Unsaintly Virtue

Before he died in 1883, Swami Dayanand Saraswati expressly forbade his followers from turning him into a saint. His mission, he explained, was to rid India of the ‘smell of gurudom’. Nonetheless, as the Arya Samaj rose to prominence, its members extolled its founder’s extraordinary virtues in a series of texts that can only be termed hagiographic. The literary genre of Arya hagiography that emerged between the 1880s and 1920s was thus shaped by a constitutive contradiction: disavowing its hagiographic impulses, it sought to close the gap between ‘great men’ and ‘ordinary’ people, even as it also inevitably reinforced this divide. This article briefly surveys the genre of Arya hagiography before situating it within a broader cultural formation that I term ‘print asceticism’. How, I ask, did colonial writers position print as vehicle for the renunciation of the self for the good of the nation

Ancient history · Art · Hinduism · Swami · Theology · Virtue · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Philosophy · Religious studies

• India’s foreign policy

  Ian Hall•The Round Table•2022

  Incluir item

• Self, Spencer and Swaraj

  Open Access•Shruti Kapila•Modern Intellectual History•2007

  Incluir item

• Thomas Carlyle, Chartism , and the Irish in Early Victorian England

  Open Access•Roger Swift•Victorian Literature and Culture•2001

  Incluir item

• On Trial

  David L Haberman•History of Religions•1993

  Incluir item