আধুনিক বাংলার গৌড়ীয় বৈষ্ণবতত্ত্ব | Modern Gaudiya Vaishnavism in Bengal

Abstract

The article offers an overview of a recent publication by the author about the life and work of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1874-1937), a Vaishnava guru of the Bengali school of Chaitanya (1486-1534), who managed to establish a pan-Indian movement for the modern revival of traditional personalist bhakti that today encompasses both Indian and non-Indian populations around the world. To most historians, the period between 1815 and 1914 is known as Britain's Imperial Century, when the power of British cultural influence was at its height, most especially in Calcutta, India, the so-called "jewel" of the British crown. Here the profound admixture of Western and Indic social structures, values and ideas gave rise to a new indigenous middle-class known as the bhadralok: the class responsible for what is popularly known as the Bengal Renaissance, and for producing such transformative figures as Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda, both of whom believed non-dualism to be the fundamental expression of Indic thought. As a result of their efforts, modern Hinduism gradually came to be identified with Vedantic non-dualism (advaita) in both India and the West-an outcome that has historically obscured personalist bhakti strands. To redress this imbalance, the article explores Bhaktisiddhanta's background, motivation and thought, especially as it relates to his forging of a modern traditionalist institution for the revival of Chaitanya Vaishnava bhakti. That institution, originally known as the Gaudiya Math, has a number of contemporary global offshoots, the best known of which is the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.