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Swami Vivekananda
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.
Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa
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 Revisited
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.
The Life of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay
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.
Ramakrishna Miscellany: A Comparative Study
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...
Rabindra Miscellany. Critical Essays on Rabindranath Tagore's Thoughts on Love, Life, Gender, God, and Patriotism
"Rabindra Miscellany" is a critical study of some thoughts and writings of Rabindranath Tagore, India's most brilliant poet, philosopher, and polymath. The five essays - one of them a translation of a chapter of the distinguished Tagore scholar Niharranjan Ray's book "Bhāratīya aitihya o Rabīndranāth" - seek to offer a window to the panoramic expanse of Tagore's intellect and imagination that informed his ideas of human and divine love, aesthetic consciousness, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The poet's works discussed in this study highlight his evolving ideas of this world and its inhabitants as part of a majestic cosmic order emanating from a divine source that he never identifies with any divinity from the world's leading faiths. Yet he recognizes its presence in everyone's soul and he designates this innermost ["antaratama"] divine presence as his God of Life ["Jībandebatā"].
Crazy in Love of God
This study examines the nexus between sexuality and religiosity in the career of nineteenth-century Calcutta's famous Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86). Dr. Sil's pioneering psychological study (Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: A Psychological Profile, 1991) of this personality was followed by another book on Ramakrishna, published in 1998, which strongly argued against the saint's widely publicized homosexual orientation in the Anglo-American academe. The present book argues that he was not a homo spiritualis, in the strict sense of the term but a homo religiosus par excellence, and that, far from being a Shakta/Tantrika devotee of the Goddess Kali, he was essentially a bhakta (devotee) in the Vaishnava tradition--his cultural and family inheritance. His idea of the divine and his life and teachings as a mystic and saint provide ample justification to consider him essentially a Vaishnava whose spiritual battle cry was to demand to have a mystical dalliance with God. Narasingha P. Sil is Professor of History at Western Oregon University.
Divine Dowager
Although not seeking to debunk the Hindu hagiography that has grown up around her and her ascetic husband Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Sil (history, Western Oregon U.) seeks to rescue the human figure of Saradamani Chattopadhyay, a simple but industrious woman who had been a victim of her God-man h
INDIAN POETRY IN ENGLISH : CRITICAL ESSAYS
Indian poets who wrote in English—a small middle class minority—were divided from the regional language poets by more than language for long. The English poets had a selected readership, were known unto themselves, in academic circles if they were widely published, but were looked down upon with a kind of derision by regional writers. However, the scenario has changed now. From English being spurned as a colonizer’s tongue that was nobody’s language, it has now become everybody’s language with English medium schools, English movies, ads, soaps and serials. For a generation living in a global village, genuine readership and appreciation of English poetry is no longer an encumbrance....
