On alienation in 20th century Indic poetry in English.

This book publishes, for the first time in decades, and in many cases, for the first time in a readily accessible edition, English language philosophical literature written in India during the period of British rule.

Classical Indian Thought and the English Language: Perspectives and Problems, edited by Mohini Mullick and Madhuri Santanam Sondhi, contains the proceedings of the workshop "Rendering of the Categories of Classical Indian Thought in the English Language: Perspectives and Problems," held in New Delhi in December 2011. Of the ten papers included in this volume, those by Sudipta Kaviraj, S. N. Balagangadhara, and Claus Oetke concern methodological issues of broader application, so they will be reviewed here in (...) greater detail.Each paper is followed by the response of a discussant and by a debate in the form of selected questions and comments from the audience at the workshop. The most relevant points raised in these... (shrink)

The period of British colonial rule in India is typically regarded as philosophically sterile. Indian philosophy written in English during the British colonial period is often ignored in histories of Indian philosophy, or, when considered explicitly, dismissed either as uncreative or as inauthentic. The late Daya Krishna thought hard about this at the end of his life, and we have been thinking about this in conversation with him. We show that this dismissal is unjustified and that this (...) is a fertile period for Indian philosophy in which traditional Indian philosophical ideas were brought into dialogue with the West and advanced with great acumen. In this paper, we present one case study to illustrate this point. (shrink)

The present work is an attempt to show that ‘important and original philosophy was written in English, in India, by Indians’ from the late 19th c through the middle of 20th c. (xiv). In fact, it tells us that these works ‘sustained the Indian philosophical tradition and were creators of its modern avatar.’ (xiv) The authors of these works ‘pursued Indian philosophy in a language and format that could render it both accessible and acceptable to the Anglophone (...) world abroad.’ (xiv). (shrink)

This new and revised edition provides a comprehensive dictionary of Indian philosophical terms. Terms are provided in both devanagari and roman transliteration along with their English translations.

Compilation of basic text of six systems of Indian philosophy.

Decentering Rushdie argues that postcolonial studies has consistently underestimated the investment of the English-language Indian novel in the nation by focusing on a handful of texts that conform to Western assumptions about the bankruptcy of the postcolonial nation-state. Taking Salman Rushdie’s work as the sign of a presumed homology between postcolonialism and a postmodern distrust of totality, Jani demonstrates that his novels are hardly representative of the range of Indian writing in English. Instead, in a series (...) of expert readings of less well-known texts, he demonstrates the commitment to the decolonising project that exists even within the inevitably cosmopolitan worldview of Indians writing in a colonial language. Situating his work within foundational debates in postcolonial studies, this review demonstrates the fresh light he sheds on the vexed relations among historical location, political ideology and literary form. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus (...) and Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

"This is an important contribution to the serious, detailed philosophical discussion of Buddhist ideas, an approach to the study of Buddhism that is still relatively young and undeveloped. The arguments for and against various Buddhist views are presented in an accessible and clear way, but without shying away from the inevitable conundrums and complexities. The study is well supported by a wide range of primary sources and references to recent scholarly discussions." - David Burton, Canterbury Christ Church University The first (...) introductory survey of Indian Buddhist philosophy available in the English language. Organised in broadly chronological terms, this book presents the philosophical arguments of the great Indian Buddhist philosophers of the fifth century BCE to the eighth century CE. Each chapter examines their core ethical, metaphysical and epistemological views as well as the distinctive area of Buddhist ethics that we call today moral psychology. Throughout, the book follows three key themes that both tie the tradition together and are the focus for most critical dialogue: the idea of anatman or no-self, the appearance/reality distinction and the moral aim, or ideal. Indian Buddhist philosophy is shown to be a remarkably rich tradition that deserves much wider engagement from European philosophy. Carpenter shows that while we should recognise the differences and distances between Indian and European philosophy, its driving questions and key conceptions, we must resist the temptation to find in Indian Buddhist philosophy, some Other, something foreign, self-contained and quite detached from anything familiar. Indian Buddhism is shown to be a way of looking at the world that shares many of the features of European philosophy and considers themes central to philosophy understood in the European tradition. (shrink)

