Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Superman of Sri Aurobindo and Iqbal act for the good of the world

World religions and norms of war, Vesselin Popovski, Gregory M. Reichberg ... - 2009 - 335 pages
In post-colonial India, ancient Hindu texts and not Hindu priests remain important for the power elites and for the process of ... The ascetic Aurobindo argued that individuals might sacrifice themselves for a greater "good cause". ...
Colonialism, modernity, and religious identities: religious reform ..., Gwilym Beckerlegge - 2008 - 274 pages
of these problems, and summarizes Aurobindo's solutions along with those of other orientalists of the colonial and postcolonial periods. ... Aurobindo too was at first interested only in the Upanishads, accepting passively the ...
Salman Rushdie: fictions of postcolonial modernity, Stephen Morton - 2008 - 190 pages
seen to parallel the association of Indian nationalists such as Aurobindo Ghose and Bal Gangadhar Tilak with anarchists ... secular vision of India's postcolonialmodernity: Aziz learns to identify with a political state of his own, ...
In the presence of Sai Baba: body, city, and memory in a global ..., Smriti Srinivas - 2008 - 403 pages
among youth by Baba is embedded in a history of such efforts in the colonial andpostcolonial milieu in India. ... Sri Aurobindo was concerned with developing a new framework for national education and left a legacy that would ...
Representing India: literatures, politics, and identities, Mukesh Williams, Rohit Wanchoo - 2007 - 343 pages
Since the primordial religions enshrined their traditions in their sacred texts, it was difficult for English to dislodge this identity.25 Aurobindo Ghosh traced the foundations of Indian culture to pre-colonial homelands where the ...
Development of modern Indian thought and the social sciences, Sabyasachi Bhattacharya - 2007 - 419 pages
C. Subramanya Bharati (1882-1921) the prophet of nationalism in the south, EG Tilak (1856-1921) and Aurobindo Ghose ... point to break off in so far as it marks the beginning of the post-colonial discourse of the Nehruvian regime. ...
Encyclopaedia of classical Indian sciences: natural science, ..., Helaine Selin, R. Narasimha - 2007 - 479 pages
The non-Western peoples who were the targets of the European colonial enterprise were very often awed and overwhelmed by their ... Thinkers such as Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghosh contrasted an Indian spiritualism with the deadening ...
The post-colonial space: writing the self and the nation - Page 184, Nandini Sahu - 2007 - 192 pages
The rulers realize that the colonial rule over India is not a smooth sailing affair for long, but is spiked with ... political ideology, Sri Aurobindo acknowledges him as his political Guru. In a paean of praise once he wrote: "Of ...
Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion - Page 74, Hugh B. Urban - 2007 - 372 pages
Many Indian authors, such as the young Aurobindo Ghose, would appropriate and exploit the terrifying image of Tantra, ... and the Divine Mother, seeking some kind of harmony with the West in an age of postcolonial compromise. ...
Picturing the nation: iconographies of modern India, Richard H. Davis - 2007 - 274 pages
and where does this longing take it in colonial and post-colonial India?1 In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by ... With a disarming smile, Aurobindopointed at a wall map of India and said: 'Do you see this map? ...
The Indian imagiNation: colonial and postcolonial literature and ... 2007 - 296 pages
In his attempt to define the idea of nationalism as expressed by Sri Aurobindo, one of the significant proponents in colonial India, Saurabh Bhattacharyya draws attention to the fact that though he had a brief career in active politics ...
Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and ... - Page x, Ashmita Khasnabish - 2006 - 239 pages
My realization is that Sri Aurobindo does not limit his sadhana of supramental consciousness to the practice of yoga, ... I hope all the theoretical chapters continue to contribute to the discourse of feminist postcolonial and ...
Affective communities: anticolonial thought, Fin-De-Siècle ... - Page 256, Leela Gandhi - 2006 - 254 pages
It stretches postcolonial theory well beyond its usual boundaries. Leela Gandhi successfully documents the anti-imperial ... or the Jewish French mystic Mirra Alfassa and the Cambridge-educated Indian yogi and extremist Sri Aurobindo. ...
Political agenda of education: a study of colonialist and ... - Page 38, Krishna Kumar - 2005 - 223 pages
Sri Aurobindo's associate, Mirra Alfassa, popularly known as the Mother, developed an institutionalized programme ... century as a reaction to colonization, particularly to the image of India that colonial intelligentsia had propagated. ...
