In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

In popular imagination, Lala Lajpat Rai is frequently associated with Bhagat Singh, who, by assassinating J.P. Saunders, avenged Rai’s death, caused by a police lathi charge, and was hanged for it. Lajpat Rai is also remembered for his fervent opposition to British rule. In recent decades, however, historians have converged with the Hindu Right in rediscovering Lajpat Rai as an ideological ancestor of Hindutva. But what then explains Rai’s wholehearted approval of Congress–Muslim League cooperation, and attempt to endow Hindus and Muslims with bonds of common belonging? Why did he reinterpret India’s medieval history to highlight peaceful coexistence between Hindus and Muslims? Have our hasty conclusions about Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought concealed its complexities and distorted our understanding of nationalism in general? Meticulously researched and eloquently written, Being Hindu, Being Indian offers the first comprehensive examination of Lajpat Rai’s nationalist thought. By revealing the complexities of Rai’s thinking, it provokes us to think more deeply about broader questions relevant to present-day politics: Are all expressions of ‘Hindu nationalism’ the same as Hindutva? What are the similarities and differences between ‘Hindu’ and ‘Indian’ nationalism? Can communalism and secularism be expressed together? How should we understand fluidity in politics? This book invites readers to treat Lajpat Rai’s ideas as a gateway to think more deeply about history, politics, religious identity and nationhood.

Since the dawn of Romanticism, artists and intellectuals in Germany have maintained an abiding interest in the gods and myths of antiquity while calling for a new mythology suitable to the modern age. In this study, George S. Williamson examines the factors that gave rise to this distinct and profound longing for myth. In doing so, he demonstrates the entanglement of aesthetic and philosophical ambitions in Germany with some of the major religious conflicts of the nineteenth century. Through readings of key intellectuals ranging from Herder and Schelling to Wagner and Nietzsche, Williamson highlights three crucial factors in the emergence of the German engagement with myth: the tradition of Philhellenist neohumanism, a critique of contemporary aesthetic and public life as dominated by private interests, and a rejection of the Bible by many Protestant scholars as the product of a foreign, "Oriental" culture. According to Williamson, the discourse on myth in Germany remained bound up with problems of Protestant theology and confessional conflict through the nineteenth century and beyond. A compelling adventure in intellectual history, this study uncovers the foundations of Germany's fascination with myth and its enduring cultural legacy.

Orientalism and the Figure of the Jew proposes a new way of understanding modern Orientalism. Tracing a path of modern Orientalist thought in German across crucial writings from the late eighteenth to the mid–twentieth centuries, Librett argues that Orientalism and anti-Judaism are inextricably entangled. Librett suggests, further, that the Western assertion of “material” power, in terms of which Orientalism is often read, is overdetermined by a “spiritual” weakness: an anxiety about the absence of absolute foundations and values that coincides with Western modernity itself. The modern West, he shows, posits an Oriental origin as a fetish to fill the absent place of lacking foundations. This fetish is appropriated as Western through a quasi-secularized application of Christian typology. Further, the Western appropriation of the “good” Orient always leaves behind the remainder of the “bad,” inassimilable Orient. The book traces variations on this theme through historicist and idealist texts of the nineteenth century and then shows how high modernists like Buber, Kafka, Mann, and Freud place this historicist narrative in question. The book concludes with the outlines of a cultural historiography that would distance itself from the metaphysics of historicism, confronting instead its underlying anxieties.

This work includes international secondary literature on anti-Semitism published throughout the world, from the earliest times to the present. It lists books, dissertations, and articles from periodicals and collections from a diverse range of disciplines. Written accounts are included among the recorded titles, as are manifestations of anti-Semitism in the visual arts (e.g. painting, caricatures or film), action taken against Jews and Judaism by discriminating judiciaries, pogroms, massacres and the systematic extermination during the Nazi period. The bibliography also covers works dealing with philo-Semitism or Jewish reactions to anti-Semitism and Jewish self-hate. An informative abstract in English is provided for each entry, and Hebrew titles are provided with English translations.

Dilemma in Politics underlines the major faults and fissures in the academic discourses around the themes emphasizing upon the prevalence of dichotomy between ‘what ought to be’ and ‘what is’ in the political sphere. How do political values get marginalized, if not compromised, in the name of ideological conflicts and alliances? This book highlights this dilemma across a range of themes which explore the gaps in the practice and the praxis of politics. The chapters in this volume present detailed analytical perspective on issues concerning environment, female empowerment and feminist discourses and identity-based politics and its limitations, among various other key themes. Further, it analyses the concept of rights in the neoliberal democratic context, caste and class politics and its inherent dilemmas, and it also illustrates the gaps in the political discourses to discussion on possible alternatives or solutions. With contributions by eminent political scientists working on Indian politics, this book would be an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers of political science, political philosophy, public administration, governance, public policy, political participation, democracy and South Asia studies, and will be of interest to bureaucrats, policymakers and the general reader.

Three men, in an attempt to shatter the run-of-the-mill experiences of travel, embark on a quest for an adventure of a kind that made them crazy with delight. "Three Men in (SeA) Southeast Asia," Revised & Refurbished Edition is a delectable record of an enjoyable journey that reveals the joie de vivre of the three comrades on an odyssey in their early twilight years. These men seek to relive their youthful past, inspired by the love of people, nature, art, culture, history, and architecture. They set out on a trip to Southeast Asian countries. 'A must-have Travelogue, for any serious traveler' This book explores the incredible places with a vibe that takes the glamour of these countries to a whole new level, consequent to the extensive research incorporated into it with revelations of the very origin the universe poured on to him with divine inference.

This book on the developing arguments concerning the Aryan Invasion Theory consists of adapted versions of papers the author has read:the first at the World Association of Vedic Studies (WAVES)conference on the Indus-Saraswati civilization in Atlanta 1996,the third at the 1996 Annual South Asia conference in Madison,Wisconsin and in a lecture at the Linguistics Department in Madison;the fifth contains material used in author?s paper read at the second WAVES conference in Los Angeles 1998;the second and fourth were read at lectures for the Belgo-Indian Association,Brussels,and at the Etnografisch Museum,Antewerp.

Theory to establish that the political situation and terrorism in post-1947 India is attributed to Aryan invasion and prevailing caste system.