INDIAN THOUGHT AND ITS DEVELOPMENT by ALBERT SCHWEITZER.Originally printed in 1936. PREFACE: I HAVE written this short account of Indian Thought and its Development in the hope that it may help people in Europe to become better ac quainted than they are at present with the ideas it stands for and the great personalities in whom these ideas are embodied. To gain an insight into Indian thought, and to analyse it and discuss our differences, must necessarily make (...) European thought clearer and richer. If we really want to understand the thought of India we must get clear about the problems it has to face and how it deals with them. What we have to do is to set forth and explain the process of develop ment it has passed through from the time of the Vedic hymns down to the present day. I am fully conscious of the difficulty of describing definite lines of development in a philosophy which possesses in so remarkable a degree the will and the ability not to perceive contrasts as such, and allows ideas of heterogeneous character to subsist side by side and even brings them into connection with each other. But I believe that we, the people of the West, shall only rightly comprehend what Indian thought really is and what is its significance for the thought of all mankind, if we succeed in gaining an insight into its processes. Like every European who studies Indian philo sophy, I am deeply indebted to the scholars who have published the texts and been responsible for the fundamental work of research. I am specially grateful to Professor Moriz Winternitz of Prague, not only for what I have learnt from his great work on Indian Literature, but also because he has allowed me a share in the wealth of his knowledge by giving me a fund of information in response to my questions. I have also found it a great advantage to have been able to discuss the problems of Indian thought with my friend Mr C. F. Andrews. I found Romain Hollands penetrating studies on Ramakrishna and Vivekananda very inspiring. And I have to thank my friend Mr A. B. Ashby for valuable help in connection with the English edition. Indian thought has greatly attracted me since in my youth I first became acquainted with it through reading the works of Arthur Schopenhauer. From the very beginning I was convinced that all thought is really concerned with the great problem of how man can attain to spiritual union with infinite Being. My attention was drawn to Indian thought because it is busied with this problem and because by its nature it is mysticism. What I liked about it also was that Indian ethics are concerned with the be haviour of man to all living beings and not merely with his attitude to his fellow-man and to human society. But the closer my acquaintance with the docu ments of Indian thought the more I was assailed by doubts as to whether the view made familiar to us Europeans by the works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Paul Deussen and others the view namely that Preface vii Indian thought is completely governed by the idea of world and life negation is right. I was compelled to admit the fact that world and life affirmation is present at the back of this thought from the very dawn of its history, and that the existence and inter fusion within it of world and life negation and world and life affirmation constitute its special character istic and determine its development. I am not merely describing the thought of India, but at the same time I am making a critical examina tion of it... (shrink)

Publication date: 25 October 2017 Source: Author: Olga Posudiyevska This article presents the study of Rudyard Kipling’s early pieces of writing. The author proposes an alternative view to the consideration of the writer’s literary heritage from the position of jingoism and propagation of the civilizing mission of the British Empire, which can still be encountered in academic research. The analysis of Plain Tales from the Hills suggests that the praise of British imperialism was not the main idea of Kipling’s early (...) works. The researcher comes to the conclusion that Kipling did not regard India as a conquered barbarous land which the British people had to civilize. This remote exotic country became a motherland for a representative of Anglo-Indian society, who was born in Indian environment. Kipling’s love for India is felt in his strive to give a detailed description of exotic locations and ethnographic peculiarities and even to restore the manner of speech of Indian population. The reader of Plain Tales from the Hills can perceive the author’s respect for the English and Indian people, working in harsh climate, his interest and great sympathy with the aboriginal population, living in hard social conditions under the British rule. The sarcastic remarks of his characters, which reflect Kipling’s doubt in the beneficial role of the British Empire in the lives of the Indian people, finally refute the statement about the writer’s glorification of the imperialistic policy of Great Britain as the main aim of his creative art. (shrink)

This paper compares late eighteenth-century claims for the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian and for the existence of Welsh Indians. It shows that although both claims were supported in part by appeals to similarities between Celtic and American Indian languages, the appeals in each case were very different. On the one hand, the Edinburgh literati who supported Ossian's authenticity focused on expressive structures shared by all primitive societies. On the other hand, radically Protestant antiquarians and philologists focused on lexical similarities (...) that they argued demonstrate a genetic link between certain American Indians and the Welsh. The paper uses this fundamental difference underlying a superficial similarity, to explore in greater detail the distinction between philosophical historians among the Edinburgh literati, who were religiously moderate, politically conservative, and promoted Scotland's integration into a modern, polite, commercial and English-speaking empire, and the Welsh antiquarians, who were religious and political radicals and whose interest in the Welsh Indians reflected and reinforced their attempts to resurrect a distant golden age of Celtic Britain. pe’nguin. (1) A bird. This bird was found with this name, as is supposed, by the first discoverers of America; and penguin signifying in Welsh a white head, and the head of this fowl being white, it has been imagined, that America was peopled from Wales … —Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755. (shrink)