Feminists under fire: exchanges across war zones - Page 203, Wenona Mary Giles, Women in Conflict Zones Network - 2003 - 238 pages
against colonial policies of their own countries. They included Annie Besant, Helena Blavatsky, and Margaret Cousins, ... The "Mother" - Mira Rachel Alfassa of Sephardic Jewish origin from Egypt and France - was a great modernizer and ...
The white woman's other burden: Western women and South Asia ... - Page 206, Kumari Jayawardena - 1995 - 310 pages
One Holy Mother who lived through the colonial and post-colonial period as more the equal partner (than the devotee) of the guru was Mirra Alfassa, who is discussed in the next chapter. Though regarded as the Divine Mother, ...
Integral Education: thought & Practical - Page 18, R.n. pani
Mirra Alfasa, subsequently known as the Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry was born in in Paris. He was prone to self-education through observation, meditation and contemplation even from her childhood and she was conscious of ...
Colonialism, modernity, and religious identities: religious reform ..., Gwilym Beckerlegge - 2008 - 274 pages
When Aurobindo arrived in south India in 1910, he was surprised to discover no radical physical differences between his new neighbours and people in the north. Eventually he became convinced that 'the [racial] theory which European ...
HINDUISM AND MODERNITY - Page 38, David Smith - 2008 - 264 pages
Aurobindo himself saw the Veda as vast piece of symbolism representing the passions of the soul and its striving ... It is justly said that the whole idea of a self-supposed racially superior people invading India, which is what the ...
Sri Aurobindo - A Contemporary Reader, Sachidananda Mohanty, Aurobindo Ghose - 2008 - 180 pages
Especially it gives self-consciousness to national or racial unity and creates the bond of a common self-expression and a common record of achievement. On the other hand, it is a means of national differentiation and perhaps the most ...
The Synthesis - Page 210 N. Popovic - 2008 - 292 pages
He argued in favour of the racial and cultural superiority of Europe, and even welcomed the atom bomb as a sign of humankind's triumph over nature. ... 1 In the East, a similar concept was espoused by Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. ...
The Oxford encyclopedia of women in world history, Bonnie G. Smith - 2008 - 2752 pages
in her experiment with creating gender and racial equality through education and peaceful communal living. ... The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was devoted to promoting the evolution of individual consciousness and advancing forms of ...
Race and Racialization: Essential Readings - Page 108, Tania Das Gupta - 2007 - 375 pages
exasperated by many of these debates, retracted his earlier discussions of the Aryans as a racial rather than a ... Aurobindo, a spiritual source of emulation for both the Hindutva movement and for some remarkably reactionary ...
Christian inculturation in India - Page 108, Paul M. Collins - 2007 - 234 pages These distinctions were reinforced by racial stereo-typing.4t He goes on to argue that the pure Vedic religion was corrupted by ... However Sharma argues Aurobindo should be considered as a proponent of Hindutva in terms similar to ...
Connecting Cultures, Emma Bainbridge - 2007 - 178 pages
(the society of practice), a secret terrorist cell set up in Calcutta in 1902 by Aurobindo Ghose and his brother ... the programme of the national-racialregeneration through physical and spiritual discipline seemed less urgent to ...
Encyclopaedia of classical Indian sciences: natural science, ..., Helaine Selin, R. Narasimha - 2007 - 479 pages
... the pretensions of racial superiority held by European colonisers, and idealised village life in French West Africa. ... Aurobindo Ghosh and Rabindranath Tagore viewed the war as the fulfilment of earlier Indian prophecies of a ...
The politics of anti-Westernism in Asia: visions of world order in ..., Cemil Aydin - 2007 - 299 pages
... led him to praise Indian nationalists such as Aurobindo Ghose and Tagore for expressing the "true" Indian spirit, ... be the leader of an independent Asia rather than a racially marginalized partner in the club of great powers. ...
The post-colonial space: writing the self and the nation - Page 183, Nandini Sahu - 2007 - 192 pages
Compared to MR Anand's novel, Bankim Chandra's story is based on patriotic love and sacrifice though both the writers vehemently oppose racial ... set in the background of the eighteenth century Bengal profoundly inspired Sri Aurobindo. ...
Ireland and India: colonies, culture and empire, Tadhg Foley, Maureen O'Connor - 2006 - 306 pages
In contrast, the case of Gandhi and African nationalism, ethnicity and a profound sense of racial apartness seems ... Aurobindo Ghose, one of the leaders of the Bengal Resistance, was in touch with developments in Ireland from the 1880s ...
