Download Free The Renaissance In India And Other Essays On Indian Culture Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online The Renaissance In India And Other Essays On Indian Culture and write the review.

A defence of Indian civilisation and culture, with essays on Indian spirituality, religion, art, literature, and polity. Sri Aurobindo began the 'Foundations' series as an appreciative review of Sir John Woodroffe's book, 'Is India Civilised?', continued it with a rebuttal of the hostile criticisms of William Archer in 'India and Its Future', and concluded it with his own estimation of India's civilisation and culture. In Sri Aurobindo's view India is one of the greatest of the world's civilisations because of its high spiritual aim and the effective manner in which it has impressed this aim on the forms and rhythms of its life. A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this culture , he wrote, its core of thought, its ruling passion. Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim of life, but it even tried...to turn the whole of life towards spirituality. Sri Aurobindo held that an aggressive defence of India culture was necessary to counter the invasion of the predominantly materialistic modern Western culture. His Foundations is precisely such a defence. Contents: Part I: The Issue; Is India Civilised?; Part II: A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture; Part III: A Defence of Indian Culture; Indian Culture and External Influence; The Renaissance in India. Subjects: Indology, Philosophy, Religion, Political Thought, Art, Literature.
India's recent economic performance has attracted world attention but the country is re-awakening not just as an economy but as a civilization. After a thousand years of the decline, it now has a genuine opportunity to re-establish itself as a major global power.In ?The Indian Renaissance?, the author, Sanjeev Sanyal, looks at the processes that led to ten centuries of fossilization and then at the powerful economic and social forces that are now working together to transform India beyond recognition. These range from demographic shifts to rising literacy levels, but the most important revolution has been the opening of mind and the changed attitude towards innovation and risk.This book is about how India found itself at this historic juncture, the obstacles that it still needs to negotiate and the future that it may enjoy. The author tells the story from the perspective of the new generation of Indians who have emerged from this great period of change.Published and distributed worldwide by World Scientific Publishing Co. except India, UK and North America
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.
Compared to how it looked 150 years ago at the eve of the colonial conquest, today’s India is almost completely unrecognizable. A sovereign nation, with a teeming, industrious population, it is an economic powerhouse and the world’s largest democracy. It can boast of robust legal institutions and a dizzying plurality of cultures, in addition to a lively and unrestricted print and electronic media. The question is how did it get to where it is now? Covering the period from 1800 to 1950, this study of about a dozen makers of modern India is a valuable addition to India’s cultural and intellectual history. More specifically, it shows how through the very act of writing, often in English, these thought leaders reconfigured Indian society. The very act of writing itself became endowed with almost a charismatic authority, which continued to influence generations that came after the exit of the authors from the national stage. By examining the lives and works of key players in the making of contemporary India, this study assesses their relationships with British colonialism and Indian traditions. Moreover, it analyzes how their use of the English language helped shape Indian modernity, thus giving rise to a uniquely Indian version of liberalism. The period was the fiery crucible from which an almost impossibly diverse and pluralistic new nation emerged through debate, dialogue, conflict, confrontation, and reconciliation. The author shows how the struggle for India was not only with British colonialism and imperialism, but also with itself and its past. He traces the religious and social reforms that laid the groundwork for the modern sub-continental state, proposed and advocated in English by the native voices that influenced the formation India’s society. Merging culture, politics, language, and literature, this is a path breaking volume that adds much to our understanding of a nation that looks set to achieve much in the coming century.
This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule. Bhushan's and Garfield's own essays on the work of this period contextualize the philosophical essays collected and connect them to broader intellectual, artistic and political movements in India. This volume yields a new understanding of cosmopolitan consciousness in a colonial context, of the intellectual agency of colonial academic communities, and of the roots of cross-cultural philosophy as it is practiced today. It transforms the canon of global philosophy, presenting for the first time a usable collection and a systematic study of Anglophone Indian philosophy. Many historians of Indian philosophy see a radical disjuncture between traditional Indian philosophy and contemporary Indian academic philosophy that has abandoned its roots amid globalization. This volume provides a corrective to this common view. The literature collected and studied in this volume is at the same time Indian and global, demonstrating that the colonial Indian philosophical communities were important participants in global dialogues, and revealing the roots of contemporary Indian philosophical thought. The scholars whose work is published here will be unfamiliar to many contemporary philosophers. But the reader will discover that their work is creative, exciting, and original, and introduces distinctive voices into global conversations. These were the teachers who trained the best Indian scholars of the post-Independence period. They engaged creatively both with the classical Indian tradition and with the philosophy of the West, forging a new Indian philosophical idiom to which contemporary Indian and global philosophy are indebted.
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.
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian nationalist, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. This book is an enquiry into the integral philosophy of Aurobindo and its contemporary relevance. It offers a reading of Aurobindo’s key texts by bringing them into conversation with religious studies and the hermeneutical traditions. The central argument is that Aurobindo’s integral philosophy is best understood as a hermeneutical philosophy of religion. Such an understanding of Aurobindo’s philosophy, offering both substantive and methodological insights for the academic study of religion, subdivides into three interrelated aims. The first is to demonstrate that the power of the Aurobindonian vision lies in its self-conception as a traditionary-hermeneutical enquiry into religion; the second, to draw substantive insights from Aurobindo’s enquiry to envision a way beyond the impasse within the current religious-secular debate in the academic study of religion. Working out of the condition of secularism, the dominant secularists demand the abandonment of the category ‘religion’ and the dismantling of the academic discipline of religious studies. Aurobindo’s integral work on ‘religion’, arising out of the Vedānta tradition, critiques the condition of secularity that undergirds the religious-secular debate. Finally, informed by the hermeneutical tradition and building on the methodological insights from Aurobindo's integral method, the book explores a hermeneutical approach for the study of religion which is dialogical in nature. This book will be of interest to academics studying Religious Studies, Philosophy of Religion, Continental Hermeneutics, Modern India, Modern Hinduism as well as South Asian Studies.