51 research outputs found
Women in the Novels of Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Saratchandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore
No full textNot availabl
Modernidade e religião (e política) na proposta de filosofia transformativa de Sri Aurobindo
No full textA proposta do artigo é abordar o pensamento do filósofo indiano Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), mais conhecido como Sri Aurobindo, como uma possível referência aos estudos de religião em uma perspectiva pós-colonial. O objetivo principal será analisar o modo como Sri Aurobindo pensava a religião – em termos de filosofia e de práxis – enquanto uma plataforma de resistência e diálogo no contexto de colonialidades do mundo moderno. Para tanto, recorre-se ao aporte teórico de alguns cientistas políticos e/ou sociais, entre eles Ashis Nandy (2015), Partha Chatterjee (1993) e Dipesh Chakrabarty (1995), buscando compreender a concepção de “espiritualidade”, projetada pelo filósofo, enquanto um domínio imaginado abarcando os binômios de razão/religião e tradição/modernidade
Embodied Spirituality in the Light of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and Somatic Psychology
No full textSri Aurobindo and the Mother were great innovators of a spirituality that gave a special place for embodiment of Divinity on the Earth and in our bodies, a unique synthesis of ascending and descending yogas and spiritual paths of the past. This paper will discuss the place the physical body is given for spiritual development in the light of Sri Aurobindo and Mother, and will describe the eventual transformation of the body though Supermentalization. The paper will go further to discuss developments in somatic psychotherapies and inspired integral transformative practices and trainings that are naturally developing greater respect to physical embodiment, which the author believes are the beginnings new integral yogic practices for what Sri Aurobindo called Subjective Age
From the self to the Self: An Exposition on Personality Based on the Works of Sri Aurobindo
No full textThis presentation outlines a theory of personality based on the works of Sri Aurobindo, and challenges encountered in introducing it in the Indian academia. It includes the author\u27s personal journey of Self-discovery through the established views in academic psychology, leading to the Advaita Vedantic path, culminating in integral psychology
"Art and Beauty, Opposition and Growth in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram"
No full textDegree Awarded: Ph.D. Religion and Culture. The Catholic University of AmericaSri Aurobindo (nee Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950), a native of India, spent his youth studying poetry and the classics in England. Upon his return to colonial India, he became influential in Indian revolutionary politics. Inspired by his own spiritual experience, S'aktism, Vedanta, Tantra, and the Bhagavad Ghita, he later developed his own "integral yoga" in the French colonial city of Pondicherry. Instead of transcending the Earth, his yoga seeks to transform matter into what he calls "the new supramental creation." He wrote over 30 books in the areas of yoga theory and practice, social, political, and cultural reflection, art and poetry. He wrote his most important work, his epic poem Savitri, over a 35-year period as a way to develop his spiritual practice. Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973) shared Sri Aurobindo's goals and joined him in 1920. She was a gifted painter and musician and a spiritual seeker from Paris whom he named "the Mother" when they established the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1926. He considered her the feminine ?akti to his masculine ?vara role, and their followers believe them to be their Avat'ras (God/dess in human form). After he died, the Mother continued to guide the Ashram until her death. For 52 years she used painting to grow in her spiritual practice. Both gurus encouraged many of their disciples to use the arts for spiritual growth. Sri Aurobindo's work has inspired various prominent thinkers, and is considered a significant contribution to Hindu studies, as well as 20th-century colonial Indian history. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of the modern yoga renaissance; however, since the 1980s there has been a lack of scholarship on his thought, and particularly as this applies to art and religion. Also, the Mother's participation has never been critically examined in this tradition. This dissertation investigates the following question: What are the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's aesthetic theory and to what extent does their artwork and their collaboration with their disciples demonstrate their aesthetics? This study uses a historical-critical methodology to examine the development of thought in their written texts on culture and aesthetics, and a visual culture approach to interpret their use of art, architecture, and visual culture. It relies upon disciples's diaries, reproductions of drawings and paintings by the Mother and her disciples, and the author's ethnographic data collected