The basic phenomena are primordial religious experience and the experience of contemplation and understanding of an Other religion (Islam and Christianity). He created the basic foundations of Neo-Vedanta philosophy predominantly owing to the special phenomena of religious consciousness. The influences of the phenomena of religious consciousness on the thinking and philosophy of Modern India are described in the article, based on the Bengal Renaissance works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially those of the inaugurator Rammohun Roy.

The model includes (1) the interpretation of the phenomenon in a context of philosophy of history, (2) representation of the groundings and conception of the project created in social thought by Bengal ‘creative minority’ and (3) a brief description of the aspects of the Bengal Renaissance in religious, social, political and cultural spheres. Taking into account of the term’s origin in inner experience of Bengal intellectuals from Rammohun Roy to Rabindranath Tagore and the idea of renaissance as rebirth/regeneration of India and her society, the author offers epistemological model of symbolical description of the epoch. Florensky) of national-cultural renaissance in Bengal as important period in history of social thought, which is the process of selfdetermination by Bengal intellectual elites in context of society’s modernization. The term can be used as a ‘system of symbolical description’ (P. Based on philosophical approach, the author proposes to evaluate the methodological value of the term ‘the Bengal Renaissance’ for designation, the process both of awakening in culture and society and of transformations in minds and thought of Bengal educated elites, which had been interacted with Western civilization and culture.

Awakening by Subrata Dasgupta