Raja Nal And The Goddess

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Raja Nal and the Goddess

Susan Snow Wadley
Raja Nal and the Goddess Book PDF

Author : Susan Snow Wadley
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2004-11-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0253111277

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Raja Nal and the Goddess by Susan Snow Wadley Pdf

"... [T]ells a wonderful story, one much loved in northern India.... fills an important lacuna in the work on oral epic." -- Lindsey Harlan Dhola is an oral epic performed primarily by lower-caste, usually illiterate, men in the Braj region of northern India. The story of Raja Nal, "a king who does not know he is a king," this vast epic portrays a world of complex social relationships involving changing and mistaken identities, goddesses, powerful women, magicians, and humans of many different castes. In this comprehensive study and first extended English translation based on multiple oral versions, Susan Snow Wadley argues that the story explores the nature of humanity while also challenging commonplace assumptions about Hinduism, gender, and caste. She examines the relationship between oral and written texts and the influence of individual performance styles alongside a lyrical translation of the work.

Nomadic Narratives

Tanuja Kothiyal
Nomadic Narratives Book PDF

Author : Tanuja Kothiyal
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2016-03-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781107080317

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Nomadic Narratives by Tanuja Kothiyal Pdf

"Discusses the emergence of socio-historical identities in the Thar Desert with the mobility of its inhabitants"--

Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines [2 volumes]

Patricia Monaghan
Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines 2 volumes Book PDF

Author : Patricia Monaghan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 725 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2009-12-18
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 9780313349904

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Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines [2 volumes] by Patricia Monaghan Pdf

This two-volume set provides a comprehensive guide to the vast array of feminine divine figures found throughout the world. Drawn from a variety of sources ranging from classical literature to early ethnographies to contemporary interpretations, the Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines provides a comprehensive introduction to the ways goddess figures have been viewed through the ages. This unique encyclopedia of over thousands of figures of feminine divinity describes the myths and attributes of goddesses and female spiritual powers from around the world. The two-volume set is organized by culture and religion, exploring the role of women in each culture's religious life and introducing readers to the background of each pantheon, as well as the individual figures who peopled it. Alternative names for important divinities are offered, as are lists of minor goddesses and their attributes. Interest in women's spirituality has grown significantly over the last 30 years, both among those who remain in traditional religions and those who explore spirituality outside those confines. This work speaks to them all.

The Goddesses' Henchmen

Lindsey Harlan
The Goddesses Henchmen Book PDF

Author : Lindsey Harlan
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2003-06-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780195348347

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The Goddesses' Henchmen by Lindsey Harlan Pdf

The Rajputs ruled the vast majority of the kingdoms that were joined together after Indian independence to form the state of Rajasthan, "Land of Kings." An important part of Rajput religion is the worship of "heroes" who have died in battle. This practice has attained new significance in recent years, as right-wing Hindu activists have deployed narratives about heroism in Rajput wars with Muslim emperors. In this book, Lindsey Harlan explores the idea of the Rajput hero. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in stories about heroes and in their worship. She looks at the differences between female and male storytellers, the relationships of the hero to the women in his tale, and the relationship of the hero to the goddess for whom he is both sacrifice and henchman. She obtains her materials from interviews with Rajput families and their servants, from songfests, from bystanders at shrines, from ritual specialists. Ultimately she shows how heroic traditions encapsulate and express ideals of perfection and masculinity, defined most visibly against the backdrop of domesticity and femininity. More broadly she argues that heroes reflect ever-changing valuations of history, and serve as sources of inspiration for facing contemporary challenges (domestic, communal, national) and concerns about the future.

Feminine Journeys of the Mahabharata

Lavanya Vemsani
Feminine Journeys of the Mahabharata Book PDF

Author : Lavanya Vemsani
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2021-05-21
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783030731656

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Feminine Journeys of the Mahabharata by Lavanya Vemsani Pdf

The Mahabharata preserves powerful journeys of women recognized as the feminine divine and the feminine heroic in the larger culture of India. Each journey upholds the unique aspects of women's life. This book analytically examines the narratives of eleven women from the Mahabharata in the historical context as well as in association with religious and cultural practices. Lavanya Vemsani brings together history, myth, religion, and practice to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the history of Hindu women, as well as their significance within religious Indian culture. Additionally, Vemsani provides important perspective for understanding the enduring legacy of these women in popular culture and modern society.

Is the Goddess a Feminist?

Alf Hiltebeitel,Kathleen M. Erndl
Is the Goddess a Feminist Book PDF

Author : Alf Hiltebeitel,Kathleen M. Erndl
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2000-11
Category : Religion
ISBN : 081473619X

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Is the Goddess a Feminist? by Alf Hiltebeitel,Kathleen M. Erndl Pdf

American and Indian scholars of religion, anthropology, women's studies, and psychology look at the complex relationship between the living worship of female divinities and women in India. In keeping with the multiplicity, especially of Hinduism but also Buddhism and Jainism, the anthology presents a number of sometimes conflicting views rather than a consistent account. Only authors are indexed. c. Book News Inc.

