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A collection of Daniélou's writings that builds a bold and cogent defense of India's caste system • Looks at the Hindu caste system not as racist inequality but as a natural ordering of diversity • Reveals the stereotypes of Indian society invented to justify colonialism • Includes never-before-published articles by the internationally recognized Hindu scholar and translator of The Complete Kama Sutra (200,000 copies sold) In classical India social ethics are based on each individual's functional role in society. These ethics vary according to caste in order to maximize the individual's effectiveness in the social context. This is the definition of caste ethics. The Indian caste system is not a hierarchy with some who are privileged and others who are despised; it is a natural ordering, an organizing principle, of a society wherein differences are embraced rather than ignored. In the caste system it is up to the individual to achieve perfection in the state to which he or she is born, since to a certain extent that state also forms part of a person's nature. All people must accomplish their individual spiritual destinies while, as members of a social group, ensuring the continuity of the group and collaborating in creating a favorable framework for all human life--thereby fulfilling the collective destiny of the group. The notion of transmigration provides an equalizing effect on this prescribed system in that today's prince may be reborn as a woodcutter and the Brahman as a shoemaker. In India: A Civilization of Differences, Daniélou explores this seldom-heard side of the caste debate and argues effectively in its favor. This rare collection of the late author's writings contains several never-before-published articles and offers an in-depth look at the structure of Indian society before and after Western colonialism.
'Rajiv Malhotra's insistence on preserving difference with mutual respect - not with mere "tolerance" - is even more pertinent today because the notion of a single universalism is being propounded. There can be no single universalism, even if it assimilates or, in the author's words, "digests", elements from other civilizations' - Kapila Vatsyayan In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, thinker and philosopher Rajiv Malhotra addresses the challenge of a direct and honest engagement on differences, by reversing the gaze, repositioning India from being the observed to the observer and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view. In doing so, he challenges many hitherto unexamined beliefs that both sides hold about themselves and each other. He highlights that while unique historical revelations are the basis for Western religions, dharma emphasizes self-realization in the body here and now. He also points out the integral unity that underpins dharma's metaphysics and contrasts this with Western thought and history as a synthetic unity. Erudite and engaging, Being Different critiques fashionable reductive translations and analyses the West's anxiety over difference and fixation for order which contrast the creative role of chaos in dharma. It concludes with a rebuttal of Western claims of universalism, while recommending a multi-civilizational worldview.
First published in 1965, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline is a strikingly original work, the first real cultural history of India. The main features of the Indian character are traced back into remote antiquity as the natural outgrowth of historical process. Did the change from food gathering and the pastoral life to agriculture make new religions necessary? Why did the Indian cities vanish with hardly a trace and leave no memory? Who were the Aryans – if any? Why should Buddhism, Jainism, and so many other sects of the same type come into being at one time and in the same region? How could Buddhism spread over so large a part of Asia while dying out completely in the land of its origin? What caused the rise and collapse of the Magadhan empire; was the Gupta empire fundamentally different from its great predecessor, or just one more ‘oriental despotism’? These are some of the many questions handled with great insight, yet in the simplest terms, in this stimulating work. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies, South Asian studies and ethnic studies.
In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, "for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow." Yet even today most intelligent non-Indian Americans have little knowledge of Indian history and affairs those lessons have not taken root. This book is an in-depth historical survey of the Indians of the United States, including the Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska, which isolates and analyzes the problems which have beset these people since their first contacts with Europeans. Only in the light of this knowledge, the author points out, can an intelligent Indian policy be formulated. In the book are described the first meetings of Indians with explorers, the dispossession of the Indians by colonial expansion, their involvement in imperial rivalries, their beginning relations with the new American republic, and the ensuing century of war and encroachment. The most recent aspects of government Indian policy are also detailed the good and bad administrative practices and measures to which the Indians have been subjected and their present situation. Miss Debo's style is objective, and throughout the book the distinct social environment of the Indians is emphasized—an environment that is foreign to the experience of most white men. Through ignorance of that culture and life style the results of non-Indian policy toward Indians have been centuries of blundering and tragedy. In response to Indian history, an enlightened policy must be formulated: protection of Indian land, vocational and educational training, voluntary relocation, encouragement of tribal organization, recognition of Indians' social groupings, and reliance on Indians' abilities to direct their own lives. The result of this new policy would be a chance for Indians to live now, whether on their own land or as adjusted members of white society. Indian history is usually highly specialized and is never recorded in books of general history. This book unifies the many specialized volumes which have been written about their history and culture. It has been written not only for persons who work with Indians or for students of Indian culture, but for all Americans of good will.
In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left one hundred years before. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece of journalism and cultural analysis, a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by repeated foreign invasions and immured in a mythic vision of its past. Drawing on novels, news reports, and political memoirs -- but most of all on his conversations with ordinary Indians, from princes to engineers and feudal village autocrats -- Naipaul captures India’s manifold complexities.
Could you be related to a blonde Lithuanian? Did you know that India is the only country that has both lions and tigers? Who found out how tall Mt Everest is? If you've ever wanted to know the answers to questions like these, this is the book for you. In here you will find various things you never expected, such as the fact that we still greet each other like the Harappans did and that people used to think India was full of one-eyed giants. And, sneakily, you'll also know more about India's history and geography by the end of it. Full of quirky pictures and crazy trivia, this book takes you on a fantastic journey through the incredible history of India's geography.
When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
In this lucid, informative, and insightful book, a leading expert on the subject decodes the complex history of India-China relations and argues that the path ahead is a difficult one that could see more military confrontations, including violent border clashes.
Underscoring the unique and multifaceted interactions between ancient India and ancient China, 'India and China: Interactions through Buddhism and Diplomacy' collates the classic works of the preeminent Indian scholar of Chinese history and Buddhism, Professor Prabodh Chandra Bagchi (1898-1956). The volume's essays provide a wide-ranging and thorough investigation of both Sino-Indian Buddhism and cultural relations between the two ancient nations, and are accompanied by a variety of Bagchi's short articles, English translations of a number of his Bengali essays, and contemporary articles analyzing his contribution to the wider field of Sino-Indian study.