Idealistic Thought of India - Page 399, P. T. Raju - 2006 - 452 pages
But the Superman of Aurobindo and Iqbal act for the good of the world, for bringing the kingdom of God on earth. ... Both thought and behaviour mechanisms have a tradition, a history which is cosmic, racial, social and individual; ...
Organizing empire: individualism, collective agency, and India - Page 148, Purnima Bose - 2006 - 278 pages
The stereotype of the Bengali babu belonged to a gendered colonial discourse ofracial typologies, ... Aurobindo Ghosh, who was a terrorist before becoming a yogin in 1910, valorized the ksatriyas as the caste that would be the agent of ...
Guru English: South Asian religion in a cosmopolitan language - Page 91, Srinivas Aravamudan - 2006 - 330 pages
and arguably, the deconstruction of religion from its racial constructions under the sign of empire. ... Leaving behind a copious archive of high Romantic argument and so-called overhead poetry, Aurobindo straddles the doctrinal and ...
The Encyclopaedia Of Indian Literature (Volume Two) (Devraj To Jyoti) - Page, Amaresh Datta - 2006 - 914 pages
This may be said to be largely due to racial, social and cultural exchanges, and, to some extent, ... The influence of Aurobindo is also strong in the works of Bendre, Gokak and others. Dramatists like Utpal Datta and Badal Sarkar have ...
History Modern India - Page 136, S. N. Sen - 2006 - 244 pages
It was Aurobindo Ghosh who decried the Congress policy. In a series of articles, published in 1893, ... His bitter experience with the racial policy of the whites against the Indians and Africans enriched his political foresight. ...
Raj orators: speeches of eminent Indians during the Raj, B. G. Tandon - 2006 - 482 pages
Aurobindo said: "He spoke under an inspiration, which he himself was unable to resist. ... with power of words and of rhythm: "Though the Hindus do not raciallylack either military skill or capacity for statecraft, these are not, ...
The SAGE handbook of nations and nationalism - Page 188 Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar - 2006 - 577 pages
Like many Christian Identity activists, McVeigh and Pierce expected racial struggle and guerilla war in the liberation ... and Aurobindo Ghose added a specifically Hindu spiritual dimension to India's emerging movement for independence. ...
Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions - Page 163, José Harris - 2005 - 336 pages
Aurobindo Ghose had been tried for conspiracy with terrorism, and, although escaping the death and imprisonment sentences ... Tilak had also been tried for inciting violence and racial hatred and sentenced to six years transportation, ...
Report, with accompanying papers, Dante Society of America – 2004
While Aurobindo made Dante the model for religious poetry because he [Dante] had intellectually grasped "the motives of ... by Dante than any other poet, has stirredpost-colonial writers. For example, Salman Rushdie in his 1999 novel, ...
Making local democracy work in India: social capital, politics & ..., Harihar Bhattacharyya - 2002 - 227 pages
In the post- colonial period the country witnessed an enormous expansion of the state, and centralisation too, ... Aurobindo, India's idealist though widely respected philosopher, condemned uniformity and over-centralisation and 20. ...
Conversations and transformations: toward a new ethics of self and ... - Page xx, Ananta Kumar Giri - 2002 - 347 pages
Even the so-called moves of post-colonial criticism, as they have come to pass in the institutional corridors of India ... like Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo. But Western readers are also exposed to a string of less familiar Indian figures: ...
Hinterlands and horizons: excursions in search of amity, Margaret Chatterjee - 2002 - 139 pages
CHAPTER ONE The Tattered Emblem In Martin Buber gave an address to The World Brotherhood Association in California which had the title "Fraternity." He maintained that the three principles of the French Revolution had come apart in ...
Bengal, rethinking history: essays in historiography, Śekhara Bandyopādhyāẏa - 2001 - 326 pages
Aurobindo Ghosh, whom Nandy contrasts sharply with Tagore, held up the ideal that 'unification . . . ought not to be ... See Sugata Bose, 'Instruments and Idioms ofColonial and National Development: India's Historical Experience in ...
En-gendering India: woman and nation in colonial and postcolonial ... - Page, Sangeeta Ray - 2000 - 198 pages
it was in Bengal that the Western intrusion was the deepest and the colonialpresence the longest" (18). I have relied on two translations olAnandamath. The first is translated by Sree Aurobindo and Sree ...
Signposts: gender issues in post-independence India, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Kali for Women ... - 1999 - 381 pages
by a letter he read in which the Bengali nationalist Aurobindo wrote to his wife, Mrinalini: My dearest Mrinalini! ... [the British colonial] has forced my mother to the ground, lays himself on her breast, and sucks away her blood. ...
