Rebels, Wives, Saints

Rebels, Wives, Saints PDF Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Rebels, Wives, Saints, acclaimed scholar Tanika Sarkar continues her revolutionary scholarship on women, religion, and nationhood in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe Sarkar describes in Rebels, Wives, Saints centers around symbols of women as both defiled and deified, exemplified in the idea of woman as widow and woman as goddess. The nation, Sarkar explains, is imagined as a woman-goddess within a country comprising plural cultural traditions. Sarkar also broadens the discussion to consider male reformers who battle Hindu conservatives, a Hindu novelist who idealizes nationalism as a means for overcoming Muslim influence, male-dominant social norms, and theatre and censorship. Throughout the book, Sarkar deploys her trademark focus on small, specific, emotional defining moments in order to arrive at a larger, compelling picture that reveals how people actually feel and experience life in Bengal.

Rebels, Wives, Saints

Rebels, Wives, Saints PDF Author: Tanika Sarkar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Rebels, Wives, Saints, acclaimed scholar Tanika Sarkar continues her revolutionary scholarship on women, religion, and nationhood in colonial Bengal. The colonial universe Sarkar describes in Rebels, Wives, Saints centers around symbols of women as both defiled and deified, exemplified in the idea of woman as widow and woman as goddess. The nation, Sarkar explains, is imagined as a woman-goddess within a country comprising plural cultural traditions. Sarkar also broadens the discussion to consider male reformers who battle Hindu conservatives, a Hindu novelist who idealizes nationalism as a means for overcoming Muslim influence, male-dominant social norms, and theatre and censorship. Throughout the book, Sarkar deploys her trademark focus on small, specific, emotional defining moments in order to arrive at a larger, compelling picture that reveals how people actually feel and experience life in Bengal.

Guru to the World

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

Get Book Here

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.

Much Ado Over Coffee

Much Ado Over Coffee PDF Author: Bhaswati Bhattacharya
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on oral history, fiction, fascinating intellectual gossip, and records of the Coffee Board of India, this study is a multi-sited ethnography of the Indian Coffee House, possibly the world’s first coffee house chain. It offers a critical analysis of adda (informal meetings) of the educated middle class in Allahabad, Calcutta and Delhi. The coffee house became the new socio-intellectual nerve centre, replacing the neigbourhood tea shops, and creating an entirely different social space. This book will have line drawings and cartoons as well as archival photographs.

Living with Religious Diversity

Living with Religious Diversity PDF Author: Sonia Sikka
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317370996
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Looking beyond exclusively state-oriented solutions to the management of religious diversity, this book explores ways of fostering respectful, non-violent and welcoming social relations among religious communities. It examines the question of how to balance religious diversity, individual rights and freedoms with a common national identity and moral consensus. The essays discuss the interface between state and civil society in ‘secular’ countries and look at case studies from the the West and India. They study themes such as religious education, religious diversity, pluralism, inter-religious relations and exchanges, dalits and religion, and issues arising from the lived experience of religious diversity in various countries. The volume asserts that if religious violence crosses borders, so do ideas about how to live together peacefully, theological reflection on pluralism, and lived practices of friendship across the boundaries of religious identity-groupings. Bringing together interdisciplinary scholarship from across the world, the book will interest scholars and students of philosophy, religious studies, political science, sociology and history.

The Politics of Belonging in India

The Politics of Belonging in India PDF Author: Daniel J. Rycroft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136791140
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the 1990s, the Indigenous movement worldwide has become increasingly relevant to research in India, re-shaping the terms of engagement with Adivasi (Indigenous/tribal) peoples and their pasts. This book responds to the growing need for an inter-disciplinary re-assessment of Tribal studies in postcolonial India and defines a new agenda for Adivasi studies. It considers the existing conceptual and historical parameters of Tribal studies, as a means of addressing new approaches to histories of de-colonization and patterns of identity-formation that have become visible since national independence. Contributors address a number of important concerns, including the meaning of Indigenous studies in the context of globalised academic and political imaginaries, and the possibilities and pitfalls of constructions of indigeneity as both a foundational and a relational concept. A series of short editorial essays provide theoretical clarity to issues of representation, resistance, agency, recognition and marginality. The book is an essential read for students and scholars of Indian Sociology, Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Indigenous studies.

The Doctor and Mrs. A.

The Doctor and Mrs. A. PDF Author: Sarah Pinto
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823286681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
Just before India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. The published analysis documents a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. “Mrs. A.” (as she is known) turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book explores the conversation between Mrs. A. and Satya Nand, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a dynamic concept of counter-ethics. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the west did not invent feminism, that psychiatry’s history of innovation and creativity is global, and that ethical thinking does not need to center on western myths or paradigms.

Family, School and Nation

Family, School and Nation PDF Author: Nivedita Sen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317410629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
This seminal work examines the concurrence of childhood rebellion and conformity in Bengali literary texts (including adult texts), a pertinent yet unexplored area, making it a first of its kind. It is a study of the voice of child protagonists across children’s and adult literature in Bengali vis-à-vis the institutions of family, the education system, and the nationalist movement in the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries.

Fathers in the Motherland

Fathers in the Motherland PDF Author: Swapna M Banerjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9354972551
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
This monograph breaks new ground by weaving stories of fathers and children into the history of gender, family and nation in colonial India. Focusing on the reformist Bengali Hindu and Brahmo communities, the author contends that fatherhood assumed new meaning and significance in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. During this time of social and political change, fathers extended their roles beyond breadwinning to take an active part in rearing their children. Utilizing pedagogic literature, articles in scientific journals, autobiographies, correspondence, and published essays, Fathers in a Motherland documents the different ways the authority and power of the father was invoked and constituted both metaphorically and in everyday experiences. Exploring specific moments when educated men—as biological fathers, literary activists, and educators—assumed guardianship and became crucial agents of change, Banerjee interrogates the connections between fatherhood and masculinity. The last chapter of the book moves beyond Bengal and draws on the lives of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru to provide a broader salience to its argument. Reclaiming two missing links in Indian history-fathers and children-the book argues that biological and imaginary "fathers" assumed the moral guardianship of an incipient nation and rested their hopes and dreams on the future generation.

Unfinished Gestures

Unfinished Gestures PDF Author: Davesh Soneji
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226768090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book Here

Book Description
'Unfinished Gestures' presents the social and cultural history of courtesans in South India, focusing on their encounters with colonial modernity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore PDF Author: Kumkum Bhattacharya
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3319008374
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 111

Get Book Here

Book Description
This new addition to Springer’s series on Key Thinkers in World Education tracks the intellectual and philosophical journey of a trail-blazing innovator whose ideas have fired the imaginations of progressive educationalists for almost a century. The volume’s in-depth analysis of the educational philosophy of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore offers an unrivalled focus on his highly influential views. Tagore—poet, internationalist, humanist, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature—lived on the cusp of change between two momentous centuries in world civilization and foresaw the dissolution of colonialism and the globalization of culture. His ideas on education placed the creative individual at the centre of the quest for knowledge. Eschewing the artificial distinctions between elementary and higher learning, he advocated the importance of sowing the seed of humanism as early as possible, and fostering the individual’s enjoyment of education as well as their courage to challenge conventions. In doing so, he anticipated the modern concern with critical thinking at the same time as he was encouraging independence of thought and action as a counter to colonial oppression and condescension. Concise yet thorough, this volume on one of the most original thinkers of the last century covers every aspect of Tagore’s highly original educational philosophy.