Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India

Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India PDF Author: Akshaya Mukul
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9352772954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 634

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the early 1920s, Jaydayal Goyandka and Hanuman Prasad Poddar, two Marwari businessmen-turned-spiritualists, set up the Gita Press and Kalyan magazine. As of early 2014, Gita Press had sold close to 72 million copies of the Gita, 70 million copies of Tulsidas's works and 19 million copies of scriptures like the Puranas and Upanishads. And while most other journals of the period, whether religious, literary or political, survive only in press archives, Kalyan now has a circulation of over 200,000, and its English counterpart, Kalyana-Kalpataru, of over 100,000. Gita Press created an empire that spoke in a militant Hindu nationalist voice and imagined a quantifiable, reward-based piety. Almost every notable leader and prominent voice, including Mahatma Gandhi, was roped in to speak for the cause. Cow slaughter, Hindi as national language and the rejection of Hindustani, the Hindu Code Bill, the creation of Pakistan, India's secular Constitution: Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru were the spokespersons of the Hindu position on these and other matters. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters - buccaneering entrepreneurs and hustling editors, nationalist ideologues and religious fanatics - this is essential (and exciting) reading for our times.

Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India

Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India PDF Author: Akshaya Mukul
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 9352772954
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 634

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the early 1920s, Jaydayal Goyandka and Hanuman Prasad Poddar, two Marwari businessmen-turned-spiritualists, set up the Gita Press and Kalyan magazine. As of early 2014, Gita Press had sold close to 72 million copies of the Gita, 70 million copies of Tulsidas's works and 19 million copies of scriptures like the Puranas and Upanishads. And while most other journals of the period, whether religious, literary or political, survive only in press archives, Kalyan now has a circulation of over 200,000, and its English counterpart, Kalyana-Kalpataru, of over 100,000. Gita Press created an empire that spoke in a militant Hindu nationalist voice and imagined a quantifiable, reward-based piety. Almost every notable leader and prominent voice, including Mahatma Gandhi, was roped in to speak for the cause. Cow slaughter, Hindi as national language and the rejection of Hindustani, the Hindu Code Bill, the creation of Pakistan, India's secular Constitution: Kalyan and Kalyana-Kalpataru were the spokespersons of the Hindu position on these and other matters. Featuring an extraordinary cast of characters - buccaneering entrepreneurs and hustling editors, nationalist ideologues and religious fanatics - this is essential (and exciting) reading for our times.

The Oppressive Present

The Oppressive Present PDF Author: Sudhir Chandra
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317559940
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Get Book Here

Book Description
Marking a departure from studies on history and literature in colonial India, The Oppressive Present explores the emergence of social consciousness as a result of and in response to the colonial mediation in the late nineteenth century. In focusing on contemporary literature in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Marathi, it charts an epochal change in the gradual loss of the old pre-colonial self and the configuration of a new, colonized self. It reveals that the ‘oppressive present’ of generations of subjugated Indians remains so for their freed descendants: the consciousness of those colonized generations continues to characterize the ‘modern educated Indian’. The book proposes ambivalence rather than binary categories — such as communalism and nationalism, communalism and secularism, modernity and tradition — as key to understanding the making of this consciousness. This cross-disciplinary volume will prove essential to scholars and students of modern and contemporary Indian history and society, comparative literature and post-colonial studies.

Hinduism Before Reform

Hinduism Before Reform PDF Author: Brian A. Hatcher
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988221
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Get Book Here

Book Description
A bold retelling of the origins of contemporary Hinduism, and an argument against the long-established notion of religious reform. By the early eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire was in decline, and the East India Company was making inroads into the subcontinent. A century later Christian missionaries, Hindu teachers, Muslim saints, and Sikh rebels formed the colorful religious fabric of colonial India. Focusing on two early nineteenth-century Hindu communities, the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, and their charismatic figureheads—the “cosmopolitan” Rammohun Roy and the “parochial” Swami Narayan—Brian Hatcher explores how urban and rural people thought about faith, ritual, and gods. Along the way he sketches a radical new view of the origins of contemporary Hinduism and overturns the idea of religious reform. Hinduism Before Reform challenges the rigid structure of revelation-schism-reform-sect prevalent in much history of religion. Reform, in particular, plays an important role in how we think about influential Hindu movements and religious history at large. Through the lens of reform, one doctrine is inevitably backward-looking while another represents modernity. From this comparison flows a host of simplistic conclusions. Instead of presuming a clear dichotomy between backward and modern, Hatcher is interested in how religious authority is acquired and projected. Hinduism Before Reform asks how religious history would look if we eschewed the obfuscating binary of progress and tradition. There is another way to conceptualize the origins and significance of these two Hindu movements, one that does not trap them within the teleology of a predetermined modernity.

