Regional Communities Of Devotion In South Asia

Author : Gil Ben-Herut,Jon Keune,Anne E. Monius
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 386 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2019-07-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781351023368

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Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia by Gil Ben-Herut,Jon Keune,Anne E. Monius Pdf

This book explores the key motif of the religious other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent unmasks processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The book reconsiders and challenges inherited notions of the bhakta’s or devotee’s other. Considering the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact—as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic—the book critically engages with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and traces when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asia’s devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religions and Asian Religions.

Author : Knut A. Jacobsen
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 471 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2020-11-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780429622069

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Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions by Knut A. Jacobsen Pdf

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora. Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines. Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.

Author : Smriti Srinivas,Neelima Jeychandran,Allen Roberts
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2022-10-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000604061

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Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint by Smriti Srinivas,Neelima Jeychandran,Allen Roberts Pdf

Devotional Spaces of a Global Saint focuses on the presence and contemporaneity of Shirdi Sai Baba (d.1918), who has a vast following in postcolonial South Asia and an ever-growing global diaspora. Essays consider the saint’s influence on everyday life and how visual, narrative, textual, sensorial, performative, political, social, and spatial practices interpenetrate to produce multiple terrains of devotion. Contributions by twelve scholars of several academic disciplines explore eruptions and circulations of sacred materials, spatialities of devotional practices, visual and digital imaginaries, transcultural narrativizations, and material affects and effects of Sai Baba. The presentation transcends routine scholarly discussions about sainthood, cultures of worship, religious objects, Hinduism and Islam. Shirdi Sai Baba’s presence conveys inspiration and healing energies and he accepted the entreaties of people of all castes and creeds, offering an alternative to communal ideologies of his time – and the present. Considerations of Shirdi Sai Baba’s milieux of devotional praxis situate and localize debates about the meaning of nation and religion, past and present, urbanization, and class identity in transitions from colonial to postcolonial/global South Asia. The book expands the boundaries of the study of Shirdi Sai Baba and makes important contributions to South Asia Studies, Anthropology, Religious Studies, Global Studies, Urban Studies, Indian Ocean Studies, Inter-Asian Studies, Visual and Media Studies, and Cultural Geography.

Author : István Keul
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2021-02-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000331493

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Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia by István Keul Pdf

This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi. Contributors from different disciplines discuss a large variety of urban spaces: physical and imagined, institutional and residential, built and landscaped, virtual and mediatised, historical and contemporary. In doing so, the book addresses a wide range of issues concerning the role of religion in the dynamic interplay of factors which characterise complex urban social spaces. Chapters incorporate varying degrees and forms of the religious/spiritual, ranging from invisible and incorporeal to material and explicit, embedded in and expressed as spatial politics, works of fiction, mission, pilgrimage, festivals and everyday life. Topics examined include conflictual situations involving places of worship in Delhi, inclusive religious practices in Kanpur, American Protestant mission in Madurai, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in Lahore, gardens as imaginative spaces, the politics of religion in Varanasi and many others. Illustrating and analysing ways and forms in which religion persists in South Asian urban contexts, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, the study of religions, urban studies and South Asian studies.

Author : Pushkar Sohoni,Torsten Tschacher
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 122 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2021-09-27
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000456981

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Non-Shia Practices of Muḥarram in South Asia and the Diaspora by Pushkar Sohoni,Torsten Tschacher Pdf

This book analyses engagements with non-Shia practices of Muḥarram celebrations in the past and present, in South Asia and within a larger diaspora. Breaking new ground by bringing together a variety of regional perspectives (the Deccan, the Punjab, Singapore, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago) and linguistic backgