S. N. Balagangadhara

Quick Facts

Full Name	S. N. Balagangadhara
Occupation	Philosopher
Date Of Birth	Jan 3, 1952(1952-01-03)
Age	72
Birthplace	Bangalore
Country	India
Birth City	Bangalore
Horoscope	Aquarius

S. N. Balagangadhara Biography

S. N. Balagangadhara is one of the most popular and richest Philosopher who was born on January 3, 1952 in Bangalore, Bangalore, India. Balagangadhara was a student of National College, Bangalore and moved to Belgium in 1977 to study philosophy at Ghent University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Etienne Vermeersch. His doctoral thesis (1991) was entitled Comparative Science of Cultures and the Universality of Religion: An Essay on Worlds without Views and Views without the World.

Balagangadhara proposes therefore a novel analysis of religion, the Roman ‘religio’, the construction of ‘religions’ in India, and the nature of cultural differences. His second major work, Reconceptualizing India Studies, appeared in 2012 and argues that post-colonial studies and modern India studies are in need of a rejuvenation. After Said’s Orientalism (1978), post- colonialism, as a discipline, has not contributed much to human knowledge. A strange form of unproductive self-reflection and impenetrable jargon has come to stand for and replace theory building and knowledge production. The book attempts to chalk out a potential direction for the social-scientific study of Indian culture. Stressing the need for an alternative understanding of Western culture, Balagangadhara argues that Hinduism, caste system, and secularism are not colonial constructs but entities within the Western cultural experience. He argues that the so-called facts about India and her traditions are a result of colonial consciousness.

In 2014, Manohar publishers brought out a condensed and shortened version of The Heathen in his Blindness… (1994), entitled Do all Roads Lead to Jerusalem? The Making of Indian Religions (2014).

In the name of science and ethnology, the Biblical themes have become our regular stock-in-trade: that God gave religion to humankind has become a cultural universal in the guise that all cultures have a religion; the theme that God gave one religion to humanity has taken the form and belief that all religions have something in common; that God revealed himself to humankind is sanctified in the claim that in all cultures and at all times there is a subjective experience of religion which is fundamentally the same; the idea that God implanted a sense of divinity in Man is now a secular truth in the form of an anthropological, specifically human ability to have a religious experience … And so the list goes on, and on, and on. Theme after theme from the pages of the Bible has become the ‘but of course!’ of intellectuals—whether Jew, Muslim, Dinka, or Brahmin (1994: 226–27).

He was the co-chair of the Hinduism Unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) from 2004 to 2007.

S. N. Balagangadhara Net Worth

S. N. Balagangadhara is one of the richest Philosopher from India. According to our analysis, Wikipedia, Forbes & Business Insider, S. N. Balagangadhara 's net worth $5 Million. (Last Update: December 11, 2023)

From the 1980s onwards, S. N. Balagangadhara has developed the research programme Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap (Comparative Science of Cultures) to study cultural differences. On the one hand, he analyses western culture and intellectual thought through its representations of other cultures, with a particular focus on the western representations of India. On the other, Balagangadhara attempts to translate the knowledge embodied by the Indian traditions into the conceptual language of the twenty-first century.

In his first work, The Heathen in his Blindness… (1994), Balagangadhara focused on religion, culture, and cultural difference. He is mainly known for the controversial claim that religion is not a cultural universal. According to the author, Christianity had a profound influence on western culture. Balagangadhara argued that the analytical tools with which the West has understood other cultures like India, are therefore, intrinsically shaped by Semitic and Christian theology. The Semitic doctrine that God gave religion to humankind, Balagangadhara argued, lies at the heart of the ethnographic belief in the universality of religion:

On 1 October 2013, University of Pardubice (Czech Republic) awarded him with its honorary doctorate, “doctor honoris causa”, and the gold medal for: (a) the outstanding development of the comparative science of cultures and religions, (b) the development of the collaborations between European and Indian universities, and (c) his contribution to the development of the Studies of religions at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at the University of Pardubice.

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Facts & Trivia

S. Ranked on the list of most popular Philosopher. Also ranked in the elit list of famous people born in India. S. N. Balagangadhara celebrates birthday on January 3 of every year.