during his stay in the Ashram in India in 2012-13. The results of this dissertation: 1) their yoga is "descendant," demanding a principle of growth that welcomes oppositions found in life to stimulate the universalization of the basic consciousness and to divinize the Earth; the arts aid this process by helping the disciple to face oppositions with sincerity and resilience, and to unveil spiritual potentials that were not known until the creative process uncovered them; 2) they prize the intuition and higher spiritual faculties of consciousness in their creative process and spiritual experience, which diminishes and potentially annihilates the importance of the intellect; 3) for them, the arts are essentially tied to beauty, which aids their goal of the "new creation;" their ideal of beauty occurs when the physical art media harmonizes with the meaning of the artwork, uniting qualities of beauty with the value of beauty. This study concludes that if Sri Aurobindo is a guru who is primarily an artist, his teaching is principally found in an examination of his creative process, his poetry, and his work with his and the Mother's disciples. Likewise, as an artist-guru, the Mother's teaching is chiefly encountered in an investigation of her guidance of the Ashram, her painting, music, architecture, and visual culture, and most importantly her claims to the transformation of her own body. Their combined teaching is intended to be a transformative experience of growth through beauty, which for them is a way to create a non-sectarian sacred gaze in their followers. Their aesthetic goals might be characterized as expanding the basic consciousness in order to critique past uses of beauty that have become an abuse of others; to reinterpret past achievements in beauty with an intent to include all; and still further, to create new, more inclusive expressions of beauty in one's own historical context
Indians in London: From the birth of the East India Company to independent India
No full textIn September 1600, Queen Elizabeth and London are made to believe that the East India Company will change England's fortunes forever. With William Shakespeare's death, the heart of Albion starts throbbing with four centuries of an extraordinary Indian settlement that Arup K. Chatterjee christens as Typogravia. In five acts that follow, we are taken past the churches destroyed by the fire of Pudding Lane; the late eighteenth-century curry houses in Mayfair and Marylebone; and the coming of Indian lascars, ayahs, delegates, students and lawyers in London. From the baptism of Peter Pope (in the year Shakespeare died) to the death of Catherine of Bengal; the chronicles of Joseph Emin, Abu Taleb and Mirza Ihtishamuddin to Sake Dean Mahomet's Hindoostane Coffee House; Gandhi's experiments in Holborn to the recovery of the lost manuscript of Tagore's Gitanjali in Baker Street; Jinnah's trysts with Shakespeare to Nehru's duels with destiny; Princess Sophia's defiance of the royalty to Anand establishing the Progressive Writers' Association in Soho; Aurobindo Ghose's Victorian idylls to Subhas Chandra Bose's interwar days; the four Indian politicians who sat at Westminster to the blood pacts for Pakistan; India in the shockwaves at Whitehall to India in the radiowaves at the BBC; the intrigues of India House and India League to hundreds of East Bengali restaurateurs seasoning curries and kebabs around Brick Lane.Indians in London is a scintillating adventure across the Thames, the Embankment, the Southwarks, Bloomsburys, Kensingtons, Piccadillys, Wembleys and Brick Lanes that saw a nation-a cultural, historical and literary revolution that redefined London over half a millennium of Indian migrations-reborn as independent India
Interfaith dialogue and mystical consciousness in India:Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, the Hari-Hara mystery, and the Hindu-Christian encounter
No full textInterfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India is a research inquiry in interfaith studies that uses hermeneutical phenomenology to address vexing issues arising in the study of mysticism and enlightened sages. This book raises the following questions: If all human beings have access to mystical consciousness, and some do access it, how is it that only a few become luminary sages, displaying extraordinary power? What is the ethical responsibility of such sages? And how is the encounter among sages/mystics of different traditions contributing to the harmonious unfolding of religious diversity? The author provides original answers and a renewed vision of Hinduism through the lens of two of the most loved and admired sages of modern India—Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo. This book is a blueprint for transformative research on religion: it envisions an innovative method— integrative hermeneutical phenomenology—contributing to the development of interfaith mysticism. Bringing to the fore key themes such as Self-realization, the Hari-Hara mystery, and Mystic Fire, the author shows the importance of mystical experience in the understanding of the religious “Other” and the future of religion. