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New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments by John Morrison
page 40 of 233 (17%)
are as ignorant of English as the great reformers are the reverse. We
may cite, in illustration:

1. Dyanand Saraswati, founder of the new sect of [=A]ryas in the United
Provinces and Punjab. Their chief doctrine, the infallibility of the
Vedas or earliest Hindu scriptures, is reactionary, although a number of
reforms are inculcated in the name of a return to the Vedas.

2. The late Ramkrishna Paramhansa, a famous Bengali ascetic of high
spiritual tone, but of the old type.

3. The gentleman already referred to, who as University lecturer on
Hindu Philosophy in Calcutta insisted that none but Hindus be admitted
to the exposition of the sacred texts, shutting out the Chancellor, the
Vice-Chancellor, and many Fellows of the University.

4. Sanscrit pundits, very conservative as a class, and generally
unfamiliar with English.

New Hinduism in contact with the modern educational influences was most
interestingly manifest in the person of Swami Vivekananda (_Reverend
Rational-bliss_ we may render his adopted name), representative of
Hinduism at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The
representative Hindu was not even a member of the priestly caste, as we
have already told. It were tedious to analyse his Hinduism, as set forth
at Chicago and elsewhere, into what was Christianity or modern thought,
and what, on the other hand, was Hinduism. Suffice it to say that as
Narendra Nath Dutt, B.A., he figures on the roll of graduates of the
Church of Scotland's College in Calcutta. While a student there, he sat
at the feet of two teachers representing the new and the old, the West
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