“Prophet” Looking for a Nineteenth Century Future

Goonatilake, Susantha

doi:10.1080/02691720500084341

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…That is, in academic depictions, Gandhi and his Hinduism are based in caste tradition (Gangal 1988;Pandey 1979) and reject 'modernist premises' (Queen 1996). This is evident in Goonatilake's (2005) reference to Gandhi as "backward looking" (143). Simon Charsley (1998) argues that the reason that Gandhi opposed Ambedkar was because the latter threatened the Hindu social order, evident in his opposition to the caste system.…”

Section: Conversion As a Thematic Sitementioning

confidence: 96%

“…Another challenge to the modernist reading of Ambedkar can be brought to bear by Susantha Goonatilake's (2005) critique of Meera Nanda. In this article, he argues that Ambedkar's ostensibly modernist leanings are not modern at all, but drawn from traditional sources.…”

Section: Against the Adequacy Of The Modernist Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second explanation that I would like to present is that of Susantha Goonatilake (2005). He asserts that there are two main readings of Ambedkar's motivation for conversion: the modernist appraisal and the Buddhist interpretation.…”

Section: Different Explanations For Accounts Of Ambedkar's Convementioning

confidence: 99%

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Conversion as a Thematic Site: Academic Representations of Ambedkar’s Buddhist Turn

Gannon

2011

Method Theory Study Religion

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Many scholars have written on the conversion of Bhimrao Ambedkar from Hinduism to Buddhism, trying to explain it. In this paper, I argue that a hermeneutics of conversion is needed to understand what this transition means in the larger academic community. Through using the concept of the 'thematic site', a narrative trope that draws on the Lacanian idea of the 'point de capiton' (also known as the 'nodal point' or 'quilting point'), to investigate how the invisible is evoked in the visible of these scholarly accounts of Ambedkar's Buddhism, this paper argues that academic accounts of this conversion rearticulate colonial dichotomies of modern/traditional, mapping them onto the binary of West/East. That is, by tracing common academic representations of Ambedkar's conversion, this paper posits that there is an obfuscated relation that is articulated in the depiction of this event, a connection that invisibly connects Ambedkar's act to colonial constructions of knowledge.

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Section: Conversion As a Thematic Sitementioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Against the Adequacy Of The Modernist Readingmentioning

confidence: 99%