Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: The essay explores Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Krishnacaritra—published in 1886—the life of a humanised god, as engaged in cross cultural dialogues with John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo, Natural Religion, and The Expansion of England in particular, and the broader European tendency of naturalising religions in general. It contends that the rise of historicised life writing genres in Europe was organically related to the demythologised, verifiable god-lives writing project. Bankimchandra’s Krishnacarita is embedded within a dense matrix of nineteenth century Indian secular life writing projects and its projection of Krishna as a cultural icon within an incipient nationalist imagining. The essay while exploring such fraught writing projects in Victorian England and nineteenth century colonial Bengal, concludes that ‘secularism’ arrives as not as religion’s Other but as its camouflaging in ethico-cultural guise. Secularism rides on the backs of such demystified god life narratives to rationalise ethico-culturally informed global empires.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel11060300
Author: Nandini Bhattacharya
Institution: University of Burdwan
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,056
OpenAlex ID: W3035905298