Ramakrishna Miscellany: A Comparative Study, Studia Orientalia Monographica, Vol. 7, Narasingha P. Sil
This slender, but substantial volume brings together four of Sil’s published essays (revised here into a single monograph) on the life of the famed Bengali mystic Śrī Ramakrishna Paramahaṃsa, born Gadadhar, or, Gadai Chattopadhyay in rural Bengal in 1836. Despite a life cut short due to throat cance...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Univ.
2020
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| In: |
Nidān
Year: 2020, Volume: 5, Issue: 2, Pages: 87-89 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This slender, but substantial volume brings together four of Sil’s published essays (revised here into a single monograph) on the life of the famed Bengali mystic Śrī Ramakrishna Paramahaṃsa, born Gadadhar, or, Gadai Chattopadhyay in rural Bengal in 1836. Despite a life cut short due to throat cancer at the age of fifty, Ramakrishna achieved a fair degree of fame during his lifetime, winning a number of Bengal’s elite urban intellectuals among his core devotees. However, the celebrity he achieved during his lifetime pales in comparison to his after-death legacy. This legacy, which was initially brought on to the world stage by his chief acolyte Swami Vivekananda (arguably India’s most famous public intellectual/religious thinker of his day), remains such that today—150 years after Ramakrishna’s death—it includes over two hundred Ramakrishna religious centers, a near-constant stream of reprints of his collected sayings, publications about him that include numerous biographies and hundreds of critical essays, and an enduring group of devotees numbering in the thousands (though the sect does have its unique strains, devotees of Ramakrishna view themselves as part of the larger Hindu tradition). Amidst all this, Sil, who is an academic historian, brings a unique perspective to the figure of Ramakrishna. On the one hand, as he notes in this work, as a native Bengali, Sil is something of an "insider"; yet, he is neither a follower of Ramakrishna, nor a specialist in South Asian religion (8). And, despite having published several dozen studies (books, articles, etc.) focused on 19th-century Bengali intellectual history, Sil’s primary academic training is in the history of Tudor England. While all this may seem somewhat incongruous, Sil uses it to great effect in his work on Ramakrishna, in which he combines an insider’s understanding of Bengali Hinduism with the dispassionate eye of a broadly trained academic historian. |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2020.2 |