1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910789408803321

Autore

Aravamudan Srinivas

Titolo

Guru English [[electronic resource] ] : South Asian religion in a cosmopolitan language / / Srinivas Aravamudan

Pubbl/distr/stampa

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

ISBN

1-283-13332-6

9786613133328

1-4008-2685-3

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (347 p.)

Collana

Translation/transnation

Disciplina

420/.954

Soggetti

English language - Religious aspects - South Asia

English language - Social aspects - South Asia

Religion and culture

Cosmopolitanism - India

South Asia Religion Study and teaching

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.