Hindu Social Organization


Book Description

This comprehensive, systematic and integrated exposition of Hindu social psychology and institutions provides a vivid understanding of the difficult subject. The author has shown with remarkable clarity and lucidity how Hindu civilization has influenced society to form a distinct cultural pattern of its own. Hindu Social Organization has been received with acclaim by a number of very important social scientists in India as well as in Europe and America. It is not only a pioneering attempt but has remained unsurpassed till date. This edition bears proof of its eminence in retaining the foreword to the first edition of this book written by Dr S. Radhakrishnan. Key Features: · The present study talks about constructing a picture of the Hindu social organization and institutions from the point of view of their socio-psychological foundations and implications. · It deals with the many topics of education, marriage, family, place of women in Hindu society, the system of caste, with accurate learning and great discrimination. · The present essay, we shall endeavour to visualize in details the basic conditioning factors that ruled not only the earlier phases of Indian culture and civilization, but have gone so deep into the social psychology of the Hindus that they continue to dominate his life and conduct, in a large measure, even to this day. · This book gives us definite glimpses of what may be called the ideological and valuation foundations of those social institutions. · It describe ideas, ideals and aspirations so as to re-set and reconstruct the several strata of the social structure that have been evolving in Hindu life and conduct. Note: Now this ISBN-9788171542062 has a new identity.




The Government of Social Life in Colonial India


Book Description

From the early days of colonial rule in India, the British established a two-tier system of legal administration. Matters deemed secular were subject to British legal norms, while suits relating to the family were adjudicated according to Hindu or Muslim law, known as personal law. This important new study analyses the system of personal law in colonial India through a re-examination of women's rights. Focusing on Hindu law in western India, it challenges existing scholarship, showing how - far from being a system based on traditional values - Hindu law was developed around ideas of liberalism, and that this framework encouraged questions about equality, women's rights, the significance of bodily difference, and more broadly the relationship between state and society. Rich in archival sources, wide-ranging and theoretically informed, this book illuminates how personal law came to function as an organising principle of colonial governance and of nationalist political imaginations.




The Sādhus of India


Book Description

Robert Lewis Gross Provides A Richly Detailed Ethnographic Account Of India`S Colourful And Charismatic Holymen, Or Sadhus As They Are Referred To In South Asia. Through An Examination Of Their Cosmology, Sacred Symbolism, Ritual Practices, And Varied Interrelationships With The Hindu Laity, Dr. Gross Attempts To Understand The Persistence Of Ancient Traditions Of Asceticism And World Renunciation Modern Indian Social And Religious Life.




Politics After Television


Book Description

An analysis of the use of media by political and religious interest groups in India







Changing Homelands


Book Description

Changing Homelands offers a startling new perspective on what was and was not politically possible in late colonial India. In this highly readable account of the partition in the Punjab, Neeti Nair rejects the idea that essential differences between the Hindu and Muslim communities made political settlement impossible. Far from being an inevitable solution, the idea of partition was a very late, stunning surprise to the majority of Hindus in the region. In tracing the political and social history of the Punjab from the early years of the twentieth century, Nair overturns the entrenched view that Muslims were responsible for the partition of India. Some powerful Punjabi Hindus also preferred partition and contributed to its adoption. Almost no one, however, foresaw the deaths and devastation that would follow in its wake. Though much has been written on the politics of the Muslim and Sikh communities in the Punjab, Nair is the first historian to focus on the Hindu minority, both before and long after the divide of 1947. She engages with politics in post-Partition India by drawing from oral histories that reveal the complex relationship between memory and history—a relationship that continues to inform politics between India and Pakistan.




Holy Science


Book Description

"Subramaniam examines how science and religion have come together to propel a vision of the modern Indian nation, and in particular, a Hindu nationalist vision of India. Five illustrative cases of bionationalism animate this book: Hindu nationalist narratives of scientific development, colonial law and sexual politics in India, surrogacy and women's roles, the politics of caste and race in the language of genes and genomics, and the alignment of environmental scientists and religious activists. Subramaniam demonstrates that the politics of gender, race, class, caste, sexuality, and indigeneity are deeply implicated in the projects and narratives of the nation. At the same time, she seeks spaces of possibility and new narratives for planetary salvation that defy binary logics, incorporating science and religion, human and nonhuman, and nature and culture"--




Why I Am a Hindu


Book Description

Hinduism is one of the world's oldest and greatest religious traditions. In captivating prose, Shashi Tharoor untangles its origins, its key philosophical concepts and texts. He explores everyday Hindu beliefs and practices, from worship to pilgrimage to caste, and touchingly reflects on his personal beliefs and relationship with the religion. Not one to shy from controversy, Tharoor is unsparing in his criticism of 'Hindutva', an extremist, nationalist Hinduism endorsed by India's current government. He argues urgently and persuasively that it is precisely because of Hinduism's rich diversity that India has survived and thrived as a plural, secular nation. If narrow fundamentalism wins out, Indian democracy itself is in peril.




Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear


Book Description

The representation of the Muslims as threatening to India's body politic is central to the Hindu nationalist project of organizing a political movement and normalizing anti-minority violence. Adopting a critical ethnographic approach, this book identifies the poetics and politics of fear and violence engendered within Hindu nationalism.