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Colonial Hinduism
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Book Synopsis The Emergence of Modern Hinduism by : Richard S. Weiss
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Hinduism written by Richard S. Weiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.
Book Synopsis Rethinking Religion in India by : Esther Bloch
Download or read book Rethinking Religion in India written by Esther Bloch and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-24 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction of Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominant understanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. According to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as features of a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts. Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonial ‘construction’. This book focuses on the different versions, arguments and counter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct of colonialism. Bringing together the different positions in the debate, it provides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examine the argument. Organized in two parts, the first half of the book provides new analyses of historical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoretical questions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism. Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a result of a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colonialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India; and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduism only exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empirical reality in India. This volume offers new insights into the nature of the construction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of the History of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.
Book Synopsis Was Hinduism Invented? by : Brian K. Pennington
Download or read book Was Hinduism Invented? written by Brian K. Pennington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Who Invented Hinduism by : David N. Lorenzen
Download or read book Who Invented Hinduism written by David N. Lorenzen and published by Yoda Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who Invented Hinduism? presents ten masterly essays on the history of religious movements and ideologies in India by the eminent scholar of religious studies, David N. Lorenzen. Stretching from a discussion on the role of religion, skin colour and language in distinguishing between the Aryas and the Dasas, to a study of the ways in which contact between Hindus, on the one hand, and Muslims and Christians, on the other, changed the nature of the Hindu religion, the volume asks two principal questions: how did the religion of the Hindus affect the course of Indian history and what sort of an impact did the events of Indian history have on the Hindu religion. The essays cast a critical eye on scholarly Arguments which are based as much on current fashion or on conventional wisdom as on evidence available in historical documents. Taking issue with renowned scholars such as Louis Dumont, Romila Thapar, Thomas Trautmann and Dipesh Chakrabarty on some central conceptions of the religious history of India, Lorenzen establishes alternative positions on the same through a thorough and compelling look at a vast array of literary sources. Touching upon some controversial arguments, this well-timed and insightful volume draws attention to the unavoidably influential role of religion in the history of India, and in doing so, it creates a wider space for further discussion focusing on this central issue.
Download or read book Colonial Hinduism written by Amiya P. Sen and published by Mandala Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a tightly woven narrative, historian of modern India Amiya P. Sen traces the shifting self-understanding of Hindus in the light of the many challenges posed by the British colonial encounter, offering an accessible yet analytically rich book on the birth and development of modern Hinduism, which will be of interest to students and the interested general reader alike. Change has been endemic to Hindu cultural life from its inception. It was nevertheless in the modern era, with the advent of British colonial rule in India, that this change had its most far-reaching consequences, profoundly shaping the landscape of Hinduism as we encounter it today. In Colonial Hinduism: An Introduction, Amiya P. Sen charts this many-layered historical process in a refreshingly accessible narrative. Over seven chapters, this book traces the shifting self-understanding of the Hindus in the light of new challenges posed by the West. This encounter brought forth a new Hindu consciousness that was prepared to critique India’s perceived past irrationalities and superstitions but also reject what it took to be the excesses of the materialistic West. Over the years, a surging Hindu nationalism and anti-colonial sentiment sought to counter the material advances of the West with the self-acclaimed spiritual excellence of India in order to to secure for India a rightful place within global civilisation. In time, however, Hindu nationalism produced its own excesses, the ramifications of which India is still contending. Colonial Hinduism: An Introduction fulfils the long standing need for an accessible yet analytically rich book on the birth and development of modern Hinduism, which will be of interest to students and the interested general reader alike. OXFORD CENTRE SERIES: Colonial Hinduism: An Introduction is part of The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Mandala Publishing Series. This book joins other accessible texts on Hindu Studies authored by expert scholars, including The Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation and Study Guide; The Hindu Temple and Its Sacred Landscape; and Women in the Hindu World. EXPERT AUTHOR: Amiya P. Sen, PhD, is a historian with an interest in the intellectual and cultural history of modern India. Sen has been Agatha Harrison Fellow at the University of Oxford, Shivdasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Heinrich Zimmer Chair at the University of Heidelberg, and Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi, He has served the Universities of Delhi, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. EDUCATION AID: With the integration of discussion questions, suggested further reading, glossary of terms, and images throughout, this book serves as a comprehensive resource for both classwork and independent study of modern Hinduism.
