Arising from research towards a history of Indian philanthropy, the lecture examines the influence of Swami Vivekananda. Briefly, the argument is that Indian philanthropy was transformed from its focus on temples and priests (with occasional charity to the poor), to take in “modern” concerns such as schools, hospitals, orphanages and other areas of public interest; and that Swami Vivekananda’s impact prepared the way for the expansion of the ambit of Indian philanthropy to national and international concerns.
Lecture tag: Modern Hinduism
In the World but Not of the World: Social Ethics in Early Modern North India
Can a religious practitioner be exempt from performing social duties? Ever since Buddhists and Jains rejected Brahmanical social values, the issue of social ethics for religious practitioners has been a contested topic in South Asia. In this presentation, I examine how Baladeva Vidyabhusana, a Vaishnava theologian in the 18th century, dealt with this topic at the court of Jai Singh II, a famous Rajput king of Jaipur. Kiyokazu Okita obtained his D.Phil. from Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford in 2011. After serving as a lecturer at Department of Religion, University of Florida, he is currently a JSPS post-doctoral research fellow at Department of Indological Studies, Kyoto University, as well as a visiting researcher at Abteilung für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, Universität Hamburg.