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A History of the Brahmins

A History of the Brahmins
Author: Sucha Nand
Publisher:
Total Pages: 674
Release: 2011-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781458346902

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A History of the Brahmins by Sucha Nand and Jagdish Rai


How the Brahmins Won

How the Brahmins Won
Author: Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2016-03-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004315519

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This is the first study to systematically confront the question how Brahmanism, which was geographically limited and under threat during the final centuries BCE, transformed itself and spread all over South and Southeast Asia.


Aryans, Jews, Brahmins

Aryans, Jews, Brahmins
Author: Dorothy M. Figueira
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2012-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0791487830

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In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.


Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief

Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief
Author: Dan Arnold
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2008-02-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231507798

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In Buddhists, Brahmins, and Belief, Dan Arnold examines how the Brahmanical tradition of Purva Mimamsa and the writings of the seventh-century Buddhist Madhyamika philosopher Candrakirti challenged dominant Indian Buddhist views of epistemology. Arnold retrieves these two very different but equally important voices of philosophical dissent, showing them to have developed highly sophisticated and cogent critiques of influential Buddhist epistemologists such as Dignaga and Dharmakirti. His analysis—developed in conversation with modern Western philosophers like William Alston and J. L. Austin—offers an innovative reinterpretation of the Indian philosophical tradition, while suggesting that pre-modern Indian thinkers have much to contribute to contemporary philosophical debates. In logically distinct ways, Purva Mimamsa and Candrakirti's Madhyamaka opposed the influential Buddhist school of thought that emphasized the foundational character of perception. Arnold argues that Mimamsaka arguments concerning the "intrinsic validity" of the earliest Vedic scriptures are best understood as a critique of the tradition of Buddhist philosophy stemming from Dignaga. Though often dismissed as antithetical to "real philosophy," Mimamsaka thought has affinities with the reformed epistemology that has recently influenced contemporary philosophy of religion. Candrakirti's arguments, in contrast, amount to a principled refusal of epistemology. Arnold contends that Candrakirti marshals against Buddhist foundationalism an approach that resembles twentieth-century ordinary language philosophy—and does so by employing what are finally best understood as transcendental arguments. The conclusion that Candrakirti's arguments thus support a metaphysical claim represents a bold new understanding of Madhyamaka.


Tamil Brahmans

Tamil Brahmans
Author: C. J. Fuller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2014-10-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 022615274X

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The Tamil Brahmans were a traditional, mainly rural, high-caste elite who have been transformed into a modern, urban, middle-class community since the late nineteenth century. Many Tamil Brahmans today are in professional and managerial occupations, such as engineering and information technology; most of them live in Chennai and other Tamilnadu towns, but others have migrated to the rest of India and overseas. This book, which is mainly based on the authors ethnographic research, describes and analyses this transformation. It is also a study of how and why the Tamil Brahmans privileged status within a hierarchical society has been perpetuated in the face of both a strong anti-Brahman movement in Tamilnadu, and a series of wider social, cultural, economic, political, and ideological changes that might have been expected to undermine their position completely. The major topics discussed include Brahman rural society, urban migration and urban ways of life, education and employment, the position of women, and religion and culture. The Tamil Brahmans class position, including the internal division into the upper- and lower-middle classes, and the process of class reproduction, are examined closely to analyze the congruence between Tamil Brahmanhood and middle classness, which as comparison with other Brahman and non-Brahman groups shows is highly unusual in contemporary India."


Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men

Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men
Author: B. R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 477
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231551517

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One of twentieth-century India’s great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace the origin of the Dalit caste. Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men is an annotated selection from this work, just as relevant now, when the oppression of and discrimination against Dalits remains pervasive. Ambedkar offers a deductive, and at times a speculative, history to propose a genealogy of Untouchability. He contends that modern-day Dalits are descendants of those Buddhists who were fenced out of caste society and rendered Untouchable by a resurgent Brahminism since the fourth century BCE. The Brahmins, whose Vedic cult originally involved the sacrifice of cows, adapted Buddhist ahimsa and vegetarianism to stigmatize outcaste Buddhists who were consumers of beef. The outcastes were soon relegated to the lowliest of occupations and prohibited from participation in civic life. To unearth this lost history, Ambedkar undertakes a forensic examination of a wide range of Brahminic literature. Heavily annotated with an emphasis on putting Ambedkar and recent scholarship into conversation, Beef, Brahmins, and Broken Men assumes urgency as India witnesses unprecedented violence against Dalits and Muslims in the name of cow protection.


Brahmin Capitalism

Brahmin Capitalism
Author: Noam Maggor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2017-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674971469

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Noam Maggor shows how the moneyed elite in Gilded Age Boston leveraged their wealth to forge transcontinental networks of commodities, labor, and transportation. With the decline of cotton-based textile manufacturing, these gentleman bankers found new business opportunities in the mines, railroads, and industries of the Great West.


Ascetics and Brahmins

Ascetics and Brahmins
Author: Patrick Olivelle
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2011-12-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1843318024

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This volume brings together papers on Indian ascetical institutions and ideologies published by Patrick Olivelle over a span of about thirty years. Asceticism represents a major strand in the religious and cultural history of India, providing some of the most creative elements within Indian religions and philosophies. Most of the major religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism, and religious philosophies both within these new religions and in the Brahmanical tradition, were created by world-renouncing ascetics. Yet ascetical institutions and ideologies developed in a creative tension with other religious institutions that stressed the centrality of family, procreation and society. It is this tension that has articulated many of the central features of Indian religion and culture. The papers collected in this volume seek to locate Indian ascetical traditions within their historical, political and ideological contexts.


Being Brahmin, Being Modern

Being Brahmin, Being Modern
Author: Ramesh Bairy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136198199

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There is clearly an academic and political obsession with the ‘idea’ of the Brahmin. There is also, simultaneously, a near-complete absence of engagement with the Brahmin as an embodied person or community. This book addresses this intriguing paradox by making available a sociological description of the Brahmins in today’s Karnataka. It pursues three distinct, yet enmeshed, registers of inquiry – the persona of the ‘Brahmin’ embodied in the agency of the individual Brahmin; the organised complexes of action such as the caste association and the public culture of print; and finally, taking off from a longer (yet, modern and contemporary) history of non-Brahminical othering of the Brahmin. It argues that we tend to understand the contemporaneity of caste almost exclusively within the twin registers of legitimation–contestation and dominance–resistance. While these facets continue to be salient, there is also a need to push out into hitherto neglected dimensions of caste. The book focuses attention on the many lives of modern caste — its secularisation, the subject positions that it offers, the equivocations by which persons and communities become ‘subjects’ of caste, their differential investments in the caste-self.


Guardian of the Gate

Guardian of the Gate
Author: G. D. Bakshi
Publisher: K W Publishers Pvt Limited
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2017-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789386288776

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This is the Military History of the Mohyals - an Indian clan of fighting Brahmins. They are Saraswat Brahmins who dwelt on the banks of the ancient river Saraswati - that once flowed from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. As such they came in the path of each and every invader who came to loot or subjugate India. The warrior sage, Parshuram, had militarised them in the early epic period. From priests these Brahmins had morphed into Mohyal fighting Brahmins, brave and tenacious fighters with a great tradition of soldiering. After Alexanders invasion, Chanakya recruited the Maurayan Army from this region. They became the Bhumiar Brahmins who later settled in Bihar and UP, and helped unify India for the Maurayan empire. Surprisingly, a Mohyal clan fought in Iraq on the side of the Shias' in the famous Karbala war. The Mohyal Shahi rulers of Afghanistan stopped the world conquering Arab armies on the Hindu Kush and gave them their first taste of defeat and held them off for 300 years. They fought the Arab invasions of Sindh, Mehmood Ghaznavi and Muhammad Ghori. When the Mughal empire turned tyrannical under Aurangzeb, they flocked to the banner of the Sikh Gurus to overthrow this evil tyranny. Baba Paraga, Bhai Mati Das and Banda Bairagi were great soldier saints of the Sikh military tradition. They were all Mohyals who played a major role in the Indian military revival that took place with the Sikhs and the Marathas. This book is an invaluable record of all the military invasions of India from the third century B.C. onwards. The soldiers and scholars of History will find it an invaluable document about Indian Military History per se - right from the Vedic times to the present era. These fighting Brahmins have maintained their military traditions. Post-independence, 2/Lt Puneet Datt won the Ashok Chakra - the highest gallantry award in the land. Four Mohyal officers won the Mahavir Chakra and other four, the Vir Chakra. Six Mohyals have risen to the rank of Army Commander and equivalent in the Indian Army and Air Force, and three became the governor of states. 10 became Lt Generals and 15 Maj Generals - all from a miniscule community - just 6 lakh strong. They are like the Samurai of Japan - great patriots, scholar-warriors and erstwhile feudal lords who have made enormous sacrifices for their country. They have been the guardians of it's gates.