Following their violent suppression of the Indian Revolution of1857, the British founded and consolidated their secular empire in the IndianSubcontinent, which marginalized and bypassed religion as far as possible,particularly Islam, which had been the official religion of the Mughal ancienrégime. Contemporaneous Ottoman efforts to counter European imperialism ledto Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s policy of pan-Islamism, particularlythe call for Islamic unity against the Russian aggression against Turkey in1877. It was at this critical juncture that some Indian Muslim scholars gallantlyvolunteered (...) to counter this threat, and to preserve the Islamic faith and heritageworldwide, despite the severe problems faced by the Muslims in India itself.This study highlights the role of an eminent scholar in this movement, namelyAllama Shibli Nu’mani, who in 1914 conceived the idea offounding the world-famous Islamic research institute Darul Musannefin ShibliAcademy in his home town of Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, India. Shibli was veryactive and instrumental in collecting donations from the wealthy landowners among the Muslim elite in his hometown of Azamgarh for theOttoman cause, raising 3,000 rupees, which was handed to Husain HasibAfendi, the Ottoman Consul in Bombay in 1877. Furthermore, his eloquentpoetry rallied Muslims across India to support the valour and heroism displayedin the jihad by Ghazi Usman Pasha against the Russians. Shibli travelled toIstanbul in 1892 and met with the Pasha, on whose efforts Tamgha-i Majidi was granted to Shibli on 13th Muharram, 1310/7th August, 1892.This article is based on Shibli’s major works in Urdu, particularly his arousingeulogies, Turkish archival reports, newspapers and magazines, andsecondary sources in Urdu and English. (shrink)

This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post-structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler, language, it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are giving account of events, whether at first or second hand. The problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through and through by the observer’s frame of reference, then one will never know, in any given case, what really happened.I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing (...) to teach a course in colonial American literature. I’d set out to learn what I could about the Puritans’ relations with American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had happened between the English settlers and the natives in seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its dilemmas were the furthest things from my mind. I began, more or less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the subject. As I read one, however, I discovered that the problem was more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct. Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory, they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of past “mistake” which, presumably, we studied history in order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn’t put us in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to prevent such atrocities from happening again? Jane Tompkins is professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 and editor of Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism . Her current work concerns the construction of male identity in American popular culture. (shrink)

A short exposition, With comments, Of the philosophical investigations into the nature and aesthetic experience of emotions represented in drama by the mediaeval indian philosophers, Bharata, Bhatt lollata, Shri shankuka, Bhatta nayaka and abhinavagupta. The conclusions reached by these philosophers are contrasted briefly with the position taken up regarding this problem by contemporary english and american aestheticians.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity by Suparno BanerjeeBarnita BagchiSuparno Banerjee. Indian Science Fiction: Patterns, History and Hybridity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2020. xiii + 256 pp. E-book, ISBN 9781786836670.Suparno Banerjee’s monograph examines science fiction (henceforth SF) from India, a country that has a rich and fascinating tradition of SF. This is a book that will be of interest and value to scholars and (...) students in higher education of utopia, dystopia, and speculative fiction, and to readers across disciplines interested in SF as a mode. It is quite clear today that Darko Suvin’s canonical definition of SF as cognitive estrangement, an interplay between the familiar and the strange, and its emphasis on the novum that is created in SF, has been enriched with further attention to context, including postcolonial contexts. Whose familiarity in cognition are we speaking about, and what happens when contexts are not necessarily hegemonic Anglo-American or Western ones? Indeed, even in Western contexts, science is not a given, but an element that always has political, historical, and ideological overtones. The novum, too, as with the term utopia, is moored in the contexts of the text.Banerjee’s book is one among several excellent monographs on Indian SF that have been published in the 2020s: Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj: Materiality, Mythology and Technology of Indian Science Fiction (2021) and Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Final Frontiers: Science Fiction and Techno-Science in Non-Aligned India (2020) come to mind. Khan adopts a refreshing fan’s guide to Indian SF register in his monograph, discussing mythology, materiality, ideology, and technology, and he coins the abbreviation TransMIT to capture his approach. Mukherjee’s book examines how Indian SF syncs with or questions the technological and scientific paradigms of India under Nehru and the Non-Aligned Movement; arguing that Indian SF needs to be seen as semiperipheral, the book also applies concepts from energy humanities [End Page 586] to Indian SF in an arresting way. Suparno Banerjee’s monograph is a solidly grounded work in its clearly explained choice of corpus, and a methodology that elicits particularly generative insights in a number of areas, including the epistemological status of science in Indian SF, the importance of SF written in bhasha or non-English Indian languages, the interplay between past and future in Indian SF, analysis of how Indian SF imaginatively represents the Other, and attention to Indian women writers of SF.Banerjee offers a lucid and useful chronology of Indian SF in four historical periods: 1835–1905, 1905–47, 1947–95, and 1995–2019. The period from 1835 to 1905 offers the first specimens of Indian SF, primarily in the form of future histories that question colonialism, in the utopian mode, and adventure tales and stories with scientific and technological elements. The establishment of a British education system, starting in the 1820s, gave an impetus to the birth of Indian SF. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” was published in 1905, a year that heralds the second period lasting until Indian independence. In this period, SF starts appearing not just in the English, Bengali, and Hindi languages, as in the first period, but also in a number of other Indian languages, such as Assamese, Marathi, and Tamil. Children’s and youth magazines develop from the 1920s, spaces where science writing and SF both appear. Nationalist, anticolonial stances emerge, challenging western hegemony, in the 1940s. In the early post-Independence period, the nationalistic elements become even stronger, and SF interacts quite strongly with older forms of fantastic writing such as myths, fairytales, and ghost stories. This third period, Banerjee argues, is the golden age of bhasha SF. From the 1990s English-language SF again becomes very prominent in India and its diaspora, though SF in bhashas continues to flourish.Banerjee examines fiction not just from post-Independence India, but also from colonial British India, and diasporic Indian writing. SF written primarily in Bengali, English, Hindi, and Marathi is examined and, when possible, the book also brings into its ambit of analysis SF written in the languages Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Reflexivity about the corpus of... (shrink)

