Abstract
RAJAM AIYAR, scholar, poet, and philosopher, was born in 1872 at Batlagundai, a village in the Madura district. He entered the Christian College, Madras, in 1887, graduating in 1889, and attended the Law College for three years. He then devoted himself for a time to letters, but later turned to philosophy and religion. After a period of preparation he took up what can only be described as the role of an evangelist. He founded a monthly magazine, Prabuddha Bhdrata, which ran for two years with some success, but was brought to an end by his premature decease at the age of twenty-eight years. This brief sketch of his career is necessary for a just appreciation of this reprint of some of his work. In “Rambles in Vedanta ” we have a number of the articles, poems, aphorisms, essays, and tales which he contributed to the magazine, bothunderhis own nameand under various pseudonyms. He himself describes them as an exposition of the principles of the ideals of the Vedanta which he aimed at presenting in their purest and simplest form, removing the misconceptions and mysticism which had gathered round them. He had studied arduously the Upanishads, the Gita, and the work of Sankara to this end. But his interpretation was peculiar and individual; and his work shows that he had been strongly influenced by his reading in English literature, of which he had a real and keen but critical appreciation. If, therefore, his guidance in Hindu philosophy and religion can be accepted only with some reserve, the book is none the less valuable to Western readers as affording an insight into a personality which could perhaps have been produced nowhere but in the India of the end of the nineteenth century.
Rambles in Vedânta.
B. R. Rajam
Aiyar
By. Being a Collection of his Contributions to the Prabuddha Bhârata, 1896–98. Pp. xlvi + 888. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1925.) 12s. 6d. net.
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Rambles in Vedânta . Nature 117, 853 (1926). https://doi.org/10.1038/117853a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/117853a0