Brian Hatcher (Illinois Wesleyan University)

submitted: Wed, 5 Oct 1994 14:41:10 -0600 (CDT)

Brian A. Hatcher
Assistant Professor of Religion and Humanities
Department of Religion
Illinois Wesleyan University
Bloomington, IL  61702-2900   USA

phone:  309-556-3160
Fax:    309-556-3411
Email:  bhatcher@titan.iwu.edu

Description of work:
     
My research interests are in the history of religious change and cultural
encounter in modern India, especially Bengal.  I am particularly
interested in exploring the vernacular aspects of what is commonly called
the Bengal Renaissance.  My dissertation, which will be published by
Oxford under the title, Idioms of Improvement:  Vidyasagar and Cultural
Encounter in Bengal, explores educational paradigms in 19th century
Bengal, the convergence of bourgeois morality and Sanskrit nitisastra in
Bengali school book literature, and the rationalist/modernist discourse of
Brahmo religious reform in the 1840s and 1850s.  Current projects include
a study of the dynamics of eclecticism in modern Hindu discourse (relating
its manifestation in figures like Vivekananda, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, etc.
both to classical Hindu hermeneutics and to the colonial context of
apologetics and polemic) and research into the social role and cultural
activities of Sanskrit pandits in 19th century Bengal.  For the latter
work I have translated autobiographical pieces by two Bengali pandits and
have compiled bibliographic information on a score of others.  I work with
both Sanskrit and Bengali, and among the other translations I have made
from the latter are Vidyasagar's Bengali Sakuntala and some 20th century
short stories by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay.  Other interests, by relevant
keyword include:  Hinduism, neo-Hinduism, humanistic Hinduism, politicized
Hinduism, Rabindranath Tagore, Rammohan Roy, Hindu-Christian encounter,
missionary activity and translation projects, Calcutta.