Peter Heehs | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 (age 74–75) |
Nationality | American |
Occupation | Historian |
Peter Heehs (born 1948) is an American historian living in Puducherry, India who writes on modern Indian history, spirituality and religion. Much of his work focuses on the Indian freedom fighter and spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo. His publications include twelve books and more than sixty articles in journals and magazines.
Peter Heehs was born and educated in the United States but has lived in India since 1971. He has worked in the team as a researcher [1] [2] at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives since its founding, and has contributed to the re-editing of the Sri Aurobindo Birth Centenary Library and The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. [3] [4]
As a historian, Heehs has written on the swadeshi period of the Indian independence movement and on the early phase of the Indian revolutionary movement. His 1992 study The Bomb in Bengal highlighted the importance of the Maniktala secret society, which was a predecessor of the Jugantar Group. In this book and other publications, Heehs made it clear that the Indian freedom struggle had a violent as well as a non-violent side, and that the violent revolutionaries helped prepare the country psychologically for the later mass movements led by Mahatma Gandhi. In the second edition of The Bomb in Bengal (2004), Heehs distinguished the aims and methods of early Indian revolutionaries. [5]
Heehs has also written on problems of Indian historiography in History and Theory, [6] Postcolonial Studies, [7] and other journals. He has also contributed to popular magazines such as History Today. [8]
As a scholar of religion, Heehs has edited the textbook Indian Religions [9] and has contributed to journals and edited volumes dealing with new religious movements in India. [10] [11] He has also discussed the problems of Indian communalism.
Heehs's ninth book, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press, 2008) was intended for scholarly readers. [12] It received positive reviews in the United States, [13] but was objected to by a large number of devotees of Sri Aurobindo, [14] who have delayed the publication of the book in India. [15] Heehs's tenth book, Writing the Self, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2013. It has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice. [16] His eleventh book, Situating Sri Aurobindo: A Reader, a collection of essays by various scholars on Sri Aurobindo's writings, with an introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in October 2013. His twelfth book, Spirituality without God, was published by Bloomsbury in November 2018.
Heehs was briefly in the news in April 2012 after the Indian home ministry declined to entertain an application for extension of his resident visa after April 15. [17] Learning of the affair on March 31, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram said he would review Heehs’s case. [18] A number of prominent scholars, as well as union minister for Rural Development Jairam Ramesh, wrote in support of Heehs to the home minister and to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. [19] Leading public intellectuals Ramachandra Guha [20] and Pratap Bhanu Mehta [21] wrote about the issue in their newspaper columns. On April 13, the home ministry announced that it had approved a one-year extension of Heehs’s visa. [22] The affair became a point of reference in discussions in the Indian and international press of freedom of expression, [23] [24] [25] book banning, [26] [27] [28] [29] censorship, [30] [31] xenophobia, [32] and visa policy. [33]
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Hinduism:
Georges Van Vrekhem was a Flemish Belgian journalist, poet and playwright, who was the artistic manager of a professional theater company, the "Nederlands Toneel te Gent". He became acquainted with the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in 1964. In 1970, he joined the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry, and eight years later, in 1978 he moved to Auroville. He has translated as selected writings from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and several books of Sri Aurobindo, The Mother, Peter Heehs, and Satprem into Dutch. Van Vrekhem died during sleep in his Auroville home in Shakti on 31 August 2012.
Kaikhosru Dhunjibhoy Sethna was an Indian poet, scholar, writer, philosopher, and cultural critic. He published more than 50 books. He was known by the diminutive Kekoo, but wrote his poetry under nom de plume of Amal Kiran.
Haridas Chaudhuri was an Indian integral philosopher. He was a correspondent with Sri Aurobindo and the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS).
Emperor vs Aurobindo Ghosh and others, colloquially referred to as the Alipore Bomb Case, the Muraripukur conspiracy, or the Manicktolla bomb conspiracy, was a criminal case held in India in 1908. The case saw the trial of a number of Indian nationalists of the Anushilan Samiti in Calcutta, under charges of "Waging war against the Government" of the British Raj. The trial was held at Alipore Sessions Court, Calcutta, between May 1908 and May 1909. The trial followed in the wake of the attempt on the life of Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford in Muzaffarpur by Bengali nationalists Khudiram Bose and Prafulla Chaki in April 1908, which was recognised by the Bengal police as linked to attacks against the Raj in the preceding years, including attempts to derail the train carrying Lieutenant-Governor Sir Andrew Fraser in December 1907.
