Caste, Conflict and Ideology

O’Hanlon, Rosalind

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511563379

“…In other regions of India, a similar phenomenon took place during the anti‐Brahman movement amongst low castes and Dalits in the nineteenth century. O'Hanlon argues that ‘by the end of the 1880s, the performance of religious ceremonies without the assistance of Brahmans had come to occupy an important place in non‐Brahman activity throughout the Deccan’ (1985: 301).…”

Section: The Knowledgeable Brahman Priest and The Literate/educated Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

Ciotti

¹

2006

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article analyses the ideological uses of formal education in a community of Chamars (former 'Untouchables' or Dalits) in northern India. In particular, it focuses on the ways it is deployed for selfand community improvement. Education is especially needed to forge an alternative to the inherited, essentialized, and derogatory Chamar identity. Furthermore, recent anti-establishment political mobilization amongst the low castes in northern India has provided new impetus for accelerating identity change. In order to grasp the nature and extent of Chamar social transformation, I explore notions of the past, aspects of ritual, and folk theories of socialization. Drawing from these, an underlying protean self and community substance emerges in which the remaking of the present is tied to the remaking of the past. Against this backdrop, I show the contradictory nature of the effects of education. On the one hand, there is the constructed and shared 'educated' substance which acts as a unifying force amongst the Chamars vis-à-vis outsiders. On the other, education as an individualizing experience and related processes of upward mobility fragment the community body politic, leaving the 'liberating' effect of education embedded in the production of new inequalities.Hindus often blame the Kali Yuga (the last of the four ages of the world) for the occurrence of things that do not follow the rules of dharma (moral order) and lead the world towards degeneration, but this belief does not seem to find an echo amongst a community of Chamars, living in the village of Manupur in the large northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Manupur Chamars tend to see things differently. When they speak about their own community and society at large, their conversations are replete with words like sudhar (improvement, social reform) and vikas (development). This terminology refers to an idea of progress -more certainly social than materialand suggests a different picture from the degradation implicit in the Kali Yuga.The Chamar evolutionist view of time, expressed by underlying ideas of reform and progress, points to the way in which informants value the present over the past. 1 Formal education lies at the heart of this dichotomy. Significantly, Manupur is situated in the outskirts of the city of Banaras, 2 a place renowned for Hindu religion as well as for education and learning, with three famous universities attended by students from all over India as well as by Manupur Chamars. The Chamars are the largest caste community amongst Dalits, spreading, under different names and subcastes, through most

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“…13 Their theological confidence in human reason as a pointer towards God was sometimes reflected in Christian missionaries in India who sought to provide empirical bases for the truth of Christianity, with the hope that once Hindus were compelled by the evidential force of their demonstrations, they would accept specific doctrinal claims about Christ. 14 The narratives of Hindu socio-religious reform movements are structured partly by interrogations of the missionary view that the rational forces of western science would propel Hindus towards the light of saving Christian truth. The Hindu reformers often drew upon the criticisms levelled at traditional beliefs and institutions by the Christian missionaries, as well as some of the radical nonconformist views circulating in Europe, to forge distinctive strategies for confronting and eradicating what they perceived to the excrescences of Hinduism.…”

Section: Hinduisms On the Horizons Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…A group of social reformers associated with Anglo-Marathi newspapers such as the Darpan, started by Bal Shastri Jambhekar in 1832, and the more radical Prabhakar in 1841, accepted the missionary arguments about the descent of Hindu society from its pristine values enshrined in the Vedas; developed the Deist view that the 'universal religion', freely accessible to all morally upright beings, transcended the 'dogmatic' bounds of Christianity; and strove for the social emancipation of the lower castes and of women. 15 Some decades later, in the Punjab, the Arya Samaj began to claim that ancient Vedic civilization had attained a high level of technological sophistication, and possessed electricity, steam engines, and aerial vehicles. 16 Thus, 'science' became a highly contested site of opposing constructions: while Christian missionaries could speak of the dissolutions of Hindu mythology through western empiricism, Hindu reformers countered such claims by marshalling the resources of empiricism and technology for the service of a 'scientific' Hinduism.…”

Section: Hinduisms On the Horizons Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

Barua¹

2020

Mind, Soul and Consciousness

0

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A distinctive claim of some of the configurations of 'modern Hinduism' is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as a 'scientific religion' which is geared towards the spiritual perfection of humanity. Many of these figures appropriated a classical Vedāntic Hindu distinction between 'lower' and 'higher' knowledge, and mapped it onto the distinction, inflected by colonial power, between 'western science' and 'Vedic/yogic wisdom'. I examine three key aspects of this mapping: the semantic ranges of 'science' in some western and Hindu traditions, the Orientalist millieu of colonial India in which these translations were developed, and the conceptual instabilities of the hybrid trope of 'Hindu science'.

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“…13 Their theological confidence in human reason as a pointer towards God was sometimes reflected in Christian missionaries in India who sought to provide empirical bases for the truth of Christianity, with the hope that once Hindus were compelled by the evidential force of their demonstrations, they would accept specific doctrinal claims about Christ. 14 The narratives of Hindu socio-religious reform movements are structured partly by interrogations of the missionary view that the rational forces of western science would propel…”

Section: Hinduisms On the Horizons Of Sciencementioning

confidence: 99%

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

Barua

¹

2018

South Asian History and Culture

1

0

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A distinctive claim of some of the configurations of 'modern Hinduism' is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as a 'scientific religion' which is geared towards the spiritual perfection of humanity. Many of these figures appropriated a classical Vedāntic Hindu distinction between 'lower' and 'higher' knowledge, and mapped it onto the distinction, inflected by colonial power, between 'western science' and 'Vedic/yogic wisdom'. I examine three key aspects of this mapping: the semantic ranges of 'science' in some western and Hindu traditions, the Orientalist millieu of colonial India in which these translations were developed, and the conceptual instabilities of the hybrid trope of 'Hindu science'.

show abstract

Caste, Conflict and Ideology

Cited by 356 publications

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‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

‘In the past we were a bit “Chamar”’: education as a self‐ and community engineering process in northern India

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

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