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The book also takes a hard look at his universally acknowledged reputation as a hypercosmological renouncer who championed the causes of the poor and the downtrodden and thus exemplified the doctrines of socialism at their finest. Sil is the first scholar to critically examine Vivekananda's attitude toward women in general and to probe into his experience with Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) in particular, and he is the first author to provide a detailed analysis of Vivekananda's popularity as a preacher and lecturer.
Despite Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa’s (1836-86) reputation as a Tāntrika in view of his being a priest of the Kālī temple at the village of Dakshineshvar in the northern suburb of Calcutta, this study posits that his piety had deep roots in Bengal Vaiṣṇavism (cult of Viṣṇu) at large and in the devotional tradition of his family. His family deity Lord Raghuvῑra (Lord Rāma) was considered as an incarnation of the Vedic-Purāṇic God Viṣṇu and thus a Vaiṣṇava deity by extension. This counter thesis on the saint’s religious identity is supported by an analysis of his emphasis on bhakti [devotion] for and biśvās [faith] in God. My analysis is predicated on a compar...
Since the publication of Sri Ramakrishna's first biography, readers have been familiar with the awesome figure of a spiritual personality who established a direct liason with the divine and preached the most enlightened religious eclecticism in simple vernacular. All subsequent studies on the paramahamsa have been predicated on the monastic Vedantic interpretation of his career and character.This study is a pioneering attempt to uncover the human face behind the mask of the Paramahamsa. Using rare Bengali sources, it is an entirely new look at the saint. In his search for the historical and human figure, the author reexamines the saint's life and thought, and delves into his childhood experiences presenting him as a simple, gregarious, semiliterate rustic with a complex sexual dilemma and spiritual hunger who sought a solution to his troubled psyche in an eclectic piety of faith and fun.
This investigation thus seeks to examine the theory of the Tudor revolution in government advanced by the late Sir Geoffrey Elton and in so doing helps to highlight the human and personal dimensions of institutional history. An outcome of this changed perspective is that the privy chamber acquires a higher profile (following David Starkey's path-breaking revisionist research) than the privy council (as postulated by Elton) in the remarkable "revolutionary" decades of the sixteenth century.".
Scholar Jeffrey J. Kripal explores the life and teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a 19th-century Bengali saint who played a major role in the creation of modern Hinduism. The work is now marked by both critical acclaim and cross-cultural controversy. In a substantial new Preface to this second edition, Kripal answers his critics and addresses the controversy.
Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay has been the most popular writer of novels and short stories in his native Bengaland in India at large. Despite this, he remains unrecognized in the English speaking world. Narasingha P. Sil fills this void by presenting a historical critical assessment of his upbringing and the experiences that influenced his masterful and magnificent work. The Life of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay rescues the authentic man, a caste-conscious and patriarchal Brahmin of colonial Bengal, from the cuckoo land of gratuitous praise and panegyric showered on the Aparajeya Kathasilpi, the "invincible" wordsmith. The author exposes Sharatchandra's innate conservative worldview and his romantic platonic concept of human sexuality that inform all his love stories. In many respects Sharatchandra resembles his formidable European forbear, Jean Jacques Rousseau of Enlightenment France. The concluding chapter of Sil's biographical study introduces this pioneering comparison between the two men--a veritable tour de force.
In the entire corpus of R makr sn a research, carried out mostly by his disciples, devotes, and admirers, only a handful have attempted to analyze his divine reputation. Yet none has examined the R makr sn a phenomenon fully.This is the first comprehensive psychoanalysis of R makr sn a's sexuality in general and his androgyny in particular, as well as a critical examination of his sermons sam dhis. Instead of the popular paramahamsa there now emerges the less attractive but more authentic profile of an utterly selfish, capricious but highly intelligent spiritual master who elicited awed submission from everybody by his unpredictable and frenzied behaviour.The author asserts that R makr sn a's spiritual odyssey is better explained as his desperate but successful effort to deal with his emotional and sexual crisis, rather than as the universally acknowledged outcome of a divine teleology. Attempting to distinguish the historical R makr sn a from the godhead of hagiography, this study offers a challenging debate on mystic phenomenon.
Ramakrishna, 1836-1886, Hindu religious leader from Bengal.
Swami Vivekananda in india: A Corrective Biography attempts to inform the reader accurately about his life both before and after his historic visits to the West. Much material has been translated anew from original Bengali books. At the same time it challenges current popular and pious notions held about this humanitarian-monk. The four major chapters in this book are about his meetings with Sri Ramakrishna, his travels in India during 1886-1893, media waves about him in India, and his triumphant return from the West in 1897. Analysis of original eyewitness reports in both India and Western newspapers and periodicals forms an integral part of this biography.
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.7, University of Cologne, course: Gothic and Neo-Gothic Ficiton, 22 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Taking a look (an not even a close one) at movies or TV-series dealing with vampires, one immediately recognizes the vampire as a sexed-up figure, conveying the notion of the lascivious vamp as in Underworld, the noble alpha-male as in Blood Ties or the longed-for guardian and lover as in Moonlight. In her novels, Anne Rice describes the vampire's bite as a liturgical act (cf. Brittnacher 1994:131), Sheridan Le Fanu's female vampire Carmilla is actually a les...