The Dissident Orientalist

Sirisena, Mihirini

doi:10.1080/1369801x.2015.1131176

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 19 publications

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“…But Gornall, as I noted above, conflates coherence with autonomy. Coherence is not synonymous with 'multiple centers of power' or some 'cosmopolitan vernacular' , and this is another iteration of 'hybridity' , 'heterogeneity' , or 'multiple modernities' attractive to scholars (Acri 2015;Harding et al 2020;McMahan 2008McMahan , 2015Shields 2017;Sirisena 2017). 32 The monk Ananda who composed the manual "Ornament of lay followers" in Pandya was not waxing poetic about cosmopolitan values.…”

Section: The Privatementioning

confidence: 99%

On Rewriting Buddhism

Abeysekara¹

2022

Religion and Society

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Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being (e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life.

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Section: The Privatementioning

confidence: 99%

On Rewriting Buddhism

Abeysekara¹

2022

Religion and Society

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Translating the Buddha: Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia and Its Indian Publics

Ober

2020

Humanities

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In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has as an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to ‘liberate’ the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem’s much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste.

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The Dissident Orientalist

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

On Rewriting Buddhism

On Rewriting Buddhism

Translating the Buddha: Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia and Its Indian Publics

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