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This paper reviews five texts regarding Padmasambhava, which were written before Zangs gling ma (dBa' bzhed and four manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang – Pelliot tibétain 44, IOL Tib 321, IOL Tib J 644 and Pelliot tibétain 307), in an attempt to outline a historical portrait of Padmasambhava, different from the mythologized portrait shaped by Zangs gling ma and the revealed biographies following it.
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Rabindranath Tagore was the first Nobel laureate of Asia. In 1913 he received the prestigious prize for Gitanjali (Song Offerings), his volume of poetry. He was born in Calcutta into a wealthy Brahmin family. He was well educated and very talented. He was a poet, philosopher, writer, playwright, songwriter, painter, and educator. He was a very charismatic person and he traveled a lot. He held lectures at several important universities of the world, had encounters with extraordinary people, and received many honorific degrees. During his life time he created a remarkable oeuvre, and his legacy is monumental. At 160 years after his birth, Rabindranath Tagore’s genius is celebrated across the globe. This study presents a short history of his incredible family, which had an important role in the Bengali cultural renaissance.
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Drawing from M. N. Pearson’s and Enseng Ho’s concept of “local cosmopolitanism,” I propose to study the neighborhood of Barkas in Hyderabad as a representation of how cosmopolitanism works in small communities where the people, while embedded in local relations, also maintain connections with distant places, thus articulating a relation between different geographical scales. Barkas is inhabited by people of an African origin, the Hadrami people from Hadramawt in Yemen, from where they came to Hyderabad to become part of the Nizam’s army. When they reached India, they were given land to build their own barracks (this is also how the neighborhood got its present name) and after the Nizam’s rule ended, most of them stayed back.
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This article compares and contrasts two eminent theologians, one Hindu (Madhva), and one Christian (Calvin) who had similar ideas in terms of the sovereignty and majesty of God and the doctrine of Predestination of souls each, of course, based on their respective religious-cultural contexts and scriptural texts.
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The Third General Assembly of the World Council of Churches took place in New Delhi, a multicultural and interreligious town in India. By this means, the World Council took a step forward towards the dialogue with the world’s religions. From ancient times, India was a place of dialogue between adherents of different cultures and religious traditions. At the Third General Assembly of the WCC, the interreligious dialogue which will be more acknowledged throughout the years became a leitmotif on the ecumenical agenda of the member churches. In this study, I try to present how this historical ecumenical event has shaped the interreligious dialogue architecture of the World Council and how it fits in the Asian interreligious landscape. It was the first General Assembly of the WCC outside the traditional Christian space, which up to that moment represents more or less the European and North-American geographical space.
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Review of: Uma Das Gupta, A History of Sriniketan. Rabindranath Tagore’s Pioneering Work in Rural Reconstruction, New Delhi, Niyogi Books, 2022, 234 pp., ISBN: 978-93-91125-44-8.
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Mahatma Gandhi was a visionary, a supreme leader, a social activist, a philosopher, and a great freedom fighter. He was the pioneer of truth, love, peace, and non-violence (ahimsa) as the means for a peaceful world. This paper deals with the theoretical and practical relevance of Indian ethics concerning the Gandhian concept of Sarvodaya, used to achieve sustainability, social, economic and environmental uplift. The paper critically evaluates the western model of sustainability, and highlights various theoretical aspects of Indian ethics. Specifically, it focuses on the Gandhian sustainability model in Sarvodaya, and attempts to balance the two theories for the practical purpose of sustainability and the need for the present situation.
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Mihai Eminescu’s indianism has been researched by scholars and critics like Amita Bhose or Mircea Itu, but the Buddhist component of his writings was not thoroughly analysed. The present study aims to investigate some fundamental Buddhist concepts that the Romanian writer recycled in his works. All of Mihai Eminescu’s friends knew about his keen interest in Buddhism, as Cătălin Cioabă’s book Mărturii despre Eminescu (2022) revealed to the public, and his fascination for this particular philosophical Indian system was reflected in his poems. The main research questions of this paper are: “Which are the Buddhist concepts that Mihai Eminescu intertextually used in his works?” and “Why did he choose those philosophical ideas?” In the analysis of the Buddhist dimension of Eminescu’s poetry, the following methods will be indispensable: close reading, hermeneutics, intertextuality and stylistics.
