Hinduism Before Reform


Book Description

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.







Black Tom


Book Description

Professor Terence CopleyÆs new biography of Thomas Arnold combines a study of his life with an examination of ArnoldÆs influence as an educator, a theologian and a churchman. Arnold was only a Victorian for five years (he died in 1842) but he has been remembered as a major figure of the age, not least because Lytton Strachey chose him as one of his objects of ridicule and pillory in Eminent Victorians (1918).He stands as a monument to the development of the 19th-century public school system whose influence spread far beyond BritainÆs upper-class. Arnold was the celebrated headmaster of Rugby School and HughesÆs Tom BrownÆs Schooldays (1857) fixed him in the public imagination.Copley assesses both the uncritical Victorian versions of ArnoldÆs life--including Hughes and Dean StanleyÆs original Life--and the sneering assessment of his influence, perpetuated by Strachey, to provide the first rounded portrait of Arnold. In conclusion Copley explores the possible legacy that this great but neglected figure has left to our age.













Catalogue of the Books in the Manchester Free Library


Book Description

"The Catalogue ... has been prepared with a view to accomplish two objects. One, to offer an inventory of all the books on the shelves of the Reference Department of the Manchester Free Library: the other, to supply ... a ready Key both to the subjects of the books, and to the names of the authors." - v. 1, the compiler to the reader.