A Renaissance Man in Memory: Appayya Dīkṣita Through the Ages (original) (raw)

Just Like Kālidāsa: The Śākta Intellectuals of Seventeenth-century South India

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Smārta intellectual community of South India entered into an unprecedented alliance with Śaṅkarācārya monastic institutions and their corresponding esoteric lineage, the Śrīvidyā school of Śākta tantrism. Among the prominent intellectuals of this period, Nīlakaṇṭha Dīkṣita, grand-nephew of the renowned polymath Appayya Dīkṣita, and a number of his associates began to cultivate devotional relationships with a particular lineage of Śaṅkarācārya ascetics. Through initiation under these preceptors, Nīlakaṇṭha and his colleagues cultivated a sophisticated knowledge of Śrīvidyā ritual and theology, composing treatises on the subject, which to date have remained unexamined by scholarly literature. By examining two of these works in detail in the present essay—the Ambāstavavyākhyā of Ardhanārīśvara Dīkṣita and the Śaṅkarābhyudaya of Rājacūḍāmaṇi Dīkṣita —I argue that Śrīvidyā esotericism served as a vehicle through which Sanskrit intellectuals actively contested and transformed public modes of sectarian affiliation and socio-religious community integration in the South Indian Smārta community. In particular, I demonstrate that this intellectual community reinvented the legacy of two icons of Sanskrit cultural history—Śaṅkarācārya and Kālidāsa—whom they recast as paradigms of both Sanskritic aesthetic virtue and esoteric Śākta devotionalism.

Anyathakhyati: A Critique by Appaya Diksita in the Parimala

2000

In this paper, the problem of illusory perception, as approached by the Nyaya and Advaita Vedanta schools of philosophy, is discussed from the standpoint of the Parimala. This seminal work belonging to the Bhamatõ¯ tradition of Advaita Vedanta was composed in the sixteenth century by the polymath Appaya Dõ¯ks:ita. In the context of discussing various theories of illusion, Dõ¯ks:ita dwells

On Appaya Dīkṣita's Engagement with Vyāsatīrtha's Tarkatāṇḍava (Journal of Indological Studies, 2016-2017)

2017

The 16 th-century South Indian scholar Appaya Dīkṣita is well-known for his harsh criticism of the Dvaita Vedānta school. This article sheds light on his relationship to the other great luminary of 16 th-century South India―the Mādhva Vyāsatīrtha. Appaya's engagement with the Tarkatāṇḍava, Vyāsatīrtha's celebrated treatise of epistemology and logic, is here discussed in relation to two works of Appaya: the Upakramaparākrama and the Śivārkamaṇidīpikā, with the aim to reflect further on the close relationship between both Sanskrit intellectuals and clarify certain aspects of Appaya's scholarly practice.

The Vaisnava Writings of a Saiva Intellectual

Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Resisting Biographical Illusions: Pandurang Khankhoje, Indian Revolutionaries and the Anxiety to be Remembered

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2024

Recently, there has been a growing discussion concerning the way historians should approach the study of Indian revolutionaries both within and outside the subcontinent. Described as 'the revolutionary turn', this area of research has not only explored the porosity and ambiguity in defining individuals as revolutionaries but has also questioned the way such revolutionaries sought to write themselves into history as a political act. Continuing this line of interrogation, this article examines the retrospective political claims of heroic revolutionary belonging by analysing the autobiographical notes left by Pandurang Khankhoje, a peripatetic Indian who left his country pursuing dreams of revolution. While in the last decade Khankhoje has become an iconic character in writing histories about global solidarities and anti-colonial resistance, this article asks to what extent can historians believe self-described revolutionary narratives. As this article shows, these narratives privilege what Pierre Bourdieu has called 'biographical illusion', the organisation of life as a history that unfolds coherently and chronologically from beginning to end. Political or ideological differences and inconsistencies are flattened in the name of global ideologies or solidarities. As an attempt to disrupt these narratives, this article will focus on the silences, absences and 'unreliability' of the experiences and sources used to understand the work and lives of Indian revolutionaries abroad, such as Khankhoje, Lala Har Dayal and M. N. Roy. This article argues that the story of revolutionaries reveals important details about how they understood the racial, political and gender structures of different societies in the early twentieth century.

‘I AM THE WIDOW’: Behram Malabari as Litterateur and Agent of Social Change in Late-Nineteenth-Century Western India

This study is posited as an intellectual biography of social reformer, poet and ethnographer, Behram Malabari. It engages with the contextual formations which inform/are brought about because of his work and life, which makes it an exploration of his times (the late 19th-century) through the lens of his life, in other words. Focusing on the figure of Malabari, the attempt is to work outwards, deciphering the fallout of the internal reform movement within the Parsi community undertaken in the mid-19th century in Western India, and the ramifications of this movement on the national one which followed. To this end, this thesis is also an investigation into the beginnings of what would become the Women’s Movement in India, foregrounded here in Malabari’s lifelong espousal of working towards the ‘uplift’ of women in their social and material conditions. A questioning of the politics of representation such a voicing must inevitably be countered with is here explored. Equally, this study seeks to outline the categories of the ‘political’ and ‘social’ available to men of letters such as Malabari, towards the end of the 19th century, see how they collapse into each other, and the intricacies generated from this amalgam, making it near impossible to trace the origins of legislation down to either one of these spheres. This thesis shows the bounds which circumscribe the social mobility of one such as Malabari – a reformer, but a Parsi reformer, negotiating on the national front the ambiguity of his position as an insider/outsider to the creed of the Hindu society he was trying to re-form. As a Parsi, member of a community heavily Anglicised in the wake of the colonial venture, and as one who spoke the language of social reform by articulating it in a demand which translated into legislation and therefore law – a ‘foreign’ law at that – he was to be distrusted twice over for being a ‘Western Reformer’. Of course, this was moot, for he was charged with ‘sedition’ in 1900, as will be discussed towards the end of the thesis. Relocating Malabari, and restoring him to his place as an important catalyst of the wider discursive field of social reform in the late 19th century is what this study aims to do. It does so by analysing Malabari’s oeuvre in what Anthony Giddens outlines as a double hermeneutic, outlining not just what he did or how he did it, but also attempting to analyse how Malabari and his ilk made sense of their world, and how that understanding shaped their practice as reformers, journalists, and public men.

Renaissances, African and modern: Gandhi as a resource?

Historia, 2009

The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of Gandhi for the discussion about the African Renaissance. The article begins with the argument that the critical process of self-reflection begun in India about its past as a resource for imagining its future is central to any possibility of a renaissance in Africa. It draws on Gandhi in terms of what an examination of his central ideas might tell us about a future post-colonial Africa. Two of these ideas relate to the role of women in society and the attendant impact this view has on dominant masculinist tropes found in colonial historiography. Using these, the article looks at Gandhi not for the political and strategic choices he makes, but for understanding the kind of ethical identity or, the humanness which Gandhi's life represents. Die Renaissance'e van Afrika en die Moderne : Gandhi as 'n hulpbron? Die doel van hierdie artikel is om die betekenis van Gandhi vir die bespreking van die Afrika Renaissanc...