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In-Between Worlds
This book examines the performance of Bauls, ‘folk’ performers from Bengal, in the context of a rapidly globalizing Indian economy and against the backdrop of extreme nationalistic discourses. Recognizing their scope beyond the musical and cultural realm, Sukanya Chakrabarti engages in discussing the subversive and transformational potency of Bauls and their performances. In-Between Worlds argues that the Bauls through their musical, spiritual, and cultural performances offer ‘joy’ and ‘spirituality,’ thus making space for what Dr. Ambedkar in his famous 1942 speech had identified as ‘reclamation of human personality’. Chakrabarti destabilizes the category of ‘folk’ as a ...
Seeking Bauls of Bengal
The author charts the rise of Bauls to their present iconic status as minstrels and mystics.
The Four Moons in the Human Body
The Bauls & Fakirs of Bengal and Bangladesh certainly constitute a breed, different from other ethnic religious sects. They do not believe in worshipping in any citadel of religion like a temple, a mosque, or a church. They have the conviction that the body itself is the habitat of cosmic energy and also that the entire cosmos is present in a living body. They compare the body with a cage and the soul with an unknown bird which has come to stay for some time only. Most of the Bauls, who are not just singers but serious followers of the Baul path, do not believe in replication—creating any future progeny. They adopt special procedures for sexual union with menstruated female partners to ret...
Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman
This book explores historical and cultural aspects of modern and contemporary Bengal through the performance-centred study of a particular repertoire: the songs of the saint-composer Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), who is particularly revered among Baul and Fakir singers. The author shows how songs, if examined as 'sacred scriptures', represent multi-dimensional texts for the study of South Asian religions. Revealing how previous studies about Bauls mirror the history of folkloristics in Bengal, this book presents sacred songs as a precious symbolic capital for a marginalized community of dislocated and unorthodox Hindus, who consider the practice of singing in itself an integral part of the path towards self-realization.
The Changing World of Caste and Hierarchy in Bengal
This book challenges the prevalent assumptions of caste, hierarchy and social mobility in pre-colonial and colonial Bengal. It studies the writings of colonial ethnographers, Orientalist scholars, Christian missionaries and pre-colonial literary texts like the Mangalkavyas to show how the concept of caste emerged and argues that the jati order in Bengal was far from being a rigidly reified structure, but one which had room for spatial and social mobility. The volume highlights the processes through which popular myths and beliefs of the lower caste orders of Bengal were Sanskritized. It delineates the linkages between sedantized peasant culture and the emergence of new agricultural castes in...
Hindu Christian Faqir
Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian holy men: the Hindu Rama Tirtha and the Christian Sundar Singh. Challenging ideas about modern Hinduism, indigenous Christianity, and sainthood, the study focuses on the vernacular, ascetic idioms that both men creatively drew upon to appeal to transnational audiences and pursue religious perfection.
Who Owns Religion?
Who Owns Religion? focuses on a period—the late 1980s through the 1990s—when scholars of religion were accused of scandalizing or denigrating the very communities they had imagined themselves honoring through their work. While controversies involving scholarly claims about religion are nothing new, this period saw an increase in vitriol that remains with us today. Authors of seemingly arcane studies on subjects like the origins of the idea of Mother Earth or the sexual dynamics of mysticism have been targets of hate mail and book-banning campaigns. As a result, scholars of religion have struggled to describe their own work to their various publics, and even to themselves. Taking the read...
Breathing Hearts
Sufism is known as the mystical dimension of Islam. Breathing Hearts explores this definition to find out what it means to ‘breathe well’ along the Sufi path in the context of anti-Muslim racism. It is the first book-length ethnographic account of Sufi practices and politics in Berlin and describes how Sufi practices are mobilized in healing secular and religious suffering. It tracks the Desire Lines of multi-ethnic immigrants of color, and white German interlocutors to show how Sufi practices complicate the post secular imagination of healing in Germany.
Age of Entanglement
Age of Entanglement explores the patterns of connection linking German and Indian intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the years after the Second World War. Kris Manjapra traces the intersecting ideas and careers of philologists, physicists, poets, economists, and others who shared ideas, formed networks, and studied one another's worlds. Moving beyond well-rehearsed critiques of colonialism, this study recasts modern intellectual history in terms of the knotted intellectual itineraries of seeming strangers. Collaborations in the sciences, arts, and humanities produced extraordinary meetings of German and Indian minds. Meghnad Saha met Albert Einstein, Stella Kramrisch brought the Ba...
Rabindranath Tagore
This new addition to Springer’s series on Key Thinkers in World Education tracks the intellectual and philosophical journey of a trail-blazing innovator whose ideas have fired the imaginations of progressive educationalists for almost a century. The volume’s in-depth analysis of the educational philosophy of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore offers an unrivalled focus on his highly influential views. Tagore—poet, internationalist, humanist, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature—lived on the cusp of change between two momentous centuries in world civilization and foresaw the dissolution of colonialism and the globalization of culture. His ideas on educati...