Indra Sen was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, psychologist, author, and educator, and the founder of Integral psychology as an academic discipline.
Anushilan Samiti was an Indian fitness club, which was actually used as an underground society for anti-British revolutionaries. In the first quarter of the 20th century it supported revolutionary violence as the means for ending British rule in India. The organisation arose from a conglomeration of local youth groups and gyms (akhara) in Bengal in 1902. It had two prominent, somewhat independent, arms in East and West Bengal, Dhaka Anushilan Samiti, and the Jugantar group.
Arya: A Philosophical Review was a 64-page monthly periodical written by Sri Aurobindo and published in India between 1914 and 1921. The majority of the material which initially appeared in the Arya was later edited and published in book-form as The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Secret of the Veda, The Foundations of Indian Culture and The Ideal of Human Unity as well as a number of translations of Vedic literature.
Mirra Alfassa, known to her followers as The Mother or La Mère, was a spiritual guru, occultist and yoga teacher, and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name "The Mother". She founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established the town of Auroville; she was influential on the subject of Integral Yoga.
Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher, yogi, maharishi, poet, and Indian nationalist. He was also a journalist, editing newspapers such as Vande Mataram. He joined the Indian movement for independence from British colonial rule, until 1910 was one of its influential leaders, and then became a spiritual reformer, introducing his visions on human progress and spiritual evolution.
Supermind, in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of integral yoga, is the dynamic manifestation of the Absolute, and the intermediary between Spirit and the manifest world, which enables the transformation of common being into Divine being.
Jatindra Nath Banerjee was one of two great Indian nationalists and freedom fighters – along with Aurobindo Ghosh – who dramatically rose to prominence between 1871 and 1910.
The reception of Hinduism in the Western world begins in the 19th century, at first at an academic level of religious studies and antiquarian interest in Sanskrit. Only after World War II does Hinduism acquire a presence as a religious minority in western nations, partly due to immigration, and partly due to conversion, the latter especially in the context of the 1960s to 1970s counter-culture, giving rise to a number of Hinduism-inspired new religious movements sometimes also known as "Neo-Hindu" or "export Hinduism".
Aurobindo's political career lasted only four years, from 1906 to 1910. Though he had been active behind the scene surveying, organizing and supporting the nationalist cause, ever since his return to India, especially during his excursions to Bengal. This period of his activity from 1906-1910 saw a complete transformation of India's political scene. Before Aurobindo began publishing his views, the Congress was an annual debating society whose rare victories had been instances of the empire taking a favourable view to its petitions. By the time Aurobindo left the field, the ideal of political independence had been firmly ingrained into the minds of people, and nineteen years later, it became the official raison d'être of the Congress.
Hindu nationalism has been collectively referred to as the expression of social and political thought, based on the native spiritual and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. "Hindu nationalism" or the correct term Hindū rāṣṭravāda is a simplistic translation and it is better described with the term "Hindu polity".
Neo-Vedanta, also called Hindu modernism, neo-Hinduism, Global Hinduism and Hindu Universalism, are terms to characterize interpretations of Hinduism that developed in the 19th century. The term "Neo-Vedanta" was coined by German Indologist Paul Hacker, in a pejorative way, to distinguish modern developments from "traditional" Advaita Vedanta.
Judith Tyberg (1902–1980) was an American yogi ("Jyotipriya") and a renowned Sanskrit scholar and orientalist. Author of The Language of the Gods and two other texts on Sanskrit, she was the founder and guiding spirit of the East-West Cultural Center in Los Angeles, California, a major pioneering door through which now-celebrated Indian yogis and spiritual teachers of many Eastern and mystical traditions were first introduced to America and the West.
Motilal Roy was a Bengali revolutionary, journalist, social reformer. He founded the Prabartak Sangha, a nationalist organisation for social works.
Debashish Banerji is a Bengali scholar. He writes in English and specializes in Integral Yoga, Indian Philosophy and Psychology, Art History and Cultural Theory. He is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, where he also chairs the department of East-West Psychology.