308 research outputs found
Introduction
No full textOn September 16, 2013, the Ananda Bazar Patrika—a leading Bengali daily published from Calcutta—carried a provocatively titled piece in its op-ed pages. The piece was called “Shri Chaitanya: Our Fathomless Self-Forgetting,”1 and it attempted to draw its readers into the realization that they—the Bengali people, as it were—had been complicit in a collective performance of amnesia. Otherwise, the sixteenth-century mystic Shri Chaitanya could not have been condemned to such a degree of apathy and disinterest as he has been in contemporary times. The author of the piece—a scholar of Vaishnavism and the Hindu ...</p
Legislating on Arbitration in Singapore: Linguistic Insights
No full textArbitration, a cost-effective and expeditious alternative to court litigation, takes place within complex and important national and international legal frameworks where legislation, rules, and conventions provide specialized regimes for the conduct of arbitrations. In recent years, Singapore has given evidence of a significant legislative activity in its fervor to make arbitration quicker and more efficient, and therefore has adopted domestic and international regimes that govern private commercial arbitration: the domestic Arbitration Act 2001 (AA) and the International Arbitration Act 2002 (IAA). While these laws differ from each other in matters of arbitral proceedings, they also reflect the best practice in dispute resolution used in the Asia Pacific Region, where Singapore is a regional and financial centre that serves as a gateway between East and West.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the arbitral regime and practice arising from the Singapore Arbitration Act 2001. The paper will look at the piece of legislative drafting from the perspective of language use in order to gain insights into the rhetorical and discursive features realized in the construction of the genre. First, the paper will outline the nature and topic of a two-ranked arbitral regime (AA – IAA) that is of relevance for the arbitration framework in Singapore. Secondly, the paper will analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the linguistic and textual choices realized in the professional/institutional practice and discourse of the genre, while also identifying those features which seem to constrain the accessibility and interpretation of legislative action performed in the genre. To the extent that Singapore inherited the Western-style legal culture of the English common law tradition, this part of the paper will also assess how the Singapore Arbitration Act borrowed semantic resources from the English Arbitration Act 1996 previously investigated by this author (Tessuto 2003), therefore giving rise to manifestations of “interdiscursivity” (Bhatia 2008, 2010a, 2011) from the discursive process and professional practice of English arbitration. Finally, the paper will draw some conclusions from the analysis of the most salient rhetorical and discursive data in the chosen genre, by adding as yet to our understanding of the intercultural and interdiscursive elements of drafting in the Eastern and Western socio-legal contexts
Epilogue
No full textThe first Bengali kirtan I heard in my life, rather belatedly I should add, was “Bharati Gourango loiya jai,” sung by Amar Pal. This song speaks of Vishvambhar’s renunciation and is addressed to his mother, Shachi, to arise, awake, and stop her son from leaving. Hearers of the song already know that this was not to be. Gauranga would leave, take vows of monasticism, and become Krishna Chaitanya. I heard this song in a compilation of Bengali folksongs or ...</p
Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal. By Rochona Majumdar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009. xii, 343 pp. 23.95 (paper).
No full textShani on the Web: Virality and Vitality in Digital Popular Hinduism
No full textWhat do god posters circulating online tell us about the practice of popular Hinduism in the age of digital mediatization? The article seeks to address the question by exploring images and god posters dedicated to the planetary deity Shani on Web 2.0. The article tracks Shani’s presence on a range of online platforms—from the religion and culture pages of newspapers to YouTube videos and social media platforms. Using Shani’s presence on the Web as a case study, the article argues that content drawn from popular Hinduism, dealing with astrology, ritual, religious vows and observances, form a significant and substantial aspect of online Hinduism. The article draws attention to the specific affordances of Web 2.0 to radically rethink what engaging with the sacred object in a virtual realm may entail. In doing so, it indicates what the future of Hindu religiosity may look like
Untidy Realms
No full textThe chapter maps the field of Vaishnava traditions in nineteenth-century Bengal to show the plural and myriad worlds that these traditions operated in—worlds that the emerging middle-class and educated Bengali Vaishnava would actively seek to disciple and define. The chapter follows closely from the argument extended in the first chapter, about the discursive nature of the “decline” thesis, and seeks to fill in the gaps that the reader may have about precisely what was being read as “decline” in the first place. Weaving together colonial sources alongside biographies, autobiographies, fiction, and information derived from contemporary periodicals, the chapter demonstrates the plurality of nineteenth-century Bengali Vaishnava worlds: its sacred spaces, musical traditions, myriad “sects,” charismatic gurus, and their old and new patrons. This chapter illustrates how crucial the study of Vaishnava traditions is to understanding caste and gender relations in Bengal.</p
Utopia and a Birthplace
No full textIn 1888, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda Thakur discovered the site of Chaitanya’s nativity in a place that is now called Mayapur. This chapter examines Datta’s biography as a colonial bureaucrat and a Gaudiya theologian to argue that the search for the birthplace was as much a result of the empiricism of the times as it was due to the anomie produced from a colonized subjectivity of a middle-class, salaried life. It analyzes how religious ideas about sacred space within Vaishnavism were crucial to the determination of Mayapur as the precise birthplace of Chaitanya. By drawing attention to the simultaneous appeal of miraculous visions, sacred geographies, and positivist determinations in the Mayapur episode, this chapter makes evident a different aspect of bhadralok Vaishnavism than what has been seen in the book thus far.</p
Interpreting Devotion: The Poetry and Legacy of a Female Bhakti Saint of India. By Karen Pechilis. Routledge Hindu Studies Series. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. xiii + 249; plates, illustrations. $145.00.
No full textPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112285/1/rsr12066_7.pd
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