The present volume appears to be the first general introduction, for English-reading students, to that which, in Indian tradition, corresponds to 'philosophy' ...

The demand for online content in Indian languages is growing faster than for that in English. The proliferation of cheap smartphones with Indic keyboards and high-speed connectivity is feeding this trend. Moreover, there is increasing formal and informal collaboration between English and IL publishers to make educational and literary content available in regional languages. This currently is not financially viable or scalable and follows the logic of the print economy. The government is focused on online content delivery (...) as part of a larger Digital India programme. In the absence of IL content in the higher education arena, it must work with private players to develop quality technical and scientific content. Indian-language publishers need to be included in this process via training and incentives, since they have regional networks for effective outreach with this content. The biggest role of the government, however, is in the arena of regulation with the updating and implementation of intellectual property and copyright laws that need to extend to digital content; as well as in creating an environment where quality educational content is incentivized. (shrink)

Contributed papers presented at the Three Day National Seminar on 'Indian and Western Philosophy of Language' held at Varanasi from February 10-12th, 2011 by IGNCA in collaboration with Department of Vyākaraṇa, Sanskrit Vidya Dharmavijnana Sankaya, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

The preoccupation with the nation that marks much postcolonial writing, especially the Anglophone novel in India following the appearance of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, has been widely remarked. In this essay I am interested in tracing how this interest in the nation-thematic has persisted into—or changed in the course of-the first decade of the new century in the fiction that has appeared since the 1980s, in response to both socio-political developments as well as changing literary trends.

