Collected essays. 1. Language, texts, and society : explorations in ancient Indian culture and religion

Collected essays. 1. Language, texts, and society : explorations in ancient Indian culture and religion PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788884537300
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Collected essays. 1. Language, texts, and society : explorations in ancient Indian culture and religion

Collected essays. 1. Language, texts, and society : explorations in ancient Indian culture and religion PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788884537300
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description


Language, Texts, and Society

Language, Texts, and Society PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857284312
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words - and the cultural history represented by words - that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle's book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to 'Hinduism' provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.

The Doctor and the Saint

The Doctor and the Saint PDF Author: Arundhati Roy
Publisher: Haymarket Books+ORM
ISBN: 1608467988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
The little-known story of Gandhi’s reluctance to challenge the caste system, and the man who fought fiercely for India’s downtrodden. Democracy hasn’t eradicated caste, argues bestselling author and Booker Prize–winner Arundhati Roy—it has entrenched and modernized it. To understand caste today in India, Roy insists we must examine the influence of Gandhi in shaping what India ultimately became: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system. Roy states that for more than a half century, Gandhi’s pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, Dalit “untouchables,” and the laboring classes remained consistently insulting, and he also refused to allow lower castes to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives. But there was someone else who had a larger vision of justice—a founding father of the republic and the chief architect of its constitution. In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy introduces us to this contemporary of Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, who challenged the thinking of the time and fought to promote not merely formal democracy, but liberation from the oppression, shame, and poverty imposed on millions of Indians by an archaic caste system. This is a fascinating and surprising look at two men—one of whom has become a worldwide symbol and the other of whom remains unfamiliar to most outside his native country. Praise for Arundhati Roy “Arundhati Roy is incandescent in her brilliance and her fearlessness.” —Junot Díaz “The fierceness with which Arundhati Roy loves humanity moves my heart.” —Alice Walker

Annihilation of Caste

Annihilation of Caste PDF Author: B.R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781688303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
The classic analysis of the caste system with an extensive introduction by Arundhati Roy. “What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste. B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

Little Buddhas

Little Buddhas PDF Author: Vanessa R. Sasson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199860262
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 543

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Book Description
Edited by Vanessa R. Sasson, Little Buddhas brings together a wide range of scholarship and expertise to address the question of what role children have played in Buddhist literature, in particular historical contexts, and their role in specific Buddhist contexts today.

Collected Essays

Collected Essays PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN: 8884537290
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description


Language, Texts, and Society

Language, Texts, and Society PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789380601656
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description


Dharma

Dharma PDF Author: Alf Hiltebeitel
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860632
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
This introductory work proposes a fresh take on the ancient Indian concept dharma. By unfolding how, even in its developments as "law" and custom, dharma participates in nuanced and multifarious understandings of the term that play out in India’s great spiritual traditions, the book offers insights into the innovative character of both Hindu and Buddhist usages of the concept. Alf Hiltebeitel, in an original approach to early Buddhist usages, explores how the Buddhist canon brought out different meanings of dharma. This is followed by an exposition of the hypothesis that most, if not all, of the Hindu law books flowered after the third-century BC emperor Asoka, a Buddhist, made dharma the guiding principle of an entire realm and culture. A discussion built around the author’s expertise on the Sanskrit epics shows how their narratives amplified the new Brahmanical norms and brought out the ethical dilemmas and spiritual teachings that arose from inquiry into dharma. A chapter on the tale of the Life of the Buddha considers the relation between dharma, moksa/nirvana (salvation), and bhakti (devotion). Here, Hiltebeitel ties together a thread that runs through the entire story, which is the Buddha’s tendency to present dharma as a kind of civil discourse. In this sense, dharma challenges people to think critically or at least more creatively about their ethical principles and the foundations of their own spiritual values. A closing chapter on dharma in the twenty-first century explores its new cachet in an era of globalization, its diasporic implications, its openings into American popular culture, some implications for women, and the questions it is still raising for modern India.

Language, Texts, and Society

Language, Texts, and Society PDF Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843318857
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
This collection brings together the research papers of Patrick Olivelle, published over a period of about ten years. The unifying theme of these studies is the search for historical context and developments hidden within words and texts. Words – and the cultural history represented by words – that scholars often take for granted as having a continuous and long history are often new and even neologisms, and thus provide important clues to cultural and religious innovations. Olivelle’s book on the Asramas, as well as the short pieces included in this volume, such as those on ananda and dharma, seek to see cultural innovation and historical changes within the changing semantic fields of key terms. Closer examination of numerous Sanskrit terms taken for granted as central to ‘Hinduism’ provide similar results. Indian texts have often been studied in the past as disincarnate realities providing information on an ahistorical and unchanging culture. This volume is a small contribution towards correcting that method of textual study.

Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe

Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004225358
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
This first volume of the series “Dynamics in the History of Religions” reviews the opening conference of the "Käte Hamburger Kolleg” at the Ruhr-University Bochum. The first section concentrates on the formation of what later come to be termed "world religions" through inter-religious contact, the second part focuses on the significance of interreligious contacts also during their expansive phase. Methodological problems of multi-perspective research and especially the lack of a general religious terminology are discussed in the third chapter, while the final papers outline various aspects of secularization and (re-)sacralisation in the age of globalisation as an effect of multicultural contacts in a world wide web of religious interferences. Contributors include: Marion Steinicke, Volkhard Krech, Peter Wick, Victor H. Mair, Heiner Roetz, Patrick Olivelle, Jens Schlieter, Guy Stroumsa, Sarah Stroumsa, Nikolas Jaspert, Michael Lecker, John Tolan, Eun-jeung Lee, Michael Lackner, Stephen C. Berkwitz, Sven Bretfeld, Lucian Hölscher, Jan Assmann, Robert Ford Campany, Russell McCutcheon, Tim H. Barrett, Francesca Tarocco, Ronald M. Davidson, Markus Zehnder, Aslam Syed, Marion Eggert, Peter Schalk, Peter Beyer, Ian Reader, José Casanova, Heinz Georg Held.