Alternative visions: paths in the global village - Page 213, Fred Reinhard Dallmayr - 1998 - 307 pages
On this point Chatterjee correctly states that the root of postcolonial malaise lies "not in our inability to ... that Aurobindo initially endorsed but was able to overcome in a lifetime of serious reflection and dedicated service. ...
Modernity, morality, and the Mahatma, Madhuri Sondhi - 1997 - 244 pages
Aurobindo entered politics in 1905, the year of Curzon's partition of Bengal, and would have experienced at first hand the intensity of Hindu-Muslim tensions which led to this bizarre episode.23 (It was an ... a post-colonial world. ...
Extremist movement in Tirunelveli, 1908-1911, P. B. Gopalakrishnan - 1997 - 96 pages
Popularly known as Moderates, their main demand was colonial self-government within the frame work of the Empire. ... Aurobindo Ghose who denounced the mendicant policies of the Congress demanded the adoption of virulent methods. ...
After amnesia: tradition and change in Indian literary criticism, G. N. Devy - 1995 - 147 pages
Even the most original of the twentieth century Indian thinkers — Sri Aurobindo, MN Roy and Mahatma Gandhi — could ... Cultural forms and intellectual institutions do keep changing continuously, and no post-colonial society can claim to ...
Understanding the post-colonial world: theory and method, Neera Chandhoke, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library - 1994 - 280 pages
The most important contribution of this group was the economic critique of thecolonial rule which they turned out . ... and Vivekananda and Aurobindo among many others. This stream of thought did not crystallise in any one ...
Provocations, the teaching of English literature in India - Page 55, Sudhakar Marathe, Mohan Ramanan, Robert Bellarmine - 1993 - 246 pages
position and force us to accept our responsibilities as post-colonial intellectuals threatened with neo-colonialism. ... the more recent work in educational psychology by thinkers such as Tagore, Gandhi, Aurobindo, and Krishnamurti. ... [Decolonising History Claude Alvares]
Portraits of an era, Tara Ali Baig - 1988 - 184 pages
Today elaborate rituals surround the exquisitely flower-decked samadhi of Sri Aurobindo and the Holy Mother, but in all the commerce of books and memorabilia still produced by the faithful, it is hard to believe that they 'Act, ...
India's woman power, Tara Ali Baig - 1976 - 301 pages
So great was the influence of these women, Sri Aurobindo was to have printed mottos placed on all the walls of the ... In a booklet, Sri Aurobindo wrote, "As a rule the only mantra used in this sadhana is that of the Mother or of my ...
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Sunday, May 30, 2010

Resurgence of Asia

Conference on Inter-Asian Connections II: Singapore - December 8-10, 2010
Co-organized and co-sponsored by The Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and the Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS - DEADLINE: Monday, May 31, 2010
The Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) (the Organizers) are pleased to announce an open call for individual research paper submissions from researchers in any world region, to participate in a 3-day thematic workshop at an international conference, “Inter-Asian Connections II: Singapore.”
To be held in Singapore, December 8-10, 2010, the conference will host concurrent workshops, coordinated by individual directors and showcasing innovative research from across the social sciences and related disciplines. Workshops will focus on themes of particular relevance to Asia, reconceptualized as a dynamic and interconnected historical, geographical, and cultural formation stretching from the Middle East through Eurasia and South Asia, to East Asia.
The conference structure and schedule have been designed to enable intensive ‘working group’ interactions on a specific research theme, as well as broader interactions on topics of mutual interest and concern. Accordingly, there will be a public keynote delivered by Dr. Ackbar Abbas (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California - Irvine) and a number of plenary sessions in addition to closed workshop sessions. The concluding day of the conference will bring all the conference participants together for a public presentation and exchange of research agendas that have emerged over the course of the conference deliberations.
Individual paper submissions are invited from junior and senior scholars, whether graduate students or faculty, or researchers in NGOs or other research organizations, for the following five workshops. For the full Calls for Papers and detailed descriptions of the individual workshops, click below.
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Thursday, May 27, 2010

Markets induce us to cooperate rather than plunder

Ask the Professor on Mises and Today's "The Calling" from Coordination Problem by Steven Horwitz
Over at the Fraser Institute's "Ask the Professor" feature, my essay for this month is on Mises's Human Action 
The revival of free market thinking and, at least until recently, the increasing economic freedom across the world both owe a huge debt to Mises and Human Action.  It is in this book that we find the most complete statement of the whole economic vision underlying the case for free markets, including the importance of individual choice, the centrality of entrepreneurship, the irreplaceable role played by genuinely competitive market prices in helping us solve problems of production and consumption, the ways in which capitalism has improved the well-being of all by promoting peaceful social cooperation and, finally, how government intervention can undermine all of these benefits.

