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Can secularism continue to provide a foundation for political legitimacy? It is often claimed that one of the cultural achievements of the West has been its establishment of secular democracy, wherein religious belief is respected but confined to the sphere of private belief. In more recent times, however, political secularism has been increasingly called into question. Religious believers, in numerous traditions, have protested against the distortion and confinement that secularism imposes on their faith. Others have become uneasily aware of the way in which secularism no longer commands universal assent in the way it once did. Confronting Secularism in Europe and India adds to this debate by staging a creative encounter between European and Indian conceptions of secularism with a view to continuing new and distinctive trajectories of thought about the place and role of secularism in contemporary times. Looking at political secularism, the relationship between secularism and religion, and religious and secular violence, this book considers whether there are viable alternatives to secularism in Europe and in India.
Travers explores how Mughal political and legal culture shaped and was reshaped by the British colonial state in Bengal.
It was hot at Padachina even for a summer day. In this village were many houses, but not a soul could be seen anywhere. The bazaar was full of shops and the lanes were lined with houses built either of brick or of mud. Every house was quiet. The shops were closed, and no one knew where the shopkeepers had gone. Even the street beggars were absent. The weavers wove no more. The merchants had no business. Philanthropic persons had nothing to give. Teachers closed their schools. Things had come to such a pass that children were even afraid to cry. The streets were empty. There were no bathers in the river. There were no human beings about the houses, no birds in the trees, no cattle in the past...
In a remarkably short period of time, the realization of religious freedom has achieved broad consensus as an indispensable condition for peace. Faced with widespread reports of religious persecution, public and private actors around the world have responded with laws and policies designed to promote freedom of religion. But what precisely is being promoted? What are the cultural and epistemological assumptions underlying this response, and what forms of politics are enabled in the process? The fruits of the three-year Politics of Religious Freedom research project, the contributions to this volume unsettle the assumption—ubiquitous in policy circles—that religious freedom is a singular ...
The International Science and Evidence Based Education (ISEE) Assessment is an initiative of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP), and is its contribution to the Futures of Education process launched by UNESCO Paris in September 2019. In order to contribute to re-envisioning the future of education with a science and evidence based report, UNESCO MGIEP embarked on the first-ever large-scale assessment of knowledge of education.
Looking at the political processes in early modern South Asia as shaped by state formation from below, this work argues that, outside the imperial and trans-regional contexts, the Mughal state subsisted on the mutually-empowering relations with the elites and common people.
"Against High-Caste Polygamy offers a complete, annotated translation of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar's first book arguing against the practice of high-caste Kulin marriage in Bengal. The translation is based on the text of the first edition of Bahuvivaha rahita haoya uchita ki na etadvishayaka vichara, published from the Sanskrit Press in 1871 (Samvat 1928); henceforth simply Bahuvivaha. I have relied on the version of the text as found in the second volume of Gopal Haldar's Vidyasagar-rachanasamgraha, as well as on a digitized version of the 1871 first edition available online"--
Cold War Genres explores post-independence Hindi literature, framing it within the sociopolitical backdrop of Nehruvian India during the early Cold War. The book underscores the pivotal role of Hindi's claims to be a national language following independence, which fostered a unique moment of literary innovation. Central to its narrative is the work of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, a pivotal figure in modern South Asian literature. Using Muktibodh's poetry, criticism, and fiction as a primary example, the book shows how literary form shapes a response to the internal contradictions of 1950s India, one that must be read in light of both the antinomies of Hindi literature and North India as well as the aesthetic debates and emerging ideas of global space during this time. Cold War Genres therefore functions as a lens to evaluate questions of genre and form shared by a range of literary cultures in the mid-twentieth-century decolonizing world. This book features extensive translations from Muktibodh's poetry and prose, including full translations of two poems "Brahmarākṣas" (The Brahman Demon) and "Aṃdhere meṃ" (In the Dark).