The laine controversy and the study of hinduism

Novetzke, Christian Lee

doi:10.1007/s11407-004-0008-9

Cited by 30 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…7 One vexed question today is whether one should admit students as Facebook friends! 8 http://www.peopleslinguisticsurvey.org/Default.aspx 9 National Knowledge Commission, Recommendations on Knowledge Applications, Traditional Knowledge, http://knowledgecommissionarchive.nic.in/focus/ traditional.asp 10 The ban on Wendy Doniger's The Hindus, and James Laine's book on Shivaji (Novetzke 2004), epitomised this phenomenon. In September-October 2017, some Arya Vysyas protested against Kancha Ilaiah's book, Samajika Smugglurlu Komatollu (Vysyas: Social Smugglers), a Telugu extract from a 2009 book, Post-Hindu India: A Discourse on Dalit-Bahujan, Socio-spiritual and Scientific Revolution (Express News Service 2017).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Indian University Today: Our Intellectual and Professional Obligations

Sundar¹

2018

Review of Development and Change

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Indian University Today: Our Intellectual and Professional Obligations

Sundar¹

2018

Review of Development and Change

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“…Named after Shivaji's son, the Sambhaji Brigade is comprised of Maratha caste members and is "affiliated with a larger politico-cultural organization, the Maratha Seva Sangh, which vows to protect the sentiments of the Maratha caste bloc," according to scholar Christian Novetzke (2004). As the caste of King Shivaji, the Marathas have undergone several revisions to their caste status in the past 300 years; originally an agricultural caste, the caste has tried to "elevate itself to the status of Kshatriya [warrior, the second highest caste after Brahmin] from the status of Shudra [the lowest caste]" by its association with Shivaji (Kinsley 1993, 156).…”

Section: Caste Disenfranchisement and Ownership In The Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Irreparable Damage: Violence, Ownership, and Voice in an Indian Archive

Caswell

2009

Libri

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“…16 Eknåth (sixteenth century), also a Bråhma~, is remembered to have been associated with a Í¨f order of the Deccan, and his remembrance in Marathi public culture features his engagement with the life of the non-elite, whose metaphors and performative cadences of labor appear in his speech. We can also see the formation of a new bhakti public around Çivåj , exemplified in the violence and censorship that followed the release of James Laine's book in India in 2003 (for more on this, see Novetzke 2004). A new religion has been proposed by those who claim Çivåj as a champion of the lower castes, a religion in which they refuse the participation of Bråhma~s and draw deeply from a comingling of Vai‚~ava Marathi bhakti, Marå †hå militancy, and anti-Bråhma~ical rhetoric.…”

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Bhakti and Its Public

Novetzke

2007

Hindu Studies

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In this essay I want to chart a space for understanding bhakti that moves between the two dominant, and in some ways mutually contradictory, modes of describing bhakti in modern scholarship. 1 These two positions are the idea, on the one hand, that bhakti forms a social movement and, on the other, that bhakti is an act of personal devotion. In between these poles of the broadly social and the strictly personal, I want to suggest that bhakti seeks to form publics of reception rather than communities that imply a single cohesive issue or idiom. I advance the thesis that all manifestations of bhakti are performances and, more to the point, public ones, that is, performances that are part of, or help form, publics of reception. While I would not argue that bhakti never describes a private affair of devotion, the sense in which bhakti enters the history of India is not through the private realm, but through the social world of caste, labor, media (both written and non-written), and markets outside the home and the heart of an individual.To Ça kara, around the ninth century CE, is attributed the argument for an individualized, monist vision of bhakti, which he is said to have expressed in the Çivånanda-lahir by his metaphor of the river, or self, joining the ocean, or Brahman. His broad influence had much to do with philosophical-religious understandings of bhakti in the direction of a personal pursuit. Yet the metaphor is telling-the river may be an individual stream on its way to the ocean, but it is also one of the central venues of collective, social Hindu religious practice (think of the Kumbha Melå or the Ga gå in Banaras) and also, universally, a key site for commerce, economics, travel, and urban development. The river is many things: a boundary, a threat, a source of sustenance, a channel of trade. The river is an apt metaphor for the public, as much as it is for bhakti and religious expression itself (for more on bhakti and rivers, see Feldhaus 1995). Indeed, despite Ça kara's usage, we also find in Sanskrit an impressive series of texts that associate bhakti with public performance. In treatises on aesthetics, and especially in texts attributed to Abhinavagupta in the early eleventh century, the nature of bhakti as affect is debated. Bhakti in this context is beyond rasa, beyond the "flavor" of a performance, but is one of those key "experiences," or bhåvas, that a rasa might explore; all roads, as it were, may lead to bhakti, and it cannot be limited to any particular kind of affect. 2 It is thus understood not only to be a shared experience, International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, 3 (2007): 255-72

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The laine controversy and the study of hinduism

Cited by 30 publications

References 20 publications

The Indian University Today: Our Intellectual and Professional Obligations

The Indian University Today: Our Intellectual and Professional Obligations

Irreparable Damage: Violence, Ownership, and Voice in an Indian Archive

Bhakti and Its Public

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