Stuttaford et al review "The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History" by Isaiah Berlin and edited by Henry Hardy with an introduction by Patrick Gardiner.
In other words, amidst the crisis of identity that colonial modernity brought in its wake, these exceptional leaders were able to traverse the length and breadth of Indian traditions in order to ...resolve the problem of who they were and to forge a politics that would ultimately lead them to a sovereign state (both of being as well as of the state). ...for Ambedkar, his conversion to Buddhism, another part of ancient Indian history, represents the burden of the self (duhkha). Unfortunately, in presenting a compelling case for rethinking India's founding, there is very little by way of rethinking the iconic figures that have been discussed in this book. ...Gandhi, the Tagores (arguably, Abanindranath is a new addition to the canon of "founders"), and Nehru still appear as larger-than-life figures whose exceptional capacity to think and to lead the country remains unquestioned.
Review 24 -- No Title Fisher, Michael H
The Journal of Asian Studies (pre-1986),
02/1980, Letnik:
39, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
At the end of the 1960s, particularly with the publication of The Modernity of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967) by Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph, considerable scholarly interest ...developed around the issues of the nature of "tradition" and the influence of "traditional" elements on "modern" society in South Asia. A seminar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and a subsequent international conference in June-July 1969, gathered some fifty academics to consider these issues in the South Asian political and social context. Ten years later a dozen papers have finally emerged under the editorial direction of Robin J. Moore.
Review 22 -- No Title Williams, Joanna
The Journal of Asian Studies (pre-1986),
05/1979, Letnik:
38, Številka:
3
Book Review
Recenzirano
This volume comprises the four Rabindranath Tagore Lectures delivered by the late Dr. Moti Chandra in 1964 at The University of Pennsylvania. They have been somewhat revised by the author and, in his ...last years of failing health, by his staff at the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, where he had served as director for over twenty years. The publication of these essays eleven years after they were written is justified by the eloquence, in places, of the writing, and because they present Moti Chandra's opinions as an individual author rather than as one of several collaborators, as in his more recent works.
Do these garments befit you?" The translation here is off the mark, because the Bangla text reads: "aniyachhi koutay bhoriya / sindur; korile aggna, sundar lolate / dibo phonta. eyo tumi, tomar ki ...saje e besh?" The word eyo in colloquial Bangla means married woman, whose husband is alive, i.e. sadhaba. ...she looks like a widow or bidhoba without sindur. The translator is not aware of the Bengali word eyo and translates it as "What's this". ...besh here is not garment, but the look of a married woman without sindur. Tulshi also has a very significant position in the Vaishnava faith. ...the essence of piety that the lamp in the foot of a tulshi exudes is missing in the translation.
Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore Robinson, Andrew; Chitravali; Kumar, Rabindra; R Siva
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
01/2012, Letnik:
22, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) On the birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in 1961, the Indian government--at the personal initiative of its prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, ...who had known and revered Tagore in the 1930s--commissioned a portfolio of collotype reproductions of some of Tagore's more than 2,000 paintings and drawings. Perhaps this is because the paintings, unlike the writings and songs, do not require much 'translation'--very few of them even have reliable titles known to have been given by Tagore himself. ...they are entirely free of the trappings of Orientalism that ensnared Tagore's life and still obscure his poetry and the other writings that first made him famous in the West with the award of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. A British painter wrote of the exhibition that "Tagore's drawings constrain us to pause and ask ourselves anew, what is the purpose of drawing, of painting, of art generally?" It seems a large claim, but it carries weight even today. Affinities have been found with paintings by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Emile Nolde and other artists, as well as with primitive art--and there is no doubt that Tagore had seen works by such painters and was interested in them--but his own paintings stand alone.
In 1913, Walter Lippmann defined culture as the "climate" of a civilization. Cultural criticism can be defined accordingly as discourse concerned with analysis, assessment, or amelioration of that ...climate. America and the Medusa reveals beauty as central to cultural criticism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Possibly because of their obsolescence as categories, beauty and ugliness have been underestimated as components of cultural critique in this period. This dissertation documents a consensus among otherwise contentious contemporary critics that American conditions were debilitatingly ugly. It further finds a conviction that America is peculiarly hostile to beauty, that beauty is primary to the good life, and that exemplary beauty will alleviate American blight, aesthetic and otherwise. Faith in the curative power of beauty involved elitist assumptions about the inferiority of popular standards and the nature of reform. Typically, activist cultural critics endorsed some variety of a saving elite, and though realizing the difficulty here--that America would have to be already sufficiently civilized as to nurture and respond to such a caste--they overlooked such conundrums, confident that demos would heed the true, the good, and especially the beautiful. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 show critics more or less comfortable with undemocratic implications depending on their particular ideology. High-Tory Irving Babbitt was unrepentant about his hopes for aesthetic inculcation of "measure," whereas fellow conservatives Stuart Sherman and W. C. Brownell increasingly accommodated popular values. H. L. Mencken abjured uplift via beauty, but left room for beauty as a stimulus of aristocratic leadership. Though alert to liberal sensibilities, radicals Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank employed elitist premises and insidious notions of aesthetic conditioning. Continuing tension between reformist critique and native democratic impulse is illustrated in chapters 2 and 6. The former analyzes Matthew Arnold's "Civilisation in the United States" (1888) and surveys contemporary reaction to reveal an America often eager to better itself yet reluctant to sacrifice democratic gains for aesthetic approval. Chapter 6 reads Sinclair Lewis's Main Street in the context of cultural criticism to investigate a similar ambivalence over the aesthetic reform of American life.
Review 30 -- No Title Broomfield, J H
The Journal of Asian Studies (pre-1986),
02/1973, Letnik:
32, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
"... it is all the while merely picking up a grain of sand here and there from the infinite seashore of misery." Such was Andrews' judgment of his own work in India. It is typical in its expression ...of anguish at the suffering he saw about him, and typical too in its tone of self-depreciation. Yet few men in this century did more for the Indian people...
