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Ronald B. Inden | |
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| Occupation(s) | Professor Emeritus, History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations |
| Employer | University of Chicago |
| Known for | Ancient and Medieval India Hindu Thought Cultural Studies Orientalism |
Ronald B. Inden is an American indologist. He is a professor emeritus in the Departments of History and of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and is a major scholar in South Asian and post-colonial studies. [1]
Inden has spent the bulk of his professional career at University of Chicago. Inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism , he began a critical investigation of how social scientific knowledge was shaped by the colonial conditions of its production. Imagining India was a critical survey of the field of Indology and argued that most scholarship consistently failed to treat Indians as rational subjects and knowing actors who were intelligently involved in the creation of their social worlds. "The immense learning and analytical sharpness of the book is evident from the very first chapter" [2] Post-Orientalist Strategies explored ways of knowing India that are not so limited by colonialism and its legacies.
R. G. Collingwood's works, including An Essay on Philosophical Method and The Idea of History, were especially influential in Inden's thought during this period. He took Collingwood's notion of a "scale of forms" and used it to develop an approach opposed to a "hierarchy of essences". In general, in Inden's work the past two decades, the focus has been on the limitations of what he calls essentializing or substantializing discourses which understand agents as more or less reflections of a single, internally consistent idea. He argues that Indology returns to a small number of relatively fixed themes to make sense out of India. India, in this indological version, is feminine, jungle-like, religious, caste-riven, village-based, irrational and, fundamentally, the opposite of the West. Inden, on the contrary, emphasizes that there's an irreducible tension in scholarship and that India and the West need to be understood as both "opposites" and "distincts" and that they have "differences in quality" as well as "differences in kind". Essentializing forms of knowledge emphasize only the differences in quality and the extent to which the West and India are opposites. [3]
In art history, literature and cultural studies, Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects of the Eastern world by writers, designers, and artists from the Western world. Orientalist painting, particularly of the Middle East, was one of the many specialties of 19th-century academic art, and Western literature was influenced by a similar interest in Oriental themes.
Puranas are a vast genre of Hindu literature about a wide range of topics, particularly about legends and other traditional lore. The Puranas are known for the intricate layers of symbolism depicted within their stories. Composed originally in Sanskrit and in other Indian languages, several of these texts are named after major Hindu gods such as Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, and Mahadevi. The Puranic genre of literature is found in both Hinduism and Jainism.
Indology, also known as South Asian studies, is the academic study of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent, and as such is a subset of Asian studies.
Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivas was an Indian sociologist and social anthropologist. He is mostly known for his work on caste and caste systems, social stratification, Sanskritisation and Westernisation in southern India and the concept of 'dominant caste'. He is considered to be one of the pioneering personalities in the field of sociology and social anthropology in India as his work in Rampura remains one of the early examples of ethnography in India. That was in contrast to most of his contemporaries of the Bombay School, who focused primarily on a historical methodology to conduct research, mainly in Indology. He also founded the Department of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi in 1959.
Kayastha denotes a cluster of disparate Indian communities broadly categorised by the regions of the Indian subcontinent in which they were traditionally located—the Chitraguptavanshi Kayasthas of North India, the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus of Maharashtra, the Bengali Kayasthas of Bengal and Karanas of Odisha. All of them were traditionally considered "writing castes", who had historically served the ruling powers as administrators, ministers and record-keepers.
Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward Said, in which he establishes the term "Orientalism" as a critical concept to describe the Western world's commonly contemptuous depiction and portrayal of the Eastern world—that is, the Orient. Societies and peoples of the Orient are those who inhabit regions throughout Asia and North Africa. Said argues that Orientalism, in the sense of the Western scholarship about the Eastern world, is inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much Orientalist work inherently political and servile to power.
Oriental studies is the academic field that studies Near Eastern and Far Eastern societies and cultures, languages, peoples, history and archaeology. In recent years, the subject has often been turned into the newer terms of Middle Eastern studies and Asian studies. Traditional Oriental studies in Europe is today generally focused on the discipline of Islamic studies; the study of China, especially traditional China, is often called Sinology. The study of East Asia in general, especially in the United States, is often called East Asian studies.
Bernard S. Cohn was an American anthropologist and scholar of British colonialism in India, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago.
The caste system in India is the paradigmatic ethnographic instance of social classification based on castes. It has its origins in ancient India, and was transformed by various ruling elites in medieval, early-modern, and modern India, especially in the aftermath of the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the establishment of the British Raj. It is today the basis of affirmative action programmes in India as enforced through its constitution. The caste system consists of two different concepts, varna and jati, which may be regarded as different levels of analysis of this system.
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Sheldon I. Pollock is an American scholar of Sanskrit, the intellectual and literary history of India, and comparative intellectual history. He is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. He was the general editor of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the founding editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
Hermann Kulke is a German historian and Indologist, who was professor of South and Southeast Asian history at the Department of History, Kiel University (1988–2003). After receiving his PhD in Indology from Freiburg University in 1967, he taught for 21 years at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University (SAI).
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist. As a professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of post-colonial studies. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for his book Orientalism (1978), a foundational text which critiques the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. His model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies.
Baidya or Vaidya is a Bengali Hindu community located in the Bengal region of Indian subcontinent. A caste (jāti) of Ayurvedic physicians, the Baidyas have long had pre-eminence in society alongside Brahmins and Kayasthas. In the colonial era, the Bhadraloks were drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from these three upper castes, who continue to maintain a collective hegemony in West Bengal.
R. S. Khare is a socio-cultural anthropologist and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, U.S. He is known for studying “from within/without” India's changing society, religions, food systems, and political cultures, and for following the trajectories of contemporary Indian traditional and modern cultural discourses. His anthropology has endeavored to widen reasoned bridges across the India-West cultural, religious-philosophical, and literary distinctions and differences.
Bengali Kayastha is a Bengali Hindu caste originated from the Bengal region of Indian subcontinent, and is one of the main subgroups of the Kayastha community. The historical caste occupation of Kayasthas throughout India has been that of scribes, administrators, ministers and record-keepers; the Kayasthas in Bengal, along with Brahmins and Baidyas, are regarded among the three traditional higher castes that comprise the "upper layer of Hindu society". During the British Raj, the Bhadraloks of Bengal were drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from these three castes, who continue to maintain a collective hegemony in West Bengal.
John E. Cort is an American indologist. He is a professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University, where he is also Chair of the Department of Religion. He has studied Jainism and the history of Jain society over four decades, authored several books on Jainism, and is one of the editors of the forthcoming Brill Encyclopedia of Jainism. According to a review published in 2006 by Peter Flügel, the influence of the studies and publications of Cort on Jainism "have been immense", and in some respects dominated the field of Jain studies.
The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.
Dirk Herbert Arnold Kolff is a Dutch historian and Indologist. Born at Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Kolff earned a doctorate degree from the Leiden University in 1983 with a doctoral thesis on the research subject of armed peasantry in northern India. He is a professor emeritus of modern South Asian history and the former Chair of Indian History at the Leiden University.
Tribal casteism encompasses South Asian practices of social marginalisation within tribes. These practices are often overlooked by scholars and the media because of a colonial legacy that employed orientalist empiricism to construct tribes as egalitarian and structurally opposite to Hindu caste society. Indian sociologists and historians often appeal to a "tribe-to-caste continuum" that has elements of contested social evolution and miss the fluid and changing nature of tribal social organization, both internally and with regard to state recognition for affirmative action quotas—Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
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