Book Synopsis Imagining Hinduism by : Sharada Sugirtharajah
Download or read book Imagining Hinduism written by Sharada Sugirtharajah and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-02-24 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining Hinduism examines how Hinduism has been defined, interpreted and manufactured through Western categorizations, from the foreign interventions of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Orientalists and missionaries, to the present day. Sugirtharajah argues that ever since early Orientalists 'discovered' the ancient Sanskrit texts and the Hindu 'golden age', the West has nurtured a complex and ambivalent fascination with Hinduism, ranging from romantic admiration to ridicule. At the same time, Hindu discourse has drawn upon Orientalist representations in order to redefine Hindu identity. As the first comprehensive work to bring postcolonial critique to the study of Hinduism, this is essential reading for those seeking a full understanding of Hinduism.
Book Synopsis Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India by : Michael Bergunder
Download or read book Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India written by Michael Bergunder and published by Primus Books. This book was released on 2011 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Hinduism Before Reform by : Brian A. Hatcher
Download or read book Hinduism Before Reform written by Brian A. Hatcher and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Orientalism and Religion by : Richard King
Download or read book Orientalism and Religion written by Richard King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Was Hinduism Invented? by : Brian K. Pennington
Download or read book Was Hinduism Invented? written by Brian K. Pennington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-28 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pennington retells the story of Christian's and Hindu's reception of each other in early 19th century Bengal, giving prominence to the power of the respective worldviews to shape the encounter and to help produce the very religions that colonialism thought it 'discovered'.
Book Synopsis History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self by : Aparna Devare
Download or read book History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self written by Aparna Devare and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking the contentious debates surrounding historical evidence and history writing between secularists and Hindu nationalists as a starting point, this book seeks to understand the origins of a growing historical consciousness in contemporary India, especially amongst Hindus. The broad question it poses is: Why has ‘history’ become such an important site of identity, conflict and self-definition amongst modern Hindus, especially when Hinduism is known to have been notoriously impervious to history? As modern ideas regarding notions of history came to India with colonialism, it turns to the colonial period as the ‘moment of encounter’ with such ideas. The book examines three distinct moments in the Hindu self through the lives and writings of lower-caste public figure Jotiba Phule, ‘moderate’ nationalist M. G. Ranade and Hindu nationalist V. D. Savarkar. Through a close reading of original writings, speeches and biographical material, it is demonstrated that these three individuals were engaged with a modern historical and rationalist approach. However, the same material is also used to argue that Phule and Ranade viewed religion as living, contemporaneous and capable of informing both their personal and political lives. Savarkar, the ‘explicitly Hindu’ leader, on the contrary, held Hindu practices and traditions in contempt, confining them to historical analysis while denying any role for religion as spirituality or morality in contemporary political life. While providing some historical context, this volume highlights the philosophical/ political ideas and actions of the three individuals discussed. It integrates aspects of their lives as central to understanding their politics.
Book Synopsis Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930 by : Prabhu Bapu
Download or read book Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930 written by Prabhu Bapu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hindu nationalism has emerged as a political ideology represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. This book explores the campaign for Hindu unity and organisation in the context of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in colonial north India in the early twentieth century. It argues that India's partition in 1947 was a result of the campaign and politics of the Hindu rightwing rather than the Islamist politics of the Muslim League alone. The book explains that the Mahasabha articulated Hindu nationalist ideology as a means of constructing a distinct Hindu political identity and unity among the Hindus in conflict with the Muslims in the country. It looks at the Mahasabha’s ambivalence with the Indian National Congress due to an extreme ideological opposition, and goes on to argue that the Mahasabha had its ideological focus on an anti-Muslim antagonism rather than the anti-British struggle for India’s independence, adding to the difficulties in the negotiations on Hindu-Muslim representation in the country. The book suggests that the Mahasabha had a limited class and regional base and was unable to generate much in the way of a mass movement of its own, but developed a quasi-military wing, besides its involvement in a number of popular campaigns. Bridging the gap in Indian historiography by focusing on the development and evolution of Hindu nationalism in its formative period, this book is a useful study for students and scholars of Asian Studies and Political History.