Storytime in India

Helen Priscilla Myers,Umesh Chandra Pandey
Storytime in India Book PDF

Author : Helen Priscilla Myers,Umesh Chandra Pandey
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2019-06-14
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780253041647

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Storytime in India by Helen Priscilla Myers,Umesh Chandra Pandey Pdf

An American ethnomusicologist and her Indian collaborator recount their experiences researching Bhojpuri wedding songs in India. Stories are the backbone of ethnographic research. During fieldwork, subjects describe their lives through stories. Afterward ethnographers come home from their journeys with stories of their own about their experiences in the field. Storytime in India is an exploration of the stories that come out of ethnographic fieldwork. Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey examine the ways in which their research collecting Bhojpuri wedding songs became interwoven with the stories of their lives, their work together, and their shared experience reading The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. Moving through these intertwined stories, the reader learns about the complete Bhojpuri wedding tradition through songs sung by Gangajali and access to the original song recordings and their translations. In the interludes, Pandey reads and interprets The Eustace Diamonds, confronting the reader with the ever-present influence of colonialism, both in India and in ethnographic fieldwork. Interwoven throughout are stories of the everyday, highlighting the ups and downs of the ethnographic experience. Storytime in India combines the style of the Victorian novel with the structure of traditional Indian village tales, in which stories are told within stories. This book questions how we can and should present ethnography as well as what we really learn in the field. As Myers and Pandey ultimately conclude, writers of scholarly books are storytellers themselves and scholarly books are a form of art, just like the traditions they study.

Climate Change and the Art of Devotion

Sugata Ray
Climate Change and the Art of Devotion Book PDF

Author : Sugata Ray
Publisher : University of Washington Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2019-07-31
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780295745381

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Climate Change and the Art of Devotion by Sugata Ray Pdf

In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion, Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the environment and current assumptions about nature and culture. A groundbreaking contribution to the emerging field of eco–art history, the book examines architecture, paintings, photography, and prints created in Braj alongside theological treatises and devotional poetry to foreground seepages between the natural ecosystem and cultural production. The paintings of deified rivers, temples that emulate fragrant groves, and talismanic bleeding rocks that Ray discusses will captivate readers interested in environmental humanities and South Asian art history. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/climate-change-and-the-art-of-devotion

Poetics of Conduct

Leela Prasad
Poetics of Conduct Book PDF

Author : Leela Prasad
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780231139212

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Poetics of Conduct by Leela Prasad Pdf

Leela Prasad's riveting book presents everyday stories on subjects such as deities, ascetics, cats, and cooking along with stylized, publicly delivered ethical discourse, and shows that the study of oral narrative and performance is essential to ethical inquiry. Prasad builds on more than a decade of her ethnographic research in the famous Hindu pilgrimage town of Sringeri, Karnataka, in southwestern India, where for centuries a vibrant local culture has flourished alongside a tradition of monastic authority. Oral narratives and the seeing-and-doing orientations that are part of everyday life compel the question: How do individuals imagine the normative, and negotiate and express it, when normative sources are many and diverging? Moral persuasiveness, Prasad suggests, is intimately tied to the aesthetics of narration, and imagination plays a vital role in shaping how people create, refute, or relate to "text," "moral authority," and "community." Lived understandings of ethics keep notions of text and practice in flux and raise questions about the constitution of "theory" itself. Prasad's innovative use of ethnography, poetics, philosophy of language, and narrative and performance studies demonstrates how the moral self, with a capacity for artistic expression, is dynamic and gendered, with a historical presence and a political agency.

Dancing with Devtas: Drums, Power and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India

Andrew Alter
Dancing with Devtas Drums Power and Possession in the Music of Garhwal North India Book PDF

Author : Andrew Alter
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 342 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2016-12-05
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781351946391

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Dancing with Devtas: Drums, Power and Possession in the Music of Garhwal, North India by Andrew Alter Pdf

In the Central Himalayan region of Garhwal, the gods (devtas) enjoy dancing. Musicians - whether ritual specialists or musical specialists - are therefore an indispensable part of most entertainment and religious events. In shamanistic ceremonies, their incantations, songs and drumming 'make' the gods possess their mediums. In other contexts, such as dramatic theatrical renditions of stories of specific deities, actors 'dance' the role of their character having become possessed by the spirit of their character. Through the powerful sounds of their drumming, musicians cause the gods to dance. Music, and more particularly musical sound, is perceived in Garhwal as a powerful force. Andrew Alter examines music and musical practice in Garhwal from an analytical perspective that explores the nexus between musical sounds and performance events. He provides insight into performance practice, vocal techniques, notions of repertoire classification, instruments, ensembles, performance venues, and dance practice. However, music is not viewed simply as a system of organized sounds such as drum strokes, pitch iterations or repertoire items. Rather, in Garhwal, the music is viewed as a system of knowledge and as a system of beliefs in which meaning and spirituality become articulated through potent sound iterations. Alter makes a significant contribution to the discipline of ethnomusicology through a detailed documentation of musical practice in the context of ritual events. The book offers a traditionally thorough historical-ethnographic study of a region with the aim of integrating the local field-based case studies of musical practices within the broader Garhwali context. The work contains invaluable oral data, which has been carefully transliterated as well as translated. Alter blends a carefully detailed analysis of drumming in conjunction with the complex ritual and social contexts of this sophisticated and semantically rich musical practice.

