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Samskara

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Submitted By danielbegypt
Words 1062
Pages 5
Daniel Blackman
Professor Curran
World Religion
28 April 2015

“Samskara” The novel Samskara was originally written by the author named Ananthamurty in 1965. It was then translated into English by a world known poet named A.K.Ramanujan in 1976. It is a novel based on a true society that lives in the north of India called Brahmins. Brahmins are part of the Hindu religion predominately living in the hills of India. This story tells a tail about the spiritual leader of the agrahara having to decide the rites of a fellow villager. Women play a huge role in this book but that is not customary in reality. Hinduism make up about 82% of the India population which is about 800 million people. It is one of the oldest religions in the world and the authors of the sacred text is still unknown. They follow the words of followers that have filtered the texts down the past 4000 years. One of the most famous followers of modern times would be Mahatma Gandhi. There is a documentary that has been written about Gandhi that is highly criticized by some in India saying that he was not as great of a man that most people make him out to be. One of the caste that is an area of study for this book is about the Brahmin caste. The best way to describe the caste system is that it is very much like the class system here in the United States. The Brahmins are the high class caste in India. In the Hinduism, there are different stages that need to be addressed in life. The first stage would be to become a student, the next stage is to start a family with a wife and children and then once your life’s work is done then detach from everything and live in solitude. This short novel will show that reality still gets in the way of the dedicate ways of brahminhood. Pranesh is the dedicated spiritual leader of the agrahara that is described in this story. Pranesh went off to Kashi for studies

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