Hindu Students and Their Missionary Teachers: Debating the Relevance of Rebirth in the Colonial Indian Academy
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 9
Abstract
This essay provides a meta-narrative for the philosophical dialogues that took place in colonial India between Scottish missionary philosophers and philosophers of Vedanta on the topic of ¯ karma and rebirth. In particular, it offers a reconstruction and analysis of the context and strategy that shaped the content of discussions that were initiated in the pages of the Madras Christian College Magazine in 1909 between Subrahmanya Sastri and AG Hogg and that inspired Radhakrishnan’s response in his dissertation entitled “The Ethics of Vedanta and its Metaphysical Suppositions”. The broad context is provided by a history of missionary presence in India. The context is further circumscribed by the ‘hybrid’ character of the position of the missionaries as teachers in departments of philosophy, teaching students of “upper-caste Hindus” in the English medium universities set up by the British in the late nineteenth century. The hermeneutics of form and context is essential to understanding the content of these debates about the ethics and metaphysics of Christianity and Hinduism, where the meaning and significance of the notion of rebirth took center stage. Importantly, these debates in turn shed light on the broader social and political context in which these debates took place.
Authors and Affiliations
Nalini Bhushan
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25791
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8090198
- Views 301
- Downloads 9
“Getting Along” in Parkchester: A New Era in Jewish–Irish Relations in New York City 1940–1970
The history of conflict between New York City’s Irish Americans and east European Jews dates back to the close of the 19th century. They disputed over jobs, union memberships, housing, and frequently over politics. The...
The Body in Grief: Death Investigations, Objections to Autopsy, and the Religious and Cultural ‘Other’
Sudden, violent and otherwise unexplained deaths are investigated in most western jurisdictions through a Coronial or medico-legal process. A crucial element of such an investigation is the legislative requirement to r...
Auguste Comte and Consensus Formation in American Religious Thought—Part 2: Twilight of New England Comtism
Auguste Comte was the most influential sociologist and philosopher of science in the Nineteenth Century. Part 1 summarized his works and analyzed reactions to them by Transcendentalists and Unitarians from 1837 until j...
What Would the Goddess Do? Isis, Radical Grandmothers, and Eliza Sharples “All Reform Will Be Found to Be Inefficient that Does Not Embrace the Rights of Woman.”
Recent research in the Huntington archive provides new information for assessing the importance of Eliza Sharples’s meaning as a radical feminist, critiquing and using Christianity and pagan female Gods to establish he...
Religion and Ethnicity: Theoretical Connections
The religion literature in Sociology remains largely disconnected from the ethnicity and immigration literature despite enduring connections between religion and ethnicity. This review helps to close this gap. It shows...