arranged marriage is an antiquated practice. Rochona Majumdar demonstrates that in the late colonial period Bengali marriage practices underwent changes that led to a valorization of the larger, intergenerational family as a revered, “ancient” social institution, with arranged marriage as the apotheosis of an “Indian” tradition. She meticulously documents the ways that these newly embraced “traditions”—the extended family and arranged marriage—entered into competition and conversation with other emerging forms of kinship such as the modern unit of the couple, with both models participating promiscuously in the new “marketplace” for marriages, where matrimonial advertisements in the print media and the payment of dowry played central roles. Majumdar argues that together the kinship structures newly asserted as distinctively Indian and the emergence of the marriage market constituted what was and still is modern about marriages in India. Majumdar examines three broad developments related to the modernity of arranged marriage: the growth of a marriage market, concomitant debates about consumption and vulgarity in the conduct of weddings, and the legal regulation of family property and marriages. Drawing on matrimonial advertisements, wedding invitations, poems, photographs, legal debates, and a vast periodical literature, she shows that the modernization of families does not necessarily imply a transition from extended kinship to nuclear family structures, or from matrimonial agreements negotiated between families to marriage contracts between individuals. Colonial Bengal tells a very different story.
Download or read book The Twice Born written by Aatish Taseer and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Twice-Born, Aatish Taseer embarks on a journey of self-discovery in an intoxicating, unsettling personal reckoning with modern India, where ancient customs collide with the contemporary politics of revivalism and revenge When Aatish Taseer first came to Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, he was eighteen, the Westernized child of an Indian journalist and a Pakistani politician, raised among the intellectual and cultural elite of New Delhi. Nearly two decades later, Taseer leaves his life in Manhattan to go in search of the Brahmins, wanting to understand his own estrangement from India through their ties to tradition. Known as the twice-born—first into the flesh, and again when initiated into their vocation—the Brahmins are a caste devoted to sacred learning. But what Taseer finds in Benares, the holy city of death also known as Varanasi, is a window on an India as internally fractured as his own continent-bridging identity. At every turn, the seductive, homogenizing force of modernity collides with the insistent presence of the past. In a globalized world, to be modern is to renounce India—and yet the tide of nationalism is rising, heralded by cries of “Victory to Mother India!” and an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence. From the narrow streets of the temple town to a Modi rally in Delhi, among the blossoming cotton trees and the bathers and burning corpses of the Ganges, Taseer struggles to reconcile magic with reason, faith in tradition with hope for the future and the brutalities of the caste system, all the while challenging his own myths about himself, his past, and his countries old and new.
Download or read book Rabbi on the Ganges written by Alan Brill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-10-21 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rabbi on the Ganges: A Jewish-Hindu Encounter is the first work to engage the new terrain of Hindu-Jewish religious encounter. The book offers understanding into points of contact between the two religions of Hinduism and Judaism. Providing an important comparative account, the work illuminates key ideas and practices within the traditions, surfacing commonalities between the jnana and Torah study, karmakanda and Jewish ritual, and between the different Hindu philosophic schools and Jewish thought and mysticism, along with meditation and the life of prayer and Kabbalah and creating dialogue around ritual, mediation, worship, and dietary restrictions. The goal of the book is not only to unfold the content of these faith traditions but also to create a religious encounter marked by mutual and reciprocal understanding and openness.
