Invading the Sacred PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Invading the Sacred PDF full book. Access full book title Invading the Sacred by Krishnan Ramaswamy. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Krishnan Ramaswamy
Publisher: Rupa Company
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 576
Get Book
Book Description
India, once a major civilizational and economic power that suffered centuries of decline, is now newly resurgent in business, geopolitics and culture. However, a powerful counterforce within the American academy is systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic culture and thought. For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as a dishonest book ; declared Ganesha s trunk a limpphallus ; classified Devi as the mother with apenis and Shiva as a notorious womanizer who incites violence in India.
Author: Krishnan Ramaswamy
Publisher: Rupa Company
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 576
Get Book
Book Description
India, once a major civilizational and economic power that suffered centuries of decline, is now newly resurgent in business, geopolitics and culture. However, a powerful counterforce within the American academy is systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic culture and thought. For instance, scholars of this counterforce have disparaged the Bhagavad Gita as a dishonest book ; declared Ganesha s trunk a limpphallus ; classified Devi as the mother with apenis and Shiva as a notorious womanizer who incites violence in India.
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789385485015
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages : 426
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195395530
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401
Get Book
Book Description
Based on presentations at a conference at the University of Chicago Law School in November 2005.
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789350291900
Category : Civilization, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 474
Get Book
Book Description
India is more than a nation state. It is also a unique civilisation with philosophies and cosmologies that are markedly distinct from the dominant culture of our times - the West. India's spiritual traditions spring from dharma which has no exact equivalent in Western frameworks. Unfortunately, in the rush to celebrate the growing popularity of India on the world stage, its civilisational matrix is being co-opted into Western universalism, thereby diluting its distinctiveness and potential. 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-cultural worldview.
Author: Aditi Banerjee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9387863999
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283
Get Book
Book Description
Gandhari, the blindfolded queen-mother of the Kauravas, sees through it all... Gandhari has one day left to live. As she stares death in the face, her memories travel back to the beginning of her story, to life's unfairness at every point: A fiercely intelligent princess who wilfully blindfolded herself for the sake of her peevish, visually-impaired husband; who underwent a horrible pregnancy to mother one hundred sons, each as unworthy as the other; whose stern tapasya never earned her a place in people's hearts, nor commanded the respect that Draupadi and Kunti attained; who even today is perceived either as an ingratiatingly self-sacrificing wife or a bad mother who was unable to control her sons and was, therefore, partly responsible for the great war of the Mahabharata... In this insightful and sensitive portrayal, Aditi Banerjee rescues Gandhari from being reduced to a mere symbol of her blindfold. She builds her up, as Ved Vyasa did, as an unconventional heroine of great strength and iron will – who, when crossed, embarked upon a complex relationship with Lord Krishna, and became the queen who cursed a God...
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9351775399
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 488
Get Book
Book Description
There is a new awakening in India that is challenging the ongoing westernization of the discourse about India. The Battle for Sanskrit seeks to alert traditional scholars of Sanskrit and sanskriti - Indian civilization - concerning an important school of thought that has its base in the US and that has started to dominate the discourse on the cultural, social and political aspects of India. This academic field is called Indology or Sanskrit studies. From their analysis of Sanskrit texts, the scholars of this field are intervening in modern Indian society with the explicitly stated purpose of removing 'poisons' allegedly built into these texts. They hold that many Sanskrit texts are socially oppressive and serve as political weapons in the hands of the ruling elite; that the sacred aspects need to be refuted; and that Sanskrit has long been dead. The traditional Indian experts would outright reject or at least question these positions. The start of Rajiv Malhotra's feisty exploration of where the new thrust in Western Indology goes wrong, and his defence of what he considers the traditional, Indian approach, began with a project related to the Sringeri Sharada Peetham in Karnataka, one of the most sacred institutions for Hindus. There was, as he saw it, a serious risk of distortion of the teachings of the peetham, and of sanatana dharma more broadly. Whichever side of the fence one may be on, The Battle for Sanskrit offers a spirited debate marshalling new insights and research. It is a valuable addition to an important subject, and in a larger context, on two ways of looking. Is each view exclusive of the other, or can there be a bridge between them? Readers can judge for themselves.