Studying Hinduism

Sushil Mittal,Gene Thursby
Studying Hinduism Book PDF

Author : Sushil Mittal,Gene Thursby
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 425 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2009-01-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781134418299

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Studying Hinduism by Sushil Mittal,Gene Thursby Pdf

This book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers wishing to develop a deeper understanding of one of the world's oldest and most multifaceted religious traditions. Sushil Mittal and Gene Thursby, leading scholars in the field, have brought together a rich variety of perspectives which reflect the current lively state of the field. Studying Hinduism is the result of cooperative work by accomplished specialists in several fields that include anthropology, art, comparative literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and sociology. Through these complementary and exciting approaches, students will gain a greater understanding of India's culture and traditions, to which Hinduism is integral. The book uses key critical terms and topics as points of entry into the subject, revealing that although Hinduism can be interpreted in sharply contrasting ways and set in widely varying contexts, it is endlessly fascinating and intriguing.

The Broken Spell

Pasha M. Khan
The Broken Spell Book PDF

Author : Pasha M. Khan
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
Page : 325 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2019-06-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780814346006

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The Broken Spell by Pasha M. Khan Pdf

The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu is a monograph on the rise and fall in popularity of "romances" (qissah)—tales of wonder and magic told by storytellers at princely courts and in public spaces in India from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Using literary genre theory, author Pasha M. Khan points to the worldviews underlying the popularity of Urdu and Persian romances, before pre-existing Islamicate rationalist traditions gained traction and Western colonialism came to prominence in India. In the introduction, Khan explains that it was around the end of the nineteenth century that these marvelous tales became devalued by Orientalists and intellectually colonized Indian elites, while at the same time a new genre, the novel, gained legitimacy. Khan goes on to narrate the life histories of professional storytellers, many of them émigrés from Iran to Mughal-ruled India, and considers how they raised their own worth and that of the romance in the face of changes in the economics, culture, and patronage of India. Khan shows the methods whereby such storytellers performed and how they promoted themselves and their art. The dividing line between marvelous tales and history is examined, showing how and why the boundary was porous. The study historicizes the Western understanding of the qissah as a local manifestation of a worldwide romance genre, showing that this genre equation had profound ideological effects. The book’s appendix contains a translation of an important text for understanding Iranian and Indian storytelling methods: the unpublished introductory portions to Fakhr al-Zamani’s manual for storytellers. The Broken Spell will appeal to scholars of folklore and fairy-tale studies, comparative literature, South Asian studies, and any reader with an interest in India and Pakistan.

Tellings and Texts

Francesca Orsini,Katherine Butler Schofield
Tellings and Texts Book PDF

Author : Francesca Orsini,Katherine Butler Schofield
Publisher : Open Book Publishers
Page : 566 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2015-10-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781783741021

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Tellings and Texts by Francesca Orsini,Katherine Butler Schofield Pdf

Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling. The book also contains links to audio files of some of the works discussed in the text. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.

Engaging South Asian Religions

Mathew N. Schmalz,Peter Gottschalk
Engaging South Asian Religions Book PDF

Author : Mathew N. Schmalz,Peter Gottschalk
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2012-01-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781438433257

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Engaging South Asian Religions by Mathew N. Schmalz,Peter Gottschalk Pdf

Focusing on boundaries, appropriations, and resistances involved in Western engagements with South Asian religions, this edited volume considers both the pre- and postcolonial period in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It pays particular attention to contemporary controversies surrounding the study of South Asian religions, including several scholars' reflection on the contentious reaction to their own work. Other chapters consider such issues as British colonial epistemologies, the relevance of Hegel for the study of South Asia, the canonization of Francis Xavier, feminist interpretations of the mother of the Buddha, and theological dispute among Muslims in Bangladesh and Pakistan. By using the themes of boundaries, appropriations and resistances, this work offers insight into the dynamics and diversity of Western approaches to South Asian religions, and the indigenous responses to them, that avoids simple active/passive binaries.

Bodies of Song

Linda Hess
Bodies of Song Book PDF

Author : Linda Hess
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2015-07-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190273170

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Bodies of Song by Linda Hess Pdf

Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.