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The experience of the religious and cultural encounter of East and West was consummated. Both civilizations looked at each other, admired each other, criticized each other, appreciated each other, but could not avoid the continuous encounter on the social space. This encounter is translated into the everyday experience of a world in which religious-cultural boundaries are much more fluid and perishable because of the innovative complex of communication, mobility, and relationship. Extensive research has been produced exploring the stakes of this West-East encounter from historical, cultural, and religious perspectives. Books, studies, and projects have been written about the differences and common elements of this encounter. Our aim in this study is to project the possibility of a new architecture of the dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism, in particular between Orthodox theology and Advaita-Vedanta, one of the darśana in Hinduism, an architecture whose morphology is constituted by the density of the human experience with the divine.
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It is misunderstood that tribal people have no proper awareness of phenomena of a thing. Perhaps it is for this reason that in any academic scholarship concerning tribal state of affairs, metaphysics in particular and philosophy in general has been dislocated from tribal enterprise. Their physical problems such as landlessness, hunger, poverty including liberation from these sufferings have been the age-old headlines in tribal studies. Many have miscalculated that tribal people solely rely on the objective revelation in defining reality without truly participating in it. In fact, tribal people suspend neither subjective nor objective affirmation; they keep harmonious relationship between the two. It is in the harmonious environment through being in the world that tribal identity has been acknowledged, and the objective truth has also been understood. Being-in-the-world (Dasein) as a methodology for doing tribal theology helps tribal in building authentic existence and in direction towards ontological theology.
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This paper compares the five texts regarding Padmasambhava written before Zangs gling ma (dBa’ bzhed and four manuscripts discovered in Dunhuang - Pelliot tibétain 44, IOL Tib J 321, IOL Tib J 644 and Pelliot tibétain 307) with the texts from Zangs gling ma, in an attempt to identify similarities and differences between them and to reach conclusions resulting from examining them together. The paper also addresses the question of historical credibility of Zangs gling ma, taking into consideration its connection with dBa’ bzhed, as well as the question on length of Padmasambhava’s stay in Tibet, by identifying texts in Zangs gling ma that refer to places in Tibet where the master stayed.
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Review of: Wendy Doniger, An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2022
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Review of: Mihaela Gligor and Elisabetta Marino (Eds.), Tagore beyond Borders: Essays on His Influence and Cultural Legacy. London, New York: Routledge, 2023
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Review of: Mihaela Gligor and Elisabetta Marino (Eds.), Tagore beyond Borders: Essays on His Influence and Cultural Legacy. London, New York: Routledge, 2023.
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Review of: Mihaela Gligor & Lipi Ghosh (Eds.), Between Two Worlds: Romania and India. Essays on Expanding Borders through Culture, Cluj-Napoca: Cluj University Press / Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2023.
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Review of: Lipi Ghosh (Editor), Rabindranath Tagore in South-East Asia. Culture, Connectivity and Bridge Making, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016, 138 pp., ISBN: 978-93-84082-80-2.
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Review of: Mahasweta Devi, Our Santiniketan. Translated by Radha Chakravarty, London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2022, 133 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8574-2-901-8.
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The article starts from the thesis that the ancient East is a unique space, time and donor of the cultural beginning in a world that has lost the humane sense of authentic culture and exists without clarity about the relationship of tension between culture and civilization. The ancient East is an example of quality, and not so much of quantity, of its cultural and religious heritage. Nowhere has the religious managed to dominate everyday experience as it is demonstrated by Eastern teachings. The sense of existentiality of the experience and unity with everything while maintaining a sacred attitude towards the pure springs of spirituality is a great merit of the East. Unique are the rituals, meanings and methods we have available to develop our knowledge in the most profound way – as self-knowledge. Rediscovering the East through a critical and reflexive methodology, today we again have the lost productive potential of the religious and the authentic cultural.
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Calcutta (Kolkata) is usually considered the cultural capital of India. The extraordinary cultural effervescence of the city, the numerous descriptions of the metropolis in the literary writings, memoirs or films place Calcutta among the most inspirational cities in the world. I have visited Calcutta many times and I am always impressed by the city’s ability to reassert itself, and to give a voice to all its residents. During festivals, the city is like a fairytale; it vibrates with people’s lives and is part of the festivities. But during the rest of the year, Calcutta charms visitors and takes over their lives, making them return again and again. This is how I see, experience, love and read the city of joy, beyond the words in which it is often described.
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