6 'Mystic Hinduism9 Vedanta and the Politics of Representation
'Mystic Hinduism' 119 Locating the 'essence' of the Hindu tradition in origins (arche), in this case the ancient Vedas, however, was also prevalent among the nineteenth- century Hindu reformers as a nationalist and anti-colonial stratagem. For 9 Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, for instance, the Samhitas were 6 'Mystic Hinduism the source of all legitimate manifestations of Hinduism and also provided evidence of the superiority of Hinduism over 'younger' religions such as Vedanta and the politics of Christianity. For Saraswati, Christianity was a poor imitation of the Hindu representation religion. Indeed, all knowledge, he believed, could be demonstrated to have originated in Mother India from time immemorial, including modern tech- nologies such as aircraft, long-forgotten and now claimed to be the sole invention of the colonizing Westerners. Equally, since William Jones had established an Indo-European link between Sanskrit and the classical languages of European culture, interest in comparative linguistics had devel- oped steadily among Orientalists and the search for a common They assert that the world is nothing but an illusion, a dream, a magic spell, Indo-European source most often turned its attentions eastwards. Saraswati and that the bodies, in order to be truly existent, have to cease existing in explicitly identified this 'Ur-language' with Vedic Sanskrit, now conceived as themselves, and to merge into nothingness, which due to its simplicity the 'mother of all languages'. This approach, of course, intersected well with amounts to the perfection of all beings. They claim that saintliness consists Romantic representations of India as the geographical point of origin of in willing nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing ..
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