My Father Balliah

My Father Balliah PDF Author: Y.B. Satyanarayana
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9350294370
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Get Book Here

Book Description
The extraordinary story of a Dalit family in southern India Poised to inherit a huge tract of land gifted by the Nizam to his father, twenty-one-year-old Narsiah loses it to a feudal lord. This triggers his migration from Vangapally, his ancestral village in the Karimnagar District of Telangana - the single most important event that would free his family and future generations from caste oppression. Years later, it saves his son Baliah from the fate reserved for most Dalits: a life of humiliation and bonded labour. A book written with the desire to make known the inhumanity of untouchability and the acquiescence and internalization of this condition by the Dalits themselves, Y.B. Satyanarayana chronicles the relentless struggle of three generations of his family in this biography of his father. A narrative that derives its strength from the simplicitywith which it is told, My Father Baliah is a story of great hardship and greater resilience.

Purifying the Earthly Body of God

Purifying the Earthly Body of God PDF Author: Lance E. Nelson
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791439234
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Get Book Here

Book Description
An interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between religion and environment in Hinduism.

The Hindus

The Hindus PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781594202056
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 808

Get Book Here

Book Description
An engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world's oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds. The Hindus brings a fascinating multiplicity of actors and stories to the stage to show how brilliant and creative thinkers have kept Hinduism alive in ways that other scholars have not fully explored. In this unique and authoritative account, debates about Hindu traditions become platforms to consider history as a whole.

A Hindu Education

A Hindu Education PDF Author: Leah Renold
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199087768
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides a comprehensive account of the Banaras Hindu University (BHU), India's first residential university and the result of Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya's efforts to establish a Hindu university in the country. This book not only discusses the origins and development of the BHU, but also the challenges and issues that the school faced. It studies Malaviya's efforts to introduce religious education in BHU—and even make it mandatory—and his response to Mahatma Gandhi's efforts to boycott the university. It also describes the lives of the students in the campus and its academic, intellectual, and cultural atmosphere. This book also considers the role and influence of the British in the development of Hindu education during the late colonial period and the importance of the university's location.

A Hindu Theology of Liberation

A Hindu Theology of Liberation PDF Author: Anantanand Rambachan
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438454554
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discusses Hindu Advaita Ved?nta as a philosophy of social justice for the modern world. This expansive and accessible work provides an introduction to the Hindu tradition of Advaita Ved?nta and brings it into discussion with contemporary concerns. Advaita, the non-dual school of Indian philosophy and spirituality associated with ?a?kara, is often seen as “other-worldly,” regarding the world as an illusion. Anantanand Rambachan has played a central role in presenting a more authentic Advaita, one that reveals how Advaita is positive about the here and now. The first part of the book presents the hermeneutics and spirituality of Advaita, using textual sources, classical commentary, and modern scholarship. The book’s second section considers the implications of Advaita for ethical and social challenges: patriarchy, homophobia, ecological crisis, child abuse, and inequality. Rambachan establishes how Advaita’s non-dual understanding of reality provides the ground for social activism and the values that advocate for justice, dignity, and the equality of human beings. “Rambachan has written an original, creative, and provocative book that will assure that Hinduism has a greater voice in the general arena of interreligious dialogue.” — Paul F. Knitter, Union Theological Seminary “This is an important contribution to the advancement of constructive work in Hindu theology, comparative theology, and the study of South Asian religious traditions. It has the potential to revolutionize how scholars view Hinduism generally, and Advaita Ved?nta in particular.” — Jeffery D. Long, Elizabethtown College

The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita PDF Author: Eknath Easwaran
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458778436
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Bhagavad Gita: one of three new editions of the books in Eknath Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality series On this path, effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure. Even a little effort towards spiritual awareness will protec...

Unifying Hinduism

Unifying Hinduism PDF Author: Andrew J. Nicholson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149875
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book Here

Book Description
Some postcolonial theorists argue that the idea of a single system of belief known as "Hinduism" is a creation of nineteenth-century British imperialists. Andrew J. Nicholson introduces another perspective: although a unified Hindu identity is not as ancient as some Hindus claim, it has its roots in innovations within South Asian philosophy from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. During this time, thinkers treated the philosophies of Vedanta, Samkhya, and Yoga, along with the worshippers of Visnu, Siva, and Sakti, as belonging to a single system of belief and practice. Instead of seeing such groups as separate and contradictory, they re-envisioned them as separate rivers leading to the ocean of Brahman, the ultimate reality. Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions, including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati, Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts—like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy—have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.