Gandhi and the Gita [Paperback]

J.I. Hans Bakker (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1551300192 | ISBN-13: 978-1551300191 | Publication Date: January 1, 1993

There have been many statements made by comparative philosophers and Sanskritists about Mahandas Karamchand Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita. The general thrust of scholarly opinion seems to be that Gandhi's translation - with its implicit interpretation is unsatisfactory. Gandhi's interpretation is assumed to be an unscholarly and misleading exegenesis.

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About the Author

Hans Bakker (ed)

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Canadian Scholars Press (January 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1551300192
• ISBN-13: 978-1551300191
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,227,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #83 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Hinduism > Gandhi

More About the Author

My parents moved to the United States in 1952 when I was five. This made me a "marginal man" (Robert Park, Everett Stonequist 1937). My dad chose to live in Ohio in part because he read Louis Bromfield's The Farm when he was a P.O.W. in Thailand and Japan. Growing up in Ohio, every summer was spent in Holland, and, eventually Europe. That background eventually encouraged me to become a sociologist and to take that discipline seriously. My year (1967-68) spent studying at Leiden University in the Netherlands I learned about sociological theory and it has continued to intrigue me ever since. Our textbook was by Nicholas S. Timasheff! I also learned about social history for the first time. A lecture on the 17th century Dutch use of weight scales to determine whether someone from Eastern Europe was a witch made it clear to me how powerful sociological understanding of history can be. The "Marxian" element in that story was clear. My empirical work on the comparative historical sociology (CHS) of Indonesia was also influenced by my background. I lived for one year in India and worked with the Gandhi Peace Foundation, which resulted in a slim volume on Gandhi. But the essay I left out of that book is in my edited book Gandhi and the Gita. My intellectual hero is Max Weber and one of the few book reviews I have written on amazon is about Weber's Economy and Society. I consider it the true beginning of a CHS. I live and work in Canada and the multicultural aspect of Canadian society fits in well with my worldview. I have recently contributed a chapter on bureaucracy and deference to a Festschrift for Professor Irving Zeitlin, author of Ideology and the Development of Sociological Theory.

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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Who is "unscholarly"?, April 17, 2008

By 

Arthur Harvey (Hartford, ME United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gandhi and the Gita (Paperback)

Indian thinkers are, or used to be, expected to translate the Gita. As to whether each interpretation is "satisfactory" is really a silly question. Gandhi was surrounded by recognized scholars, such as Vinoba Bhave, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, and Mahadev Desai. Each of these had his own interpretation of the Gita, and none of them presumed to denigrate Gandhi's.