Like his student Hayek, Mises saw competition in particular as a kind of “discovery process” by which producers responded to the demands of consumers by first figuring out what they wanted and then how to produce it at the lowest cost.  The answers to those questions were not simply “given” to market participants, nor were they automatically discovered by maximizing utility or profit functions.  They were the result of conscious entrepreneurship involving active appraisals of both the present and the various possible futures in a world of pervasive, but not debilitating, uncertainty.   Mises argued that in order to figure out what consumers want, entrepreneurs need to make use of prices generated by genuine free market competition.  Engaging in calculations of prospective profit and loss would guide entrepreneurs in their attempts to push back at the uncertainty of the future.  And actual profits and losses would tell them after the fact whether their choices were good ones.  In this way, Mises saw free markets as indispensible for figuring out what to produce and how to produce it.
More generally, what markets made possible was nothing less than human social cooperation and civilization as we know it.  For Mises, the division of labor and the specialization/exchange process of the market is not only the source of economic growth and the improvement of billions of human lives, it is the source of deeper human bonds.  A finer division of labor means more narrow specialization and relying more on exchange for all we want to acquire.  This means that humans become more deeply interdependent, which in turn removes the incentives to violence and war. Mises called this progressive process “the Law of Association:”   markets induce us to cooperate rather than plunder, and in so doing, help to create peaceful civilizations.  
Mises’ grand vision of economics and its place in society were very much at odds with the trends in economics of his day.  Mises was part of the “Austrian school of economics.”  The Austrians historically rejected the mechanical and overly mathematical treatments of economics that had begun to comprise the mainstream of the discipline by the 1920s and 30s. Instead, the Austrians took an evolutionary approach that built up from the subjective choices of individuals toward an understanding of the unintended order they produce.  This approach is echoed throughout Human Action and its insights.
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Dictatorship of the professional elite

Equality Is Important—But It Isn’t Enough
A. BARTON HINKLE TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST: May 25, 2010
Justice demands equality before the law. Fairness requires evenhandedness. But while equality and evenhandedness are necessary, they are hardly sufficient. […] 
The second thing worth noting is that, while liberals find inequality across race and gender classes invidious, many seem to find nothing wrong with an inequality between the enlightened few and the great unwashed. Large swaths of the knowledge class seem almost wistful about the idea of a dictatorship of the professional elite to oversee the lumpen proletariat.
Hence the English professor who thinks he knows where insurance rates should be set. Hence the architect who has the answer to energy policy. Hence the journalist who thinks he should write the rules for stockbrokers. Hence Woody Allen, musing that it would be good if Barack Obama "could be a dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly." Hence Thomas Friedman contending in The New York Times that one-party autocracy can "have great advantages," when it is "led by a reasonably enlightened group of people."
They mean well, of course. But then so did John C. Calhoun, when he argued that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good… Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com
The reflective ideas of Nehru on history 
C I Issac vijayvaani.com 27 May 2010
He ignored the universal fact that hitherto all accredited works in history are tailor-made [9] to fit the occasion or the interest. […] 9] “… history is what the historian makes”. E. H. Carr, What is History? Harmondsworth, UK, 1977, p 26. [...] 
He was well aware of the drawbacks of our present textual history. “Even the British period is distorted with the object of glorifying British rule and British virtues. Very slowly a more correct perspective is developing. But we need not go to the past to find instances of the manipulation of history to suit particular ends and support one’s own fancies and prejudices. The present is full of this, and if the present, which we have ourselves seen and experienced, can be so distorted, what of the past?” [33]. ... 33] Jawaharlal Nehru, Discovery of India, V [edn], 1948, op cit, pp 76, 77.        
34] “The histories of India that most of us have had to read, chiefly written by Englishmen, are usually long apologies for the panegyrics of British rule and barely veiled contemptuous account of what happened here in the millenniums preceding it”. Ibid.
35] “Many competent historians are at work now, but they often err on the other side and their work is more a meticulous chronicle of facts than living history. But even today it is strange how we suddenly become overwhelmed by tradition and the critical faculties of even intelligent men cease to function. This may partly be due to the nationalism that consumes us in our present subject state. Only when we are politically and economically free will the mind function normally and critically”. Ibid, p 75. The author is a retired Professor of History, and lives in Trivandrum 
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