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9351362485
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Get Book
Book Description
Originating in the Atharva Veda, the concept of Indra's Net is a powerful metaphor for interconnectedness. It was transmitted via Buddhism's Avatamsaka Sutra into Western thought, where it now resides at the heart of post-modern discourse. According to this metaphor, nothing ultimately exists separately by itself and all boundaries can be deconstructed. This book invokes Indra's Net to articulate the open architecture, unity and continuity of Hinduism. Seen from this perspective, Hinduism defies pigeonholing into the traditional, modern and post-modern categories by which the West defines itself; rather, it becomes evident that Hinduism has always spanned all three categories simultaneously and without contradiction.It is fashionable among intellectuals to assert that dharma traditions lacked any semblance of unity before the British period, and that the contours of contemporary Hinduism were bequeathed to us by our colonial masters. Such arguments routinely target Swami Vivekananda, a key interlocutor who shattered many deeply rooted prejudices against Indian civilization. They accuse him of having camouflaged various alleged 'contradictions' within traditional Hinduism, and charge him with having appropriated the principles of Western religion to 'manufacture' a coherent and unified worldview and set of practices known today as Hinduism.Indra's Net: Defending Hinduism's Philosophical Unity provides a foundation for theories that slander contemporary Hinduism as illegitimate, ascribing sinister motives to its existence, and characterizing its fabric as oppressive. Rajiv Malhotra offers a detailed, systematic rejoinder to such views, and articulates the multidimensional, holographic understanding of reality that grounds Hindu dharma. He also argues that Vivekananda's creative interpretations of Hindu dharma informed and influenced many Western intellectual movements of the post-modern era. Indeed, as he cites with many insightful examples, appropriations from Hinduism have provided a foundation for cutting-edge discoveries in several fields, including cognitive science and neuroscience.
Author: Ronald Dworkin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728041
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 71
Get Book
Book Description
In his last book, Ronald Dworkin addresses questions that men and women have asked through the ages: What is religion and what is God’s place in it? What is death and what is immortality? Based on the 2011 Einstein Lectures, Religion without God is inspired by remarks Einstein made that if religion consists of awe toward mysteries which “manifest themselves in the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, and which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms,” then, he, Einstein, was a religious person. Dworkin joins Einstein’s sense of cosmic mystery and beauty to the claim that value is objective, independent of mind, and immanent in the world. He rejects the metaphysics of naturalism—that nothing is real except what can be studied by the natural sciences. Belief in God is one manifestation of this deeper worldview, but not the only one. The conviction that God underwrites value presupposes a prior commitment to the independent reality of that value—a commitment that is available to nonbelievers as well. So theists share a commitment with some atheists that is more fundamental than what divides them. Freedom of religion should flow not from a respect for belief in God but from the right to ethical independence. Dworkin hoped that this short book would contribute to rational conversation and the softening of religious fear and hatred. Religion without God is the work of a humanist who recognized both the possibilities and limitations of humanity.
Author: Eleanor Wake
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186607
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book
Book Description
Christian churches erected in Mexico during the early colonial era represented the triumph of European conquest and religious domination. Or did they? Building on recent research that questions the “cultural” conquest of Mesoamerica, Eleanor Wake shows that colonial Mexican churches also reflected the beliefs of the indigenous communities that built them. European authorities failed to recognize that the meaning of the edifices they so admired was being challenged: pre-Columbian iconography integrated into Christian imagery, altars oriented toward indigenous sacred landmarks, and carefully recycled masonry. In Framing the Sacred, Wake examines how the art and architecture of Mexico’s religious structures reveals the indigenous people’s own decisions regarding the conversion program and their accommodation of the Christian message. As Wake shows, native peoples selected aspects of the invading culture to secure their own culture’s survival. In focusing on anomalies present in indigenous art and their relationship to orthodox Christian iconography, she draws on a wide geographical sampling across various forms of Indian artistic expression, including religious sculpture and painting, innovative architectural detail, cartography, and devotional poetry. She also offers a detailed analysis of documented native ritual practices that—she argues—assist in the interpretation of the imagery. With more than 200 illustrations, including 24 in color, Framing the Sacred is the most extensive study to date of the indigenous aspects of these churches and fosters a more complete understanding of Christianity’s influence on Mexican peoples.
Author: Ed Viswanathan
Publisher: books catalog
ISBN: 9780010004656
Category : Hinduism
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book
Book Description
