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The history of central Bombay s textile area is one of the most important, least known, stories of modern India. Covering a dense network of textile mills, public housing estates, markets and cultural centres, this area covers about a thousand acres in the heart of India s commercial and financial capital. With the advent of globalization, the survival of these 1.3 million people, their culture and their history has been up for grabs. The new economic policies of the Indian Government have sought to style this moribund industrial metropolis into a centre for global business and finance. The middle classes and business elite are anxious to turn it into offices and entertainment centres. The working-class residents face displacement after over a century of constant habitation, and the social rhythms and cultural economy of this area face an impending destruction. This book, comprising about a hundred testimonies by the inhabitants of these districts, which are a window into the history, culture and political economy of a former colonial port city now recasting itself as a global metropolis. While following the major threads of national and international events it tries to render the history of central Bombay through the narratives and perceptions of the people, in the process casting new light on the processes of history as they were experienced by the working classes the contesting ideas of what a free India would be; the growth of industry and labour movements; the World Wars and their impact; the complex politics of regional and linguistic identities in Bombay and Maharashtra; the eclipse of the organized Left and the rise of extremist sectarian politics. Meena Menon has been a political and trade union activist for the past 30 years and active in the textile workers movement for 11 years. Vice President of the Girni Kamgar Sangharsh Samiti (Mill Workers Action Committe) and one of its founders. Also a Senior Associate with a global policy research organization Focus on the Global South. She is based in Mumbai. Neera Adarkar has been active in the women s movement for 20 years. A practising architect and urban researcher and visiting faculty in the Academy of Architecture in Bombay. Also a founding member of Majlis, a legal and cultural centre. One of the Convenors of Girangaon Bachao Andolan (Save Girangaon Movement). She is based in Mumbai. Dr Rajnarayan Chandavarkar is Reader in the History and Politics of South Asia, and Director, Centre of South Asian Studies, in University of Cambridge, UK. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. His publications include The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, 1994) and Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850 1950 (Cambridge, 1998).
Excerpt: "Liberty is the first condition of growth. Just as man must have liberty to think and speak, so must he have liberty in food, dress, and marriage, and in every other thing as long as he does not injure others."
From witch trials to pickaxe murderers, from brothels to convents, and from slavery to Toni Morrison's Paradise, these essays provide fascinating and provocative insights into our sexual and religious conventions and beliefs.
With historical-critical analysis and dialogical even-handedness, the essays of this book re-assess the life and legacy of Swami Vivekananda, forged at a time of colonial suppression, from the vantage point of socially-engaged religion at a time of global dislocations and international inequities. Due to the complexity of Vivekananda as a historical figure on the cusp of late modernity with its vast transformations, few works offer a contemporary, multi-vocal, nuanced, academic examination of his liberative vision and legacy in the way that this volume does. It brings together North American, European, British, and Indian scholars associated with a broad array of humanistic disciplines towards critical-constructive, contextually-sensitive reflections on one of the most important thinkers and theologians of the modern era.
The book also takes a hard look at his universally acknowledged reputation as a hypercosmological renouncer who championed the causes of the poor and the downtrodden and thus exemplified the doctrines of socialism at their finest. Sil is the first scholar to critically examine Vivekananda's attitude toward women in general and to probe into his experience with Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) in particular, and he is the first author to provide a detailed analysis of Vivekananda's popularity as a preacher and lecturer.
The Hindu thinker Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) was and remains an important figure both within India, and in the West, where he was notable for preaching Vedanta. Scholarship surrounding Vivekananda is dominated by hagiography and his (mis)appropriation by the political Hindu Right. This work demonstrates that Vivekananda was no simplistic pluralist, as portrayed in hagiographical texts, nor narrow exclusivist, as portrayed by some modern Hindu nationalists, but a thoughtful, complex inclusivist. The book shows that Vivekananda formulated a hierarchical and inclusivistic framework of Hinduism, based upon his interpretations of a four-fold system of Yoga. It goes on to argue that Vivekananda understood his formulation of Vedanta to be universal, and applied it freely to non-Hindu traditions, and in so doing, demonstrates that Vivekananda was consistently critical of ‘low level’ spirituality, not only in non-Hindu traditions, but also within Hinduism. Demonstrating that Vivekananda is best understood within the context of ‘Advaitic primacy’, rather than ‘Hindu chauvinism’, this book will be of interest to scholars of Hinduism and South Asian religion and of South Asian diaspora communities and religious studies more generally.
"Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu monk who introduced Vedåanta to the West, is undoubtedly one of modern India's most influential philosophers. Unfortunately, his philosophy has too often been interpreted through reductive hermeneutic lenses. Typically, scholars have viewed him either as a modern-day exponent of âSaçnkara's Advaita Vedåanta or as a "Neo-Vedåantin" influenced more by Western ideas than indigenous Indian traditions. In Swami Vivekananda's Vedåantic Cosmopolitanism, Swami Medhananda rejects both of these prevailing approaches to offer a new interpretation of Vivekananda's philosophy, highlighting its originality, contemporary relevance, and cross-cultural significance. Vivekananda, the book argues, is best understood as a cosmopolitan Vedåantin who developed novel philosophical positions through creative dialectical engagement with both Indian and Western thinkers. Inspired by his guru Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda reconceived Advaita Vedåanta as a nonsectarian, life-affirming philosophy that provides an ontological basis for religious cosmopolitanism and a spiritual ethics of social service. He defended the scientific credentials of religion while criticizing the climate of scientism beginning to develop in the late nineteenth century. He was also one of the first philosophers to defend the evidential value of supersensuous perception on the basis of general epistemic principles. Finally, he adopted innovative cosmopolitan approaches to long-standing philosophical problems. Bringing him into dialogue with a galaxy of contemporary philosophers, Medhananda demonstrates the sophistication and enduring value of Vivekananda's views on the limits of reason, the dynamics of religious faith, and the hard problem of consciousness"--
Vivekananda had travelled within India as a 'parivrajaka' (the travelling monk) from 1888 to 1893 and in May 1893 crossed the 'kalapani' (crossing the inland water boundary) to represent India in the Parliament of World's Religion held in Chicago. This incident led to many more travels within India and the West. He was a traveller who left his impressions, views and observations in the form of letters, diaries and memoirs. A close study of such documents, as well as secondary materials, leads to questions of imperialism, identity, self-other dichotomy, comparative religion, women and acculturation.