Posts Tagged Hinduism

Another Incarnation

10 May 2009
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By PANKAJ MISHRA (NYT) reviews an interesting book that I must read.

 

THE HINDUS

An Alternative History

By Wendy Doniger

779 pp. The Penguin Press. $35

Visiting India in 1921, E. M. Forster witnessed the eight-day celebration of Lord Krishna’s birthday. This first encounter with devotional ecstasy left the Bloomsbury aesthete baffled. “There is no dignity, no taste, no form,” he complained in a letter home. Recoiling from Hindu India, Forster was relieved to enter the relatively rational world of Islam. Describing the muezzin’s call at the Taj Mahal, he wrote, “I knew at all events where I stood and what I heard; it was a land that was not merely atmosphere but had definite outlines and horizons.” (more…)

The Battle over Hindu History

9 May 2009
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Author Wendy Doniger, Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago’s Divinity School , writes on this blog about her new work. This new work further consolidates the view that much of the now politically packaged Hinduism was actually a product of colonial scholarship in the ninteenth centruy.

The Battle over Hindu History

For years, some Hindus have argued that the 16th century mosque called the Babri Masjid (after the Mughal emperor Babur) was built over a temple commemorating the birthplace of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) in Ayodhya (the city where, according to the ancient poem called the Ramayana, Rama was born), though there is no evidence whatsoever that there has been ever a temple on that spot or that Rama was born there. (more…)

Islamic poster art in India – and South Asia

19 April 2008
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This piece entitled, My Name is Green, published in the weekly Outlook India traces how “forged in the cultural ferment of a century ago, Islamic poster art in India thrived on the frontiers of taboo.” The author is Shruti Ravindran, who has obviously undertaken a lot of research and also published some great samples of such posters. That Islam in South Asia acquired and adapted the local flavour and modes of social and spiritual interaction is well known.

While reading this piece, I also recalled seeing similar eclectic posters in Pakistan in my childhood before the puritanism of General Zia ul Haq engulfed the country and Wahabi variant of an exclusive and suspicious man made ‘faith’ deepened its presence, well at least in the public domain of representation.

This piece looks at some of these aspects through the popular art form. Read and enjoy – full text has been posted below courtesy the intelligent Outlook. (more…)