Jan Filipský. "Notes on Tagore’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1926." Rabindranath Tagore. The Poet’s Religion and World Vision. Kolkata: Winternitz Society for Literature and Culture, 2011, 118-123.
PhDr. Jan Filipský, CSc.
AREAS OF INTEREST
Political and cultural history of India and Sri Lanka, ethnicity, religion and communalism and their relation to political processes in South Asia. Literary sources in Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil and Sinhala. Problems of national identity, ethnicity, civil society, nationalism with special regard to India and Sri Lanka. Fundamentalism, revivalism, violence, confessional politics, secularism and centrist ideology in South Asia. Colonial history of India, role of merchant capital in the colonization of South Asia, conquest of the Carnatic by the English East India Company and its reflection in the oral traditions of the Tamils.
Hindu Myths, Indian Folklore.
EDUCATION
- 1960–65 Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague (English, Indian Studies)
- 1966–69 post-graduate course in South Asian Studies at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Prague
- 1980 awarded title of Candidate of Historical Sciences (CSc.), in 1996 the title recognized as PhD. under the British system
- 1983 awarded Doctorate of Philosophy (PhDr.)
ACADEMIC CAREER
- 1969–93 research fellow of the Oriental Institute of the CAS specializing in Indian Political and Cultural History
- 1994–97 Assistant Professor of English Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Education, Charles University, Prague
- 1996 – to date Research Associate, South Asian Dept., Oriental Institute, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague
- 2000 (September through December) – Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada
OTHER ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES
In connection with his research made numerous study tours of India (in 1967–68, 1970, 1974, 1980–81, 1984–85, 1990, 1997 and 2000), collected Tamil ballads and consulted archival sources in New Delhi, Madras (Chennai), Colombo, as well as in The Hague, Oxford and London-