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem is well known in Mathematics/Logic/Philosophy circles. Gödel was able to find a way for any given P (UTM), (read as, “P of UTM” for “Program of Universal Truth Machine”), actually to write down a complicated polynomial that has a solution iff (=if and only if), G is true, where G stands for a Gödel-sentence. So, if G’s truth is a necessary condition for the truth of a given polynomial, then P (UTM) has to answer first that (...) G is true in order to secure the truth of the said polynomial. But, interestingly, P (UTM) could never answer that G was true. This necessarily implies that there is at least one truth a P (UTM), however large it may be, cannot speak out. Daya Krishna and Karl Potter’s controversy regarding the construal of India’s Philosophies dates back to the time of Potter’s publication of “Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies” (1963, Englewood Cliffs Prentice-Hall Inc.) In attacking many of India’s philosophies, Daya Krishna appears to have unwittingly touched a crucial point: how can there be the knowledge of a ‘non-cognitive’ mokṣa? [‘mokṣa’ is the final state of existence of an individual away from Social Contract]—See this author’s Indian Social Contract and its Dissolution (2008) mokṣa does not permit the knowledge of one’s own self in the ordinary way with threefold distinction, i.e., subject–knowledge-object or knower–knowledge–known. But what is important is to demonstrate whether such ‘knowledge’ of non-cognitive mokṣa state can be logically shown, in a language, to be possible to attain, and that there is no contradiction involved in such demonstration, because, no one can possibly express the ‘experience-itself’ in language. Hence, if such ‘knowledge’ can be shown to be logically not impossible in language, then, not only Daya Krishna’s arguments against ‘non-cognitive mokṣa’ get refuted but also it would show the possibility of achieving ‘completeness’ in its truest sense, as opposed to Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness’. In such circumstances, man would himself become a Universal Truth Machine. This is because the final state of mokṣa is construed as the state of complete knowledge in Advaita. This possibility of ‘completeness’ is set in this paper in the backdrop of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya’s Advaitic (Non-dualistic) claim involved in the mahāvākyas (extra-ordinary propositions). (Mahāvākyas that Śaṅkara refers to are basically taken from different Upaniṣads. For example, “Aham Brahmāsmi” is from Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanisad, and “Tattvamasi” is from Chāndogya Upaniṣad. Śrī Śaṅkarācārya has written extensively. His main works include his Commentary on Brahma-Sūtras, on major Upaniṣads, and on ŚrīmadBhagavadGītā, called Bhāṣyas of them, respectively. Almost all these works are available in English translation published by Advaita Ashrama, 5 Dehi Entally Road, Calcutta, 700014.) On the other hand, the ‘Incompleteness’ of Gödel is due to the intervening G-sentence, which has an adverse self-referential element. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in its mathematical form with an elaborate introduction by R.W. Braithwaite can be found in Meltzer (Kurt Gödel: on formally undecidable propositions of principia mathematica and related systems. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1962). The present author believes first that semantic content cannot be substituted by any amount of arithmoquining, (Arithmoquining or arithmatization means, as Braithwaite says,—“Gödel’s novel metamathematical method is that of attaching numbers to the signs, to the series of signs (formulae) and to the series of series of signs (“proof-schemata”) which occur in his formal system…Gödel invented what might be called co-ordinate metamathematics…”) Meltzer (1962 p. 7). In Antone (2006) it is said “The problem is that he (Gödel) tries to replace an abstract version of the number (which can exist) with the concept of a real number version of that abstract notion. We can state the abstraction of what the number needs to be, [the arithmoquining of a number cannot be a proof-pair and an arithmoquine] but that is a concept that cannot be turned into a specific number, because by definition no such number can exist.”.), especially so where first-hand personal experience is called for. Therefore, what ultimately rules is the semanticity as in a first-hand experience. Similar points are voiced, albeit implicitly, in Antone (Who understands Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, 2006). (“…it is so important to understand that Gödel’s theorem only is true with respect to formal systems—which is the exact opposite of the analogous UTM (Antone (2006) webpage 2. And galatomic says in the same discussion chain that “saying” that it ((is)) only true for formal systems is more significant… We only know the world through “formal” categories of understanding… If the world as it is in itself has no incompleteness problem, which I am sure is true, it does not mean much, because that is not the world of time and space that we experience. So it is more significant that formal systems are incomplete than the inexperiencable ‘World in Itself’ has no such problem.—galatomic”) Antone (2006) webpage 2. Nevertheless galatomic certainly, but unwittingly succeeds in highlighting the possibility of experiencing the ‘completeness’ Second, even if any formal system including the system of Advaita of Śaṅkara is to be subsumed or interpreted under Gödel’s theorem, or Tarski’s semantic unprovability theses, the ultimate appeal would lie to the point of human involvement in realizing completeness since any formal system is ‘Incomplete’ always by its very nature as ‘objectual’, and fails to comprehend the ‘subject’ within its fold. (shrink)

Description: This scholarly work of Dr S.M.S. Chari's deals with the critical review of seventeen philosophical systems as presented in an important philosophical treatise of the thirteenth century titled Paramata-bhanga contributed by Vedanta Desika, an illustrious successor to Ramanuja, who is the chief exponent of Visistadvaita Vedanta. The main objective of Paramata-bhanga is to establish that Visistadvaita is a sound system of philosophy as compared to the several other Non-Vedic as well as Vedic schools and also Vedanta schools developed by (...) Samkara, Yadavaprakasa, Bhaskara, and other exponents of the post-Ramanuja period. The original text written in Manipravala (a mixture of Tamil and Sanskrit) language contains, besides a brief account of the fundamental doctrines of Visistadvaita. The schools covered are Carvaka, Buddhism, Jainism, Sankhya, Yoga, Vaisesika, Nyaya, Purvamimamsa, Pasupata, Sabdabrahma-vivartavada, and Advaita Vedanta. Among the extant philosophical classics, Paramata-bhanga is a unique work. Realizing the importance of the Paramata-bhanga for the comparative study of Indian philosophy, late Dr Chari tried to give a lucid exposition of this treatise in English. This volume, which is the first of its kind, would be invaluable for students of Indian philosophy in general and Visistadvaita in particular. (shrink)