Book Synopsis The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad by : Alexander Rocklin
Download or read book The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad written by Alexander Rocklin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can religious freedom be granted to people who do not have a religion? While Indian indentured workers in colonial Trinidad practiced cherished rituals, "Hinduism" was not a widespread category in India at the time. On this Caribbean island, people of South Asian descent and African descent came together—under the watchful eyes of the British rulers—to walk on hot coals for fierce goddesses, summon spirits of the dead, or honor Muslim martyrs, practices that challenged colonial norms for religion and race. Drawing deeply on colonial archives, Alexander Rocklin examines the role of the category of religion in the regulation of the lives of Indian laborers struggling for autonomy. Gradually, Indians learned to narrate the origins, similarities, and differences among their fellows' cosmological views, and to define Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as distinct groups. Their goal in doing this work of subaltern comparative religion, as Rocklin puts it, was to avoid criminalization and to have their rituals authorized as legitimate religion—they wanted nothing less than to gain access to the British promise of religious freedom. With the indenture system's end, the culmination of this politics of recognition was the gradual transformation of Hindus' rituals and the reorganization of their lives—they fabricated a "world religion" called Hinduism.
Book Synopsis Hindu Pluralism by : Elaine M. Fisher
Download or read book Hindu Pluralism written by Elaine M. Fisher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-02-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, Fisher argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism. This work provides a critical resource for understanding how Hinduism developed in the early modern period, a crucial era that set the tenor for religion's role in public life in India through the present day.
Book Synopsis Unifying Hinduism by : Andrew J. Nicholson
Download or read book Unifying Hinduism written by Andrew J. Nicholson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Legacy of Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Bengal by : Ferdinando Sardella
Download or read book The Legacy of Vaiṣṇavism in Colonial Bengal written by Ferdinando Sardella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-11-25 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a focused examination of the Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition in its manifold forms in the pivotal context of British colonialism in South Asia. Bringing together scholars from across the disciplines of social and intellectual history, philology, theology, and anthropology to systematically investigate Vaiṣṇavism in colonial Bengal, this book highlights the significant roles—religious, social, and cultural—that a prominent Hindu devotional current played in the lives of wide and diverse sections of colonial Bengali society. Not only does the book thereby enrich our understanding of the history and development of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism, but it also sheds valuable new light on the texture and dynamics of colonial Hinduism beyond the discursive and social-historical parameters of an entrenched Hindu "Renaissance" paradigm. A landmark in the burgeoning field of Bengali Vaiṣṇava studies, this book will be of interest to scholars of modern Hinduism, religion, and colonial South Asian social and intellectual history.
Book Synopsis Hinduism in the Modern World by : Brian A. Hatcher
Download or read book Hinduism in the Modern World written by Brian A. Hatcher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hinduism in the Modern World presents a new and unprecedented attempt to survey the nature, range, and significance of modern and contemporary Hinduism in South Asia and the global diaspora. Organized to reflect the direction of recent scholarly research, this volume breaks with earlier texts on this subject by seeking to overcome a misleading dichotomy between an elite, intellectualist "modern" Hinduism and the rest of what has so often been misleadingly termed "traditional" or "popular" Hinduism. Without neglecting the significance of modern reformist visions of Hinduism, this book reconceptualizes the meaning of "modern Hinduism" both by expanding its content and by situating its expression within a larger framework of history, ethnography, and contemporary critical theory. This volume equips undergraduate readers with the tools necessary to appreciate the richness and diversity of Hinduism as it has developed during the past two centuries.
