Download Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals, and India PDF EPUB
Author: Author
Pages: 416
Size: 882,48 Kb
Publication Date: April 1,1999
Category: India & South Asia
Verrier Elwin (1902-1964) was unquestionably the most colorful and influential nonofficial Englishman to live and function in twentieth-hundred years India.
Described by his contemporaries as a cross between Albert Schweitzer and Paul Gauguin, Elwin was a guy of contradictions, sometimes taking on the function of evangelist, social employee, political activist, poet, govt worker, and even more. He rubbed elbows with the elite of both Britain and India, however found himself equally in the home among the impoverished and destitute. Intensely political, the Oxford-educated scholar tirelessly defended the privileges of the indigenous and, regardless of the deep spiritual influences of St. Francis and Mahatma Gandhi on his early profession, staunchly opposed Hindu and Christian puritans in the debate over the continuing future of India’s tribals. Although he was ordained as an Anglican priest, Elwin was wedded twice to tribal ladies and enthusiastically (and publicly) extolled the tribals’ practice of free of charge sex.
Savaging the Civilized is certainly both biography and background, an exploration through Elwin’s life of a few of the great debates of the twentieth hundred years: the continuing future of advancement, cultural assimilation versus cultural difference, the political practice of postcolonial instead of colonial governments, and the moral practice of authors and intellectuals. Afterwards, as primary minister Nehru’s friend and advisor in independent India, his compelling protection of tribal hedonism produced him simultaneously hugely influential, incredibly controversial, and the polemical center point of heated discussions on tribal plan and economic advancement. A prolific article writer, Elwin’s ethnographic research and popular functions on India’s tribal customs, artwork, myth and folklore continue steadily to generate controversy.