This essay considers why English-speaking scholars have been inclined to engage Indian philosophical materials “philosophically,” as opposed to purely historically. That is to say, they have tended to ask questions about the philosophical significance and even validity of the theories they encounter in Indian philosophical writings, often approaching them critically in the way philosophers assess contemporary philosophical ideas. I first attempt to explain how this phenomenon has come about. Then I attempt to justify the philosophical approach to (...) the study of Indian philosophical texts by showing how it complements, in various ways, the historical-philological study of these materials. (shrink)

When Anquetil-Duperron landed at Pondicherry in 1755, in search of the sacred books of the “Indous et des Parses” (“Hindus and Parsees”), he surely had no idea that he was inaugurating a new discipline, Indianism. He returned to France in 1761, laden with a whole library of Indian texts which he was to spend the rest of his life deciphering. That year was a turning point in Indian history: the Marathes, on the verge of becoming the dominant power (...) of the entire Indian continent, were crushed in Panipat, north of Delhi, by the armies of an Afhgan invasion, and this catastrophe halted their advance for a while. During the same year, in the south of India, Lally-Tollendal was beaten and taken prisoner by the English, thereby destroying the French dream, shared by Dupleix and Bussy, of creating an Indian empire for themselves. (shrink)

Discursive history of the English language has been vital to analysing ‘the postcolonial condition’ in the Indian subcontinent, with a broadly overarching emphasis on how English is a ‘usurper language’. Simultaneous to this, however, there exists a hitherto understudied history featuring subaltern, ‘organic intellectuals’ from the lower castes. Not only does this ‘subaltern history of English’ exhibit a more positive affect toward the English language – by invoking its emancipatory potential in an economy of deeply (...) casteist vernacular languages – but it also complicates multiple assertions that the postcolonial apparatus has so far held as a priori. Jotirao Phule’s Slavery/Gulamgiri is one of the foremost examples of such a position; its preface, which lucidly announces this seemingly unique position, is quite possibly the first explicitly political treatise written in the English language in the history of the subcontinent. This paper highlights the enormous shifts that take place in our understanding of the history of English – and colonial modernity – if we were to classify Phule’s preface as a key text in the history of ‘Indian writing in English’. Subsequently, it is argued that Phule’s work crystallizes into a radically alternate – and far more egalitarian – conception of ‘world literature’ contra Tagore’s well-known idea of visva sahitya. (shrink)

Samkhya is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, system of classical Indian philosophy. This book traces its history from the third or fourth century B. C. up through the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia as a whole will present the substance of the various Indian systems of thought to philosophers unable to read the Sanskrit and having difficulty in finding their way about in the translations (where such exist). This volume includes a lengthy introduction by Gerald James (...) Larson, which discusses the history of Samkhya and its philosophical contours overall. The remainder of the book includes summaries in English of all extant Sanskrit texts of the system. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the beginning of a radical reassessment of the philosophical literature of ancient and classical India. The analytical techniques of contemporary philosophy are being deployed towards a fresh and original interpretation of the texts. This rational rather than mystical approach towards Indian philosophical theories has resulted in a need to work which explains afresh its central methods, courses and devices. It is with this spirit of thought and background that I want to publish a book to (...) discuss the relevance and need of classical Indian thoughts. The present collection is a significant step on this part because it recognizes the potentials of classical Indian tradition and its vast wisdom to contribute in all realms of life. Here we have collected 20 papers both in English and Hindi language written on Indian epistemology, metaphysics, logic, ethics and social philosophy. But in this volume only 9 papers were published and remaining papers will be published in second edition along with the same papers. To study the nature of philosophy in India and its implementation in all spheres of human life is one of the most important objectives of our Centre. In this regard we have published two online books entitled Philosophy, Education and Indian Value System and Positive Philosophy for Contemporary Indian Society, respectively. (shrink)

Aims of education: historicism and In the castle of my skin -- The meaning of life and Black lightning -- The inner radiance of the shelf in Palace of the peacock -- Knowledge and human understanding in A house for Mr Biswas -- Existentialism and The children of Sisyphus -- Tragic vision in Wide Sargasso Sea -- African conceptions of a person and Myal -- The law of karma in Sastra -- The moralty of reparations in Salt -- Plato versus (...) Kincaid?: A reading of The autobiography of my mother. (shrink)

