Explorations in Modern Bengal, C. 1800-1900

Explorations in Modern Bengal, C. 1800-1900 PDF Author: Amiya P. Sen
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 8190891863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book examines a regional culture as it was subjected to acute interpretative stress for much of the nineteenth century. This is done through a study of three key facets to contemporary Hindu thought - a possible interplay between the divinely ordained and human history, innovative extensions in the meaning of older terms like 'Dharma', and new moral and cultural theories around select mythical figures and traditionally revered texts.

Explorations in Modern Bengal, C. 1800-1900

Explorations in Modern Bengal, C. 1800-1900 PDF Author: Amiya P. Sen
Publisher: Primus Books
ISBN: 8190891863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book examines a regional culture as it was subjected to acute interpretative stress for much of the nineteenth century. This is done through a study of three key facets to contemporary Hindu thought - a possible interplay between the divinely ordained and human history, innovative extensions in the meaning of older terms like 'Dharma', and new moral and cultural theories around select mythical figures and traditionally revered texts.

Guru to the World

Guru to the World PDF Author: Ruth Harris
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674287347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
From the Wolfson History Prize–winning author of The Man on Devil’s Island, the definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West. Few thinkers have had so enduring an impact on both Eastern and Western life as Swami Vivekananda, the Indian monk who inspired the likes of Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore. Blending science, religion, and politics, Vivekananda introduced Westerners to yoga and the universalist school of Hinduism called Vedanta. His teachings fostered a more tolerant form of mainstream spirituality in Europe and North America and forever changed the Western relationship to meditation and spirituality. Guru to the World traces Vivekananda’s transformation from son of a Calcutta-based attorney into saffron-robed ascetic. At the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he fascinated audiences with teachings from Hinduism, Western esoteric spirituality, physics, and the sciences of the mind, in the process advocating a more inclusive conception of religion and expounding the evils of colonialism. Vivekananda won many disciples, most prominently the Irish activist Margaret Noble, who disseminated his ideas in the face of much disdain for the wisdom of a “subject race.” At home, he challenged the notion that religion was antithetical to nationalist goals, arguing that Hinduism was intimately connected with Indian identity. Ruth Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East-West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas.

Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal

Print and Publishing in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Tapti Roy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429673515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book reconstructs the history of print and publishing in colonial Bengal by tracing the unexpected journey of Bharat Chandra’s Bidyasundar, the first book published by a Bengali entrepreneur. The introduction of printing technology by the British in Bengal expanded the scope of publication and consumption of books significantly. This book looks at the developments and the parallel publishing initiatives of that time. It examines local enterprises in colonial Bengal engaged in producing and selling books and explores the ways in which they charted out a cultural space in the 19th century. The work sheds fresh light on book production and the culture of print, and narrates the processes behind the printing of books to understand the multi-layered literary practices they sustained. A valuable addition to the history of publishing in India, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of South Asian and Indian history, Bengali literature, media and cultural studies, and print and publishing studies. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Bengal and the Bengali diaspora.

Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal

Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal PDF Author: Imma Ramos
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351840010
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Reviving Sati's corpse: Mother India tours and Hindutva in the twenty-first century -- Bibliography -- Index

Yoga in Modern Hinduism

Yoga in Modern Hinduism PDF Author: Knut A. Jacobsen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351624741
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The Sāṃkhyayoga institution of Kāpil Maṭh is a religious organisation with a small tradition of followers which emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the renunciant and yogin Hariharānanda Āraṇya. This tradition developed during the same period in which modern yoga was born and forms a chapter in the expansion of yoga traditions in modern Hinduism. The book analyses the yoga teaching of Hariharānanda Āraṇya (1869-1947) and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, its origin, history and contemporary manifestations, and this tradition’s connection to the expansion of yoga and the Yogasūtra in modern Hinduism. The Sāṃkhyayoga of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition is based on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, on a number of texts in Sanskrit and Bengali written by their gurus, and on the lifestyle of the renunciant yogin living isolated in a cave. The book investigates Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s connection to pre-modern yoga traditions and the impact of modern production and transmission of knowledge on his interpretations of yoga. The book connects the Kāpil Maṭh tradition to the nineteenth century transformations of Bengali religious culture of the educated upper class that led to the production of a new type of yogin. The book analyses Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition, its current teachings and practices, and looks at what Sāṃkhyayogins do and what Sāṃkhyayoga is as a yoga practice. A valuable contribution to recent and ongoing debates, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Indology, Indian philosophy, Hindu Studies and Yoga Studies.

