Guru English : South Asian religion in a cosmopolitan language / Srinivas Aravamudan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Aravamudan, Srinivas.

Series:

Translation/transnation.

Translation/transnation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--Religious aspects--South Asia.

English language.

English language--Social aspects--South Asia.

Religion and culture.

Cosmopolitanism--India.

Cosmopolitanism.

South Asia--Religion--Study and teaching.

South Asia.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (347 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

Guru English is a bold reconceptualization of the scope and meaning of cosmopolitanism, examining the language of South Asian religiosity as it has flourished both inside and outside of its original context for the past two hundred years. The book surveys a specific set of religious vocabularies from South Asia that, Aravamudan argues, launches a different kind of cosmopolitanism into global use. Using "Guru English" as a tagline for the globalizing idiom that has grown up around these religions, Aravamudan traces the diffusion and transformation of South Asian religious discourses as they shuttled between East and West through English-language use. The book demonstrates that cosmopolitanism is not just a secular Western "discourse that results from a disenchantment with religion, but something that can also be refashioned from South Asian religion when these materials are put into dialogue with contemporary social move-ments and literary texts. Aravamudan looks at "religious forms of neoclassicism, nationalism, Romanticism, postmodernism, and nuclear millenarianism, bringing together figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, and Deepak Chopra with Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer, and Salman Rushdie. Guru English analyzes writers and gurus, literary texts and religious movements, and the political uses of religion alongside the literary expressions of religious teachers, showing the cosmopolitan interconnections between the Indian subcontinent, the British Empire, and the American New Age.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE. Theolinguistics: Orientalists, Brahmos, Vedantins, and Yogis

CHAPTER TWO. From Indian Romanticism to Guru Literature

CHAPTER THREE. Theosophistries

CHAPTER FOUR. The Hindu Sublime, or Nuclearism Rendered Cultural

CHAPTER FIVE. Blasphemy, Satire, and Secularism

CHAPTER SIX. New Age Enchantments

AFTERWORD

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-311) and index.

ISBN:

9786613133328

9781283133326

1283133326

9781400826858

1400826853

OCLC:

730151764