Nyana is the most rational and logical of all the classical Indian philosophical systems. In the study of Nyana philosophy, Karikavali with its commentary Muktavali, both by Visvanatha Nyayapancanana, with the commentaries Dinakari and Ramarudri, have been of decisive significance for the last few centuries as advanced introductions to this subject. The present work concentrates on inference in Karikavali, Muktavali and Dinakari, carefully divided into significant units according to the subject, and translates and interprets them. Its commentary makes use (...) of the primary interpretation in Sanskrit contained especially in the Ramarudri and Subodhini. The book begins with the Sanskrit texts of Karikavali and Muktavali; followed by English translation of these texts. Next is given the Sanskrit text of Dinakari which comments on the first two texts, followed by its English translation. Lastly, the book contains a commentary on all the texts included. (shrink)

Source: Author: Olga Posudiyevska This study concentrates on the analysis of early works by Rudyard Kipling who was born into the family of English colonists to India, thus becoming a representative of the newly formed Anglo-Indian society. The writer’s sketch Anglo-Indian Society and his collection of short stories Plain Tales from the Hills depict the characteristic features of Anglo-Indians’ worldview and lifestyle, which are revealed and analyzed by the author of the article. Special attention is paid to (...) biographical factors influencing the author’s choice of Anglo-Indian topic at the beginning of his writing career. The researcher concludes that Kipling presents in his works an outline of Anglo-Indian society which emerged from the writer’s observations of Anglo-Indians’ lives during his work as a reporter. Striving for credibility in consideration of advantages and shortcomings of Anglo-Indian worldview and lifestyle, the author tries to occupy the position of the unconcerned observer, being capable of assessing the situation with fresh mind. Kipling disguises himself under the image of the hero-narrator, being either a tourist traveler from abroad, or a reporter, accustomed to collecting factual material for the local paper, in such a way receiving an opportunity to speak ironically and sometimes even sarcastically about certain models of behavior, accepted by Anglo-Indians. ]]>. (shrink)

For those of us who work in Indian philosophy, these are encouraging times, with reasons for guarded optimism that the broader philosophical community will slowly continue to realize the quality and depth of Indian responses to perennial philosophical problems. Across the profession, there is increased awareness of the sheer historical contingency behind the political, social, and distinctively academic structures which perpetuate the myopic idea that Philosophy proper is a cultural practice tied to a fairly narrow tradition that began (...) with Thales and terminates in the work of (largely) English-speaking thinkers in American and European universities. The last few decades have also witnessed the emergence of a group of scholars who are both expert in contemporary philosophy and historical research into Indian thought, and capable of bringing the latter into conversation with the former in fruitful ways. Against this background, one chief requirement of the times is work that provides philosophically sophisticated introductions to Indian philosophical thought. We need something, after all, to give to people who wish to learn about Indian thought without having to develop the competence to understand technical material or who would like to include something from India within an undergraduate course on Philosophy. Amber Carpenter’s Indian Buddhist Philosophy, published within Acumen’s Ancient Philosophies series is indeed this very sort of work, and succeeds admirably at achieving the right tone, neither setting the bar too high, nor ignoring the work of accurate philosophical and historical reconstruction. It also tackles an ambitious range of material without sacrificing serious philosophical engagement and appropriate contextualization. (shrink)

Indian philosophy has been often denied the official designation of “philosophy,” and many academics around the world have dismissed it as vague theology, at best. The main reason for such a relegation has been the inaccessibility of the languages in which the source texts were written. This problem was aggravated by the lack of readable English translations. Though, beginning in the nineteenth century many books on Indian philosophy have been written in English, most of them are (...) inaccessible to scholars outside the tradition, both in language and approach. If Indian philosophy is to be taken seriously, and if academics and lay alike have to benefit from the treasures hidden therein, it is necessary that the original concepts and theories are made more accessible and understandable—even to the beginner. An Introduction to Indian Philosophy is a welcome step in this direction. (shrink)