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of religious studies, interreligious/interfaith studies, comparative religion/theology, and interfaith relations, and to thoughtful readers with an interest in Asia and spiritual practice. Those interested in the mysteries of India and Hindu spirituality will find in this book a pioneering analysis of Hindu mystical consciousness and the Christian encounter with it.“Interfaith Dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India is a remarkable book, a deep and perceptive study of two monumental spiritual giants of the last century, Sri Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo. The book is meticulous and scholarly, yet at the same time sensitive to the mystical currents flowing so vitally through those holy visionaries’ lives and words. Isaac Portilla writes carefully, making his case point by point, and yet with great and bold imagination, as he aims to provide spiritual foundations for interreligious learning in the century to come, and indeed, nourishment for the spiritual journey to which we are all called.”—Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, USA“In this at once very profound yet admirably clear work, Isaac Portilla dives deeply into a comparative study of Hindu and Christian mysticism. The author’s masterful scholarship encompasses figures of both traditions such as, from the Hindu tradition, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and Sri Ramakrishna, and from the Christian tradition, Raimon Panikkar and Francis Clooney. Portilla is clearly drawing on a deep well of both scholarship and experience in his work. The book itself thus becomes an example of the methods it commends, helping to pave the way to the multifaith future that humanity must embrace if it is to survive the twenty-first century.”—Jeffery D. Long, Professor or Religion and Asian Studies, Elizabethtown College, USA“Through the prism of “hermeneutic phenomenology”, Isaac Portilla highlights the centrality of mystical consciousness across Hindu and Christian traditions, and its significance for an experientially grounded interfaith dialogue. In conversation with sage-mystics such as Sri Ramana Maharshi, Sri Aurobindo, and Henri Le Saux, Portilla configures – with interpretive insight and attention to sociohistorical context – thoughtful patterns of engaging with the “other” who may inhabit a rich continuum of mystical experience. Foregrounding the vital dimension of inwardness, Portilla gestures towards certain Hindu-Christian complementarities on the mystical path. This is a highly creative work of constructive theology which draws on Hindu conceptions of the triadic structure of ultimate reality and inflects them towards the horizon of the mystery of divine-human relationality.”—Ankur Barua, Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies, University of Cambridge, UK“In 'Interfaith dialogue and Mystical Consciousness in India, Dr Portilla has provided a cogent and innovative analysis to blaze new ground on the important subject of interreligious dialogue and encounter, specifically Hindu-Christian, with potential repercussions for all such dialogue.”—William P. Hyland, OSB Oblate, Senior Lecturer in Church History, University of St. Andrews, U
Writing the village, becoming the nation: The work of Manoj Das
No full text Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, and poems centring on village and rural life, mingling realism and everyday experiences with elements of mystery, mysticism, and the supernatural as he explores the vicissitudes and aspirations of the human condition. As he describes here, Das has been “greatly influenced” by the transition and transformation of India from colonialism to postcolonialism. His writings — with dramatic suspense, magical realism, and a style that with a minimal touch can convey nuances of character, motivation, and emotion — evocatively capture some of the most distinctive aspects of Indian culture, spirituality, arts, and history. His work has been compared with other famed Indian authors, particularly those writing in English (Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao). In this interview, Das reflects on his life work, including the role of translation (in an Indian context of “transcreation”). Das also shares his candid views on the poetics and politics of “regional language literature” (RLL) and “Indian writing in English” (IWE), an opposition relevant to postcolonial studies in the context of the (national and international) distribution and reception of literature and the wider politics of language. Conducted in the southern Indian city of Puducherry, home to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, this interview presents the influence of philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo on Das and his work, including Das’s most recent scholarship on Sri Aurobindo. Das also discusses the influences on him by the well-known Indian writers Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Fakir Mohan Senapati, and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first interview with Das published outside of India and in the West. </jats:p
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