Akshay Kumar Dutta and Public Culture in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

Akshay Kumar Dutta and Public Culture in Nineteenth-Century Bengal PDF Author: Sumit Chakrabarti
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009339826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Locates Akshay Kumar Datta as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia

Religion, Mysticism, and Transcultural Entanglements in Modern South Asia PDF Author: Soumen Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303149637X
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Zusammenfassung: "An insightful study of the spiritual quest undertaken by an impressive array of South Asian intellectuals who reappraised the very meaning of religion. Far from being a mode of inward-looking cultural defense, Soumen Mukherjee convincingly interprets mysticism and spirituality as a cosmopolitan pursuit by creative thinkers delving into devotional traditions of India's past while responding to global challenges of the early twentieth century." -- Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University "A detailed and erudite study of the way in which mysticism and spirituality came to dominate Indian forms of selfhood and self-making from the first half of the twentieth century. Part of a global debate spanning Asia, Europe, and America, interest in the esoteric and metaphysical distinguished Indian thinkers from their peers in other countries while nevertheless joining them in conversation to make for a truly global debate on the meaning and freedom of the self." -- Faisal Devji, Professor of Indian History, University of Oxford and Fellow, St Antony's College "In India, as in many other Asian contexts, claims of modernity have sat uneasily with histories and traditions of mysticism and spirituality... This outstanding book helps us break out of such unproductive dichotomies by focusing on religious and cultural discussions in India in the early twentieth century... Yet, this riveting book is neither conventionally parochial nor fashionably global-- it hypostasizes 'spiritual cosmopolitans' situating thinkers within contexts of transregional religious movements and networks." --Samita Sen, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge and Fellow, Trinity College This book explores the location of spirituality and mysticism in modern Indian religious and intellectual life. It examines select personalities and their ideas since the early twentieth century, their role in the interwoven spheres of socio-religious and political thought, and in burgeoning spiritual imaginaries, often at the intersection of academic and public discourse. As part of a global ecumene connected by affective bonds, these spiritual cosmopolitans often defied binary frameworks (East/ West; imperial core/ periphery; colonizer/ colonized), and in the upshot reappraised and recast the very concept of religion in response to overarching 'this-worldly' exigencies. Soumen Mukherjee teaches History at Presidency University in Kolkata. He is the author of Ismailism and Islam in Modern South Asia: Community and Identity in the Age of Religious Internationals (2017).

Religion and Rabindranath Tagore

Religion and Rabindranath Tagore PDF Author: Translated from Bengali with an introduction by Amiya P. Sen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199089337
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
This work focuses exclusively on Rabindranath Tagore's sermons/addresses and miscellaneous prose writings in Bengali. With a substantive introduction by Amiya P. Sen identifying various stages in the evolution of Tagore's religious thoughts, beginning from about the 1880s, the book includes representative writings from each of the stage so identified. It brings to light some of Tagore's speeches and writings on religion in the pre-Gitanjali phase, which are largely unknown and un-appreciated. The sermons collectively known as Santiniketan (delivered between 1908 and 1914) and which perhaps carry his deepest spiritual insights is a case in this point. Among other important essays of this genre yet un-translated and relatively unknown are those included in the collections Dharma (Religion), Alochana(Criticism), Parichay(Introduction), and Sanchay (Collection). This volume intends to recover them in translation.

Ethics, Distance, and Accountability

Ethics, Distance, and Accountability PDF Author: Shomik Dasgupta
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190993014
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Rammohun Roy (c.1772-1833) is counted amongst the most influential intellectuals of Modern India. But even after a century of debate and enquiry, scholars are still not quite sure whether he was a consistent and articulate political thinker, or a man of intellectual compromise and paradox. This book argues that Rammohun was a consistent thinker who creatively responded to the political challenges of the East India Company's government in India by reading deeply into Sanskritic and Indo-Persian intellectual traditions to develop a political thought of his own. Rammohun's political thought was concerned with three distinct but related themes: i) the restructuring of the East India Company's administration from a distant and invisible government at London to Calcutta; ii) the importance of ethical practice in Bengali society; and iii) the legal and ethical obligation of the Company to be accountable to its subjects. Rammohun consistently stressed the importance of societal ethics and highlighted the consequences of the distance between London and Bengal on governmental accountability. A unity of thought can thus be identified in his work.

The Defining Moments in Bengal

The Defining Moments in Bengal PDF Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199089345
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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Book Description
This work explores some of the constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from 'Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943 and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs and the literature of the time to tell his story. Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.