Franchir barrières et frontières

Cet essai est autobiographique. Il constitue une tentative de donner sens aux conceptions du monde rencontrées au cours d’un demi-siècle de types différents d'expériences éducatives expérimentées dans l'Inde d’après l’Indépendance. Ces conceptions incluent une éducation sanskrite traditionnelle à la maison, une éducation scolaire anglophone à Delhi, une éducation universitaire orientaliste en Allemagne, puis des expériences d’enseignement de la langue et de la littérature hindi en Allemagne et aux États-Unis. Chacune d’elles a impliqué une remise en question culturelle et politique de celle qui l’avait précédée. L'aboutissement de ce qui ne peut être décrit que comme le combat de toute une vie pour trouver l'équilibre est l'acceptation de la quête visant à donner un sens à une série d’opérations de recoupement.Crossing Borders and Boundaries. — This essay is autobiographical. It is an attempt to come to terms with the series of world views encountered in half a century of very different kinds of educational ventures in post-independence India. These have included traditional Sanskrit education at home, Anglicist High School and College education in Delhi, Orientalist university education in Germany and then attempts at teaching modern Hindi language and literature in Germany and the United States. Each venture has meant a cultural and political questioning of that which preceded it. The culmination of what can only be described as a life long struggle to reach equilibrium is the acceptance of the quest to establish meaning in a series of cross checking operations

Digital divine : technology use by Indian spiritual sects

Spirituality-based organizations in India, centered around a set of beliefs and practices, with a charismatic guru figure at their head, have embraced the information age enthusiastically, and have come to the fore as key players in the national narrative around social welfare and development in recent years. We conducted a qualitative study of four Hinduism-oriented Spirituality-based Organizations (SBOs) in India using interviews, on-site observations, and in-depth examination of their online outreach material to understand the ways in which technology impacts and advances their core functions. We examine five core ways which technology plays a critical role in these SBO - community-building, dissemination of core practices, self-fashioning, philanthropic outreach, and organizational growth – all of which inform these organizations’ influence in society beyond the confines of their adherents. We find that all these functions are enabled in different ways by digital technologies, which have organizational value in and of themselves, but also play an equally important role in helping extend these organizations’ public image as modern, innovative organizations aligned with broader aspirations of national development and social welfare

Fashioning readers: canon, criticism and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Oriya literature

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth century Orissa, this article describes how anxieties about the quality of ‘traditional’ Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular pre-colonial Oriya poet. The critic argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this article offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of post-colonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global