BooksHindu Encounter with ModernityForeword by Thomas J. HopkinsI have read Dr. Shukavak's work with great interest and enjoyment. I find it to be an excellent work of scholarship: carefully researched, convincingly argued, and very well written. This book is an important scholarly contribution to our knowledge of modern India and of the Hindu tradition in the modern world. I admit to a personal self-interest in this judgment, because I have been for many years a great admirer of the role of Kedarnath Dutta (Bhaktivinode Thakur) in the renaissance of Caitanya Vaishnavism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some dozen years ago, I tried to assess that role in an article on "The Social and Religious Background for the Transmission of Gaudiya Vaishnavism to the West," using all of the material I could find on the life and work of Bhaktivinode Thakur and the cultural setting of his career. Material on the latter was not hard to come by for my purposes, but I could find surprisingly little on Bhaktivinode himself; and much of that was from suspect sources that often had the quality more of hagiography than of factual biography. Thanks to Shukavak, most of what I wanted to know at that time has now been made accessible. There is of course much more to learn about Bhaktivinode, as about any great person, but the basic facts about his life have now been carefully winnowed out from the husks of hagiography and the sources for further study have been tracked down. I have nothing but admiration for the persistence with which this has been done, since the search for evidence has led Shukavak not only to archives in India and England but to Bengal villages and individual homes to locate essential pieces of the puzzle and make them available for future scholars and devotees. Beyond this reconstruction of Bhaktivinode's personal life history, Shukavak has laid out in clear fashion the cultural context of his life in terms of the social, political and intellectual changes taking place in Bengal in the nineteenth century. This part of the book is less original than the biographical research, but it is very ably done and is creatively integrated with the biography to identify the problems that Bhaktivinode was struggling to overcome in the course of his career. Moreover, we now know many of the cast of characters who intersected with Bhaktivinode at various stages in his development, many of them well-known in more familiar histories of the Bengal Renaissance. One would like to know more about the roles played in Bhaktivinode's development by such figures as Vidyasagar, Keshab Chandra Sen, the Tagores, Alexander Duff, Charles Dall, and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, to mention only a few of the more famous, but we at least have now a better idea of where to pursue this question. It is evident from Shukavak's account that Bhaktivinode was in contact with many of the key figures who carried the Renaissance forward from the early Brahmo Samaj movement to the social reform and nationalist movements of the late nineteenth century, and that his personal world included not only Bengali traditionalists and modernizing intellectuals but Christian missionaries as well. The larger history is not new, but Bhaktivinode's place in it is much more clearly defined. To this more general history, Shukavak adds two important new sets of data: a careful record of Bhaktivinode's publications year by year, and evidence of his relations with a range of religious communities and teachers outside both Calcutta bhadralok circles and the Gaudiya mainstream. The record of publications has never before to my knowledge been authenticated in such detail, and the latter evidence has hitherto either been overlooked or suppressed by the orthodox Gaudiya hagiographers who have until now largely controlled the story of Bhaktivinode's religious life. Shukavak demonstrates both excellent research skills and scholarly integrity in bringing to light a much more complete; and much more compelling; account of Bhaktivinode's religious development that recognizes the influences of his Shakta family background, Christian teachings, the Kartabhajas and Jati-Vaishnavas, and the Baghnapara Vaishnavas whose leader Bipin Bihari Goswami initiated him and later gave him the title of "Bhaktivinode" by which he was known from 1880 onward. It is clear from what Shukavak has provided that Bhaktivinode's religious journey was more complex than hagiographies have told us, and that he had perhaps the broadest-ranging religious experience of anyone in his generation; certainly more wide ranging and varied than any known member of the English-educated bhadralok, because so much of his life was lived away from Calcutta in the more traditional regions of Bengal and Orissa. Variety of experience, of course, does not in itself produce great religious thought; it must be synthesized in the mind of a spiritual genius. Shukavak leaves little doubt that Bhaktivinode was such a genius, a devotee whose vision transcended his culture and his time. Raised in a traditional Shakta household in village India, exposed in Calcutta to Western rationalism and Christian devotion, charged by his profession as a magistrate to adjudicate British law, and gradually drawn to and then converted to Caitanya Vaishnavism, Bhaktivinode had the range of life experience from which a creative synthesis could emerge. The question is how Bhaktivinode could evolve the synthesis he did when his contemporaries failed to do so, most of them clutching at one end of the traditionalist-modernist spectrum or finding themselves adrift in the middle. And how could he create a synthesis that not only accommodated both traditional Vaishnava devotion and modern rationalism but transcended them both in a vision of universal salvation deeply rooted in Caitanya's devotional principles but open to the whole world? Shukavak's assessment of these issues and his analysis of Bhaktivinode's solutions is quite simply the best I have seen. He knows Bhaktivinode's works thoroughly, and he knows the works of his contemporaries such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. He knows, moreover, the works of modern Christian theologians and historians of religion who have struggled with the problems of tradition and modernity. With these various perspectives, he is able to identify the inner logic of Bhaktivinode's approach as it points backward to Caitanya and the Goswamis and forward to the challenges of rationalism and universalism while remaining rooted in Bhaktivinode's own religious experience. The result is a clarification of Bhaktivinode's own thought from a scholarly perspective without in the least infringing on his integrity as a devotee. Both scholars and devotees should equally appreciate the product of Shukavak's efforts.
Thomas J. Hopkins, Professor of Religious Studies (Emeritus), Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Table of Contents
|
Table of Contents
Bhaktivinoda envisioned the modern Hindu as the saragrahi (essence seeker), one who could appreciate the truth held within all religious perspectives. Retail Price: US $24.95 Special Web Price $19.95
|
