KIRAN ATMA: Bengali

Showing posts with label Bengali. Show all posts

Hinduism - Where Is West Bengal In India?

West Bengal is a state in modern India. After India's independence in 1947, the state of Bengal was partitioned into West Bengal and West Pakistan, the latter of which is today known as Bangladesh.

The majority of the state is located in the Ganges River delta's lowlands, however Darjeeling stretches into the Himalayas in the north.

Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, served as the administrative hub of British India until the turn of the century.

It was also a hotbed of anti-British resistance and is now one of India's most important cultural and intellectual hubs.

Kalighat, in the center of Calcutta, as well as Dakshi neshwar, Tarakeshvar, Tarapith, and Navadvip, are all prominent holy places in West Bengal.

Christine Nivin et al., India, 8th ed., Lonely Planet, 1998, is an accessible reference for general information on West Bengal and all of India's provinces.

You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.

Be sure to check out my writings on religion here.

Hinduism - Who Was Swami Vivekananda?

Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta, 1863–1902).

The first Hindu missionary to the West and a well-known follower of Bengali mystic Ramakrishna.

Narendranath had a solid education and had planned to become a lawyer; when he first met Ramakrishna, he was cautious and distrustful, but over the course of a year, he was changed.

After Ramakrishna's death, he spent many years wandering around India, eventually realizing that religious life needed to serve both India's material and spiritual problems.

Vivekananda is most known for his speech to the First World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, in which he introduced Hinduism—in its logical, Vedantic form—to his Western audience for the first time.

He spoke throughout America and England for the following four years before returning to India to great acclaim.

He spent the remainder of his brief life promoting the Ramakrishna Mission, a religious organization dedicated to both social and religious improvement.

For more information, see Christopher Isherwood's Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 1965; Swami Vivekananda's Swami Vivekananda's Complete Works, 1970; and George M. Williams' "Swami Vivekananda" and "The Ramakrishna Movement: A Study in Religious Change," both in Robert D. Baird's Religion in Modern India, 1998.

~ Kiran Atma

You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.

Be sure to check out my writings on religion here.

Hinduism - Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? What Is Tagore Jayanti?

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet who lived from 1861 to 1941.

Poet and Nobel Laureate in Literature, for his Gitanjali ("Garland of Songs"), which was awarded in 1912.

Tagore was born into a powerful and rich landed family, allowing him to devote all of his energies to his writing.

Bust of Tagore At Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London, United Kingdom.

Tagore hales from the land owning or land lord community and caste of Tagore(Bengali variation) also known as Thakur across Northern India.

Aside from his illustrious literary output, he taught extensively both in India and abroad; in the latter, he highlighted the need of preserving spiritual ideals, whilst in India, he emphasized the importance of meeting people's material necessities.

He created the Vishva-Bharati University in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, in 1921.

The institution was committed to delivering an education that met both of these objectives, allowing students to grow into well-rounded individuals.

For further detail, read Krishna Kripalani's Rabindranath Tagore: A Biography, published in 1980.

And Donald R. Tuck's "Rabindranath Tagore: Religion as a Constant Struggle for Balance," published in Robert D. Baird's Religion in Modern India, published in 1998.

Tagore Jayanti is a commemoration of Rabindranath Tagore's birthday.

On May 8, the day he was born in 1861, a holiday honoring the Bengali poet, philosopher, and thinker Rabindranath Tagore is observed.

Tagore's birthday is observed according to the solar calendar of the common period, rather than the lunar calendar that controls most religious observances, as is the case with most twentieth-century individuals.

Tagore's birthday has special significance because, although he is most recognized for his literary accomplishments, he was also a religious preceptor (guru).

~Kiran Atma

You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.

Be sure to check out my writings on religion here.

Hinduism - Who Was Ram Mohan Roy Or Raja Ram Mohan Roy?

Ram Mohan Roy (1774–1833)

He was a successful businessman and public servant who hailed from an affluent Bengali family.

He arrived in Calcutta in 1815, just as the British were starting to pay attention to traditional Indian culture, particularly the things they deemed "bad."

Roy's reforming goals were generally aligned with the British.

Roy had opposed the use of pictures in worship from an early age, probably as a result of his exposure to Sufi teachings, and his first public battle was against such worship of gods and goddesses.

Roy, like other Indian reformers, utilized Sanskrit books judiciously, and the most significant for him were the theoretical Upanishads, which he translated to represent monotheistic (under the influence of English Unitarians) (belief in the existence of only one God).

In his latter years, he advocated for a variety of educational and social causes, but he is most remembered for his resistance to sati, the practice of a widow being burned on her husband's burial pyre.

Brahmo Samaj, the first prominent Indian proponent of Hindu social and religious reform, was created for this goal.

Although he was subsequently criticized for being unduly influenced by the British, his rewriting of history served as a model for others.

Robert D. Baird (ed. ), Religion in Modern India, 1998, is a good place to start.

You may also want to read more about Hinduism here.

Be sure to check out my writings on religion here.

Hinduism - Who Speaks Bengali Or Bangla In India?

Present Indian language belonging to the Indo-European language family, spoken in the modern Bengal area.

Bengali, like many of India's regional languages, has a rich history as a literary language.

Calcutta was India's most significant cultural hub in the nineteenth century, as well as a hotbed of opposition to British authority.

Bengali was utilized as a vernacular language in revolutionary politics at that time, especially by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Aurobindo Ghose; it was also the language of religious leaders like as Ramprasad and Ramakrishna.