Role of Religion in Environmental Sustainability: An Indian Perspective

Environmental trepidations are global issues, environment sustainability is conceivable with the noble motive, which takes real shapes with the insights and perspectives from different religions. In the process of learning and teaching laid down by religion help to expand our understanding and develop our behavior towards nature. Role of religion to shape our attitudes to the natural world is significant, because its domination in human personality is always recognizable. The paper would like to find out different prospect to achieve environment sustainability with the help of imperatives given by Indian religion. This imparts many valuable imperatives which unify nature as an inseparable part of human life and vice versa. Three major religions originating from India were explored in this paper: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The paper tries to show the human affiliation with nature is well expressed in every aspect of Indian religious life.

Representation of Indian Religion in the Short Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

India, with its plethora of religions and cultures, has been an enigmatic place for foreigners. Hinduism, a way of life more than being a religion (as proclaimed by the Supreme Court of India), has often been misunderstood by outsiders. Sometimes a biased attitude is reflected in the literature produced by these foreigners. A person like Thomas Babington Macaulay, who himself admitted that he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, had the foolish courage of saying that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. In this paper we shall analyze the representation of religion in the short stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

Reflection of Indian Culture in Shashi Deshpande’s A Matter of Time

Shashi Deshpande is a well-known name in the field of Indian literature and is a contemporary writer from Karnataka. She portrays in her novel "A Matter of Time" the truth of Indian society in Indian families. The importance of culture for Indian women is also discussed. Her novels are distinguished for their genuine depictions of the Indians and their history. She used Indian names and the role of Indian Middle Class Women in her novel A Matter of Time through the character Sumi. She talks about Indian Women, Indian Culture, Indian Religion, Indian Family, Religions and Beliefs, Family Traditions, and Emotions, among other topics. A Matter of Time is a multi-generational novel that moves around the plight and predicament of Indian women whose lives are deeply rooted in Indian beliefs, superstitions, conventions and traditions. Women have been living and breathing silently for thousands of years under the umbrella of patriarchy and with their "gazing." With the foundation of patriarchy, the disparity between man and woman, in its unwritten form, has developed through language, customs, rituals, myths and practises. Myths, rituals, and customs contribute to the evolution and establishment of human society. They are naturally developed, but are indeed societal buildings and help in developing patriarchal ideologies. They are believed to be natural. They are, therefore, essential to women's subjugation in our society.

Antiquissima Christianità: Indian Religion or Idolatry?

The Jesuit mission among the “ancient Christians” on the Malabar coast in today’s Kerala was one of the watershed moments—as I argued a decade ago—in their global expansion in Asia in the sixteenth century, and a prelude to the method of accommodation as it had been theorized and practiced in Asia. In this article I want to emphasize the invocation of comparisons with and the use of Mediterranean antiquity in crafting the identities, memory, and history of Indian Christianity. Jesuit ethnographic descriptions concerning the liturgy, rites, and customs of māppila nasrānikkal, also known as St. Thomas Christians, triggered a series of debates involving various missionaries, Catholic Church authorities in Goa and Rome, as well as Syrian bishops and St. Thomas Christian priestly families. Caught up in the contrary efforts at unifying and homogenizing Christianity under two distinct helms of the Portuguese king and the Roman pope, the missionaries generated different intellectual tools and distinctions, all of which contributed to further jurisdictional struggles. The St. Thomas Christian community became a model of “antique” Christianity for some and a heretical or even idolatrous sect for others. It became a mirror for the divided Christianity in Europe and beyond. In India, it was precisely the vocabulary and the historicizing reasoning that was invested in analyzing and defining these Indian homegrown Christians that would be subsequently applied by comparison, analogy, or contrast to formalize and reify other Indian “religions.” The dating and the autonomous or derivative status of Indian (“pagan”) antiquities emerged, a century later, as a major orientalist problem.