Jagat

It is not altogether surprising that many of those in the West who have come into contact with the Krishna consciousness movement have undertaken research into Bhaktivinoda Thakur, in great part inspired by this autobiography. Most notably, Shukavak N. Das broke the ground in 1999 with his seminal work, A Hindu Encounter with Modernity . Shukavak noted the effect the discovery of this work had on him as a university student trying to reconcile the worlds of his spiritual path and the empirical ethos of scholarship. "… [my] book is about how Chaitanya Vaishnavism began to change under [Bhaktivinoda Thakur's] influence as a modern reformer. But even more importantly, it is about my struggle as a Western devotee to enter the world of Hindu devotionalism and at the same time maintain relevance in the modern West. Hindu Encounter with Modernity was the completion of my spiritual, intellectual, and emotional conversion, my normalization, into this world of Hindu devotion, and Sv...

I have been through this subject a couple of times on this blog. (1)  Narayan Maharaj's comments on Sva-likhita-jivani (2) Lalita Prasad Thakur and Bhaktivinoda's meat-eating . This version is a little shorter, since I have here been able to rely on the testimony of Shukavak Das and the photos from the MS. This file also includes some comments on the new translation and acknowledgements and appreciation at the end. Though it seems barely worth mentioning, there are unfortunately some who doubt the authenticity of the Jīvanī . These persons have put forth various speculations on why it may be a forgery or have been tampered with in some way. This seems to have arisen out of a misunderstanding of the genre and mentality of Bhaktivinoda Thakur in writing his autobiography. Perhaps these suspicions -- always coming from those who have little or no expertise in Bengali or Bengali history -- arise out of a fear that anything that disagrees with the image of the Thakur as ...