Brahmo Samaj and Indian Civilization
Brahmo Samaj and Indian Civilization

Author: Raj Pruthi

Publisher: Discovery Publishing House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9788171417919

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Indian civilization and culture is not only ancient but it also extensive and varied. Many races and peoples have contributed and enriched it. Its key note is synthesis on the basis of eternal values. Thus the foundations of the two great ideals of Indian civilization-synthesis of cultures and spiritual regeneration of man have been truly laid, on which future structure of India's culture and civilization has been raised. Aim of this series is to compile some perspectives of Indian civilization and culture. It infact, is a romance, telling tale of heroic men, women and their exploits. It is a whole literature in itself, containing code of life, philosophy of social and ethical relations their speculative thoughts and deeds on human problems that is hard to reval. Through such creations alone the harmonies underlying true civilization and culture will one day reconcile the disorders of modern life. This common pool of literature on civilization and culture compiled in this series of volumes, it is hoped will enable the reader, eastern and western, to understand and appreciate currents of world thoughts, as also the deeds and moments of the mind in India, which have a common urge and aspiration that is global prosperity, happiness and peace.

The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind
The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind

Author: David Kopf

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-03-08

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1400869897

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As the forerunners of Indian modernization, the community of Bengali intellectuals known as the Brahmo Samaj played a crucial role in the genesis and development of every major religious, social, and political movement in India from 1820 to 1930. David Kopf launches a comprehensive generation- to-generation study of this group in order to understand the ideological foundations of the modern Indian mind. His book constitutes not only a biographical and a sociological study of the Brahmo Samaj, but also an intellectual history of modern India that ranges from the Unitarian social gospel of Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore's universal humanism and Jessie Bose's scientism. From a variety of biographical sources, many of them in Bengali and never before used in research, the author makes available much valuable information. In his analysis of the interplay between the ideas, the consciousness, and the lives of these early rebels against the Hindu tradition, Professor Kopf reveals the subtle and intricate problems and issues that gradually shaped contemporary Indian consciousness. What emerges from this group portrait is a legacy of innovation and reform that introduced a rationalist tradition of thought, liberal political consciousness, and Indian nationalism, in addition to changing theology and ritual, marriage laws and customs, and the status of women. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus
The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus

Author: Ankur Barua

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-01-18

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 9004445382

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In The Brahmo Samaj and its Vaiṣṇava Milieus: Intersections of Knowledge and Love in Nineteenth Century Bengal, Ankur Barua offers an intellectual history of the motif of religious universalism in the writings of some intellectuals associated with the Brahmo Samaj.

Hinduism Before Reform
Hinduism Before Reform

Author: Brian A. Hatcher

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674988221

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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.

Arya Samaj and Indian Civilization
Arya Samaj and Indian Civilization

Author: R.K. Pruthi

Publisher: Discovery Publishing House

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9788171417803

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Contents: Introduction, Indo-British Civilization, The Life of Dayanand Saraswati, History of Arya Samaj, Organisation and Rituals of Arya Samaj, Arya Samaj in its True Perspective, The Rational Basis of Arya Samaj, Role of Arya Samaj, The Significance of the Arya Samaj, Politics and Arya Samaj, Political Outlook of Aryasamajists, Arya Samaj and Education, D.A.V. Movement in India, The D.A.V. Institutions: Their Past and Future, Dayananda An Apostle of Universal Brotherhood, Is the Arya Samaj Another Religion?, Swamantavyamantavya: My Beliefs and Disbeliefs, Swikarapatra: The List Will and Testament of Dayananda, Library Works of Dayananda.

Keshab
Keshab

Author: John Stevens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 019093493X

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Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84) was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in nineteenth-century Bengal. A religious leader and social reformer, his universalist interpretation of Hinduism found mass appeal in India, and generated considerable interest in Britain. His ideas on British imperial rule, religion and spirituality, global history, universalism and modernity were all influential, and his visit to England made him a celebrity. Many Britons regarded him as a prophet of world-historical significance. Keshab was the subject of extreme adulation and vehement criticism. Accounts tell of large crowds prostrating themselves before him, believing him to be an avatar. Yet he died with relatively few followers, his reputation in both India and Britain largely ruined. As a representative of India, Keshab became emblematic of broad concerns regarding Hinduism and Christianity, science and faith, India and the British Empire. This innovative study explores the transnational historical forces that shaped Keshab's life and work. It offers an alternative religious history of empire, characterized by intercultural dialogue and religious syncretism. A fascinating and often tragic portrait of Keshab's experience of the imperial world, and the ways in which he carried meaning for his contemporaries.

Hindu Iconoclasts
Hindu Iconoclasts

Author: Noel Salmond

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1554581281

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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.