Languages with insufficient digitally available resources, such as, Indian–Indian and English–Indian language Machine Translation system developments, faces the difficulty to translate various lexical phenomena. In this paper, we present our work on a comparative study of 440 phrase-based statistical trained models for 110 language pairs across 11 Indian languages. We have developed 110 baseline statistical machine translation systems. Then, we have augmented the training corpus with Indowordnet synset word entries of lexical database and further trained (...) 110 models on top of the baseline system. We have done a detailed performance comparison using various evaluation metrics such as BLEU score, METEOR, and TER. We observed significant improvement in evaluations of translation quality across all the 440 models after using the Indowordnet. These experiments give a detailed insight in two ways: usage of lexical database with synset mapping for resource poor languages and efficient usage of Indowordnet synset mapping. Moreover, synset mapped lexical entries helped the SMT system to handle the ambiguity to a great extent during the translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conquest and English Legal Identity in Renaissance IrelandBrian LockeyLike the Spanish administrators of the American territories, English administrators of Ireland attempted to impose their own native legal system on the Irish inhabitants. Nonetheless, important differences existed between the two kingdoms' legal approaches to their respective colonial contexts. Because Spanish jurisprudence was allied with universalist Catholic doctrine and was officially based on Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis (the ancient (...) Roman legal code which had close affinities to natural law discourse), Spanish administrators expected New World inhabitants to accept what they considered to be the "universal values" that were inherent in Spanish law.1 In contrast English common law had its roots not in natural law but in the peculiar customs of the English people. Thus, while the Spanish were able to claim that they were replacing unnatural Indian customs with a legal system rooted in universal natural law, the English were attempting to reform what they considered to be the unnatural practices of the Irish by imposing a legal system defined by its insularity and its peculiar affinity with English institutions.2 In this essay I show that Renaissance ethnographies on Ireland by such English administrators of Ireland as Edmund Spenser, Sir John Davies, and Fynes Moryson are fractured by a conflict between a commitment to natural-law theory, which had its origin in continental writings, and a corresponding commitment to the native English tradition of common law. I examine how works by Spenser, Davies, and Moryson dealt with this conflict within their collective project of articulating a legal justification and strategy for the pacification of Ireland. [End Page 543]Despite reports throughout Europe of Spanish-perpetrated cruelty throughout the Americas, the idea that war or conquest could be just or even charitable when prosecuted against oppression originated within the Catholic tradition of scholastic just-war theory.3 Many of the sixteenth-century writers who were writing about war and conquest in legal or ethical terms were Spanish or continental theologians who had attempted to evaluate Spanish imperial policy in the New World. On the one side were such figures as the Scottish theologian John Major and Spanish historian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, both of whom had justified Spanish conquest and treatment of the Indians using arguments based on the foundation of natural law.4 On the other side were those who had, on similar terms, voiced criticisms of the cruelties which Spanish forces were inflicting on the Indians. Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas were certainly the most notable Spanish writers who favored more ethical treatment of New World inhabitants.5 Other prominent defenders of Indian rights were Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano.6 Whether directly or through intermediaries, the ideas of many of these writers permeated the ideological fabric of England.Sir Fulke Greville's famous statement about Sir Philip Sidney's goal of fostering alliances with New World inhabitants in order to overthrow the Spanish authorities included an awareness of the "inhuman cruelties" of the Spanish forces, an awareness that probably originated in the English translation of Las Casas's Brevissima relación de la destrucyión de las Indias (1552).7 Beyond [End Page 544] this significant text, however, there were others. One important book that captured the ideas of the early Spanish debates on the ethics and justice of the New World conquests was Antonio de Guevara's Relox de príncipes (1529), a work twice translated into English during the sixteenth century.8 The third book of the Relox de príncipes, which treats the princely virtues of justice, peace, and magnificence, contains several sections that together constitute a polemic against violent imperialism and unjust conquest. In one notable episode Guevara employs the example of ancient Roman imperialism to produce a veiled critique of the injustices which Spain had committed against New World polities. A "villain of Danuby" from a German province newly conquered by Rome makes a speech to the Roman senate in which he criticizes the injustice of his Roman oppressors. The German villain characterizes the conquest of Germany in the following terms: "For I let you know, if you do not know it, that when... (shrink)

Drawing on a rich variety of Indian texts across multiple traditions, including Vedanta, Buddhist, Yoga and Jain, this collection explores how emotional experience is framed, evoked and theorized in order to offer compelling insights into human subjectivity. Rather than approaching emotion through the prism of Western theory, a team of leading Indian philosophers showcase the unique literary texture, philosophical reflections and theoretical paradigms that classical Indian sources provide in their own right. From solitude in the Saundarananda and (...) psychosomatic theories of disease in the Yogavasistha to female lament in Greek, Sinhala Buddhist and Sanskrit epic tales, their chapters reveal the range and diversity of the phenomena encompassing the English term 'emotion'. In doing so, they contribute towards a more cosmopolitan, comparative and pluralistic conception of human experience. Adopting a broad phenomenological methodology, this handbook reframes debates on emotion within classical Indian thought and is an invaluable resource for researchers and students seeking to understand the field beyond the Western tradition. (shrink)