In this book Arvind Sharma introduces contemporary readers to the works of some of the finest Hindu thinkers over the last two centuries. A fundamental religious and cultural corollary of British rule over India—and India’s eventually successful struggle against it—was the cultural encounter between the two countries and the religious encounter between Christianity and Hinduism. This cultural and religious encounter, viewed through the lens of Hinduism, constitutes the theme of this book. Selections from the writings of Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, Dayananda Sarasvati, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghose, Jiddu Krishnamurty and other thinkers are presented with cameo accounts of their lives. According to Sharma, it is individual thinkers rather than philosophical systems that constitute the foci of modern Hindu thought. Written in a lucid style, the book will be of interest to undergraduate and post-graduate students of religion, classical philosophy and Indian literature, as well as the general reader interested in Hinduism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Arvind Sharma
ARVIND SHARMA was born in Varanasi, India. He earned a B.A. in History, Economics, and Sanskrit from Allahabad University in 1958 and continued his interests in economics at Syracuse University, earning an M.A. in 1970. Pursuing a lifelong interest in comparative religion, Dr. Sharma gained an M.T.S. in 1974 and then a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indian Studies from Harvard University in 1978. He succeeded to the Birks Chair of Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal, Canada and was the first Infinity Foundation Visiting Professor of Indic Studies at Harvard University. He has published over fifty books and five hundred articles in the fields of comparative religion, Hinduism, Indian philosophy and ethics, and the role of women in religion. Widely cited as an authority on Hinduism, amongst his most note-worthy publications are The Hindu Gita: Ancient and Classical Interpretations of the Bhagavadgita (1986), The Experien-tial Dimension of Advaita Vedanta (1993), Our Religions: The Seven World Religions Introduced by Pre-eminent Scholars from Each Tradition (1994), The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective (1995), Classical Hindu Thought: An Introduction (2000), and The Study of Hinduism (2003).
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