Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India

Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India PDF Author: Swagato Ganguly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351584677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry. It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which inform even contemporary descriptions of the subcontinent. Using idolatry as a concept-metaphor, the book traverses an ambitious path through the works of William Jones, James Mill, Friedrich Max Müller, John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, E. M. Forster, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee. It reveals how religion and paganism, history and literature, Oriental thought and Western metaphysics, and social reform and education were unfolded and debated by them. The author underlines how idolatry, irrationality and social disorder came to be linked by discourses informed by Enlightenment, missionary rhetoric and colonial reason. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in history, anthropology, literature, culture studies, philosophy, religion, sociology and South Asian studies as well as anyone interested in colonial studies and histories of the Enlightenment.

Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India

Idolatry and the Colonial Idea of India PDF Author: Swagato Ganguly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351584677
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry. It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which inform even contemporary descriptions of the subcontinent. Using idolatry as a concept-metaphor, the book traverses an ambitious path through the works of William Jones, James Mill, Friedrich Max Müller, John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, E. M. Forster, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee. It reveals how religion and paganism, history and literature, Oriental thought and Western metaphysics, and social reform and education were unfolded and debated by them. The author underlines how idolatry, irrationality and social disorder came to be linked by discourses informed by Enlightenment, missionary rhetoric and colonial reason. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in history, anthropology, literature, culture studies, philosophy, religion, sociology and South Asian studies as well as anyone interested in colonial studies and histories of the Enlightenment.

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism

The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism PDF Author: R. S. Sugirtharajah
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190888458
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 793

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Biblical Criticism is a comprehensive treatment of a relatively new form of scholarship-one of the most compelling and contested theories to emerge in recent times, and a topic that actively seeks to expand the ways in which the Bible can be studied, interpreted, and applied. Generally speaking, postcolonialism aims to critique and dismantle hegemonic worldviews and power structures, while giving voice to previously marginalized peoples and systems of thought. This approach, often varied in form, has inevitably engaged with the text and reception of the Bible, a scripture that Western colonizers introduced to-and often imposed upon-their colonial subjects. With a globally diverse list of contributors, the Handbook aims to cover the perspective and context of the authors of the Bible, as well as the modern experiences of imperialism, resistance, decolonization, and nationalism. Moreover, the volume includes both a theoretical overview and an exploration of how the field intersects with related areas, such as gender studies, race, postmodernism, and liberation theology.

Hindu Iconoclasts

Hindu Iconoclasts PDF Author: Noel Salmond
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554581281
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 187

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Book Description
Why, Salmond asks, would nineteenth-century Hindus who come from an iconic religious tradition voice a kind of invective one might expect from Hebrew prophets, Muslim iconoclasts, or Calvinists? Rammohun was a wealthy Bengali, intimately associated with the British Raj and familiar with European languages, religion, and currents of thought. Dayananda was an itinerant Gujarati ascetic who did not speak English and was not integrated into the culture of the colonizers. Salmond’s examination of Dayananda after Rammohun complicates the easy assumption that nineteenth-century Hindu iconoclasm is simply a case of borrowing an attitude from Muslim or Protestant traditions. Salmond examines the origins of these reformers’ ideas by considering the process of diffusion and independent invention—that is, whether ideas are borrowed from other cultures, or arise spontaneously and without influence from external sources. Examining their writings from multiple perspectives, Salmond suggests that Hindu iconoclasm was a complex movement whose attitudes may have arisen from independent invention and were then reinforced by diffusion. Although idolatry became the symbolic marker of their reformist programs, Rammohun’s and Dayananda’s agendas were broader than the elimination of image-worship. These Hindu reformers perceived a link between image-rejection in religion and the unification and modernization of society, part of a process that Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world.” Focusing on idolatry in nineteenth-century India, Hindu Iconoclasts investigates the encounter of civilizations, an encounter that continues to resonate today.

Stages of Capital

Stages of Capital PDF Author: Ritu Birla
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082239247X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.

Polytheism and Indology

Polytheism and Indology PDF Author: Edward P. Butler
Publisher: Notion Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
India has been producing knowledge for thousands of years. But entry into the contemporary globalized setting of knowledge has demanded a reckoning with powers that have sought to determine exclusively the terms upon which India might enter. The nineteenth century saw the colonization of India and its reduction to an object of study, rather than a producer of knowledge for itself and the world. This book explains why the arrival of India upon the European intellectual scene provoked a crisis, the response to which was the creation of the discipline of Indology, with the effective mission of taming India’s spiritual traditions by gaining control over the interpretation of their sacred texts. Polytheism and Indology makes the results of Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee’s inquiry in The Nay Science: A History of German Indology available in a more concise form, as well as broadening and deepening the scope of their inquiry.

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy PDF Author: Brian Christopher Jones
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1788971108
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy investigates the increasingly important subject of constitutional idolatry and its effects on democracy. Focussed around whether the UK should draft a single written constitution, it suggests that constitutions have been drastically and persistently over-sold throughout the years, and that their wider importance and effects are not nearly as significant as constitutional advocates maintain. Chapters analyse whether written constitutions can educate the citizenry, invigorate voter turnout, or deliver ‘We the People’ sovereignty.

Hindutva before Hindutva

Hindutva before Hindutva PDF Author: Amiya P. Sen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040117988
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book weaves the past with the present to trace and analyze the distinctive but reiterative evocations of Hindutva ideology in the modern-colonial period. It studies the concept of Hindutva as understood by its first major spokesperson Chandranath Basu, a formidable late nineteenth-century scholar-critic. The author examines the new rhetoric that has shaped Hindu ideologies in a colonial-modern context by foregrounding debates between Chandranath Basu and radical revisionists such as Rabindranath Tagore. It provides original translations of Basu’s works and brings to light a long-neglected professional literary critic. A unique contribution, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of religion studies, history, postcolonialism, literature, Indian political thought, Indian history, political science, Hindu studies, Hindusim, sociology and political ideology, and South Asian studies.

Orientalism and Religion

Orientalism and Religion PDF Author: Richard King
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134632347
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.

Was Hinduism Invented?

Was Hinduism Invented? PDF Author: Brian K. Pennington
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198037295
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "Hinduism" came into being. He argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalists and missionaries. Rather, he says, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors as well, who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, sati, tolerance, and conversion.

Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism

Europe, India, and the Limits of Secularism PDF Author: Jakob de Roover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199460977
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Even though the crisis of secularism was declared decades ago, it remains unresolved. This book argues that its roots are internal to the liberal model of secularism, which emerged from the religious dynamics of the Protestant Reformation. In Europe and India, this model has gone hand in hand with an intolerant anticlerical theology that rejects certain traditions as evil political religion. Consequently, liberal secularism often harms local forms of coexistence rather than nourishing them.