NACIONALINIO ATGIMIMO SĄJŪDŽIO PRIELAIDOS BENGALIJOJE XIX AMŽIAUS PABAIGOJE
THE PRECONDITIONS OF THE NATIONAL RENAISSANCE MOVEMENT IN LATE-19TH CENTURY BENGAL

Summary/Abstract: The present article deals with the problem of building a national identity in the last decades of the 19th century in Indian Bengal. Considering the main question of whether Neo-Hinduism and Hindu nationalism were invented by the British imperial thinkers and missionaries, the author thinks that the Indian Renaissance was too diverse to have every page of it put under the same cover. In the authors opinion, Hindu reformers and nationalists tried to learn from Western thin¬kers modern instrumental ways of acting, but their efforts were meant to reconstruct, preserve, and put into life the traditional religion as well as to give it a new patriotic sentiment. She scru¬tinizes the social and political thought of Sri Aurobindo in the context of other social leaders of Bengal. Special emphasis is placed on Bankim Chandra Chatterjis novel Ānandamath, or Te Sacred Brotherhood, which sets a romanticized model of the fight against British rule. The author shows how Bankim’s idea of the importance of women’s role in the struggle and the consecration to Mother India as the Deity find its way to the later nationalist and revolutionary movement. In that respect she analyses the śakti and ksatriya principles as constitutive and very important parts of rural Hindu worship, actualized by Sri Aurobindo and other political philosophers in the light of the Bhagavadgita, Upanishads, and Tantras. This aims to be a postcolonial study helping to throw light on the Lithuanian situation as it moved from the soviet occupation through the independence movement to finally issue in freedom.

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