Righteous Republic : : The Political Foundations of Modern India / / Ananya Vajpeyi.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Vajpeyi, Ananya,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 1 line illustration, 1 map

What India's founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India's own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures-Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar-Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India's founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India's struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1 Mohandas Gandhi -- 2 Rabindranath Tagore -- 3 Abanindranath Tagore -- 4 Jawaharlal Nehru -- 5 Bhimrao Ambedkar -- Conclusion -- Appendix A: The Indexical Complexity of Tagore's Meghdūt -- Appendix B: Thirteenth Rock Edict of Aśoka -- Appendix C: The State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act, 2005 -- Appendix D: From Ambedkar's Published Introduction to The Buddha and His Dhamma -- Appendix E: From "Gospel of Equality: The Buddha and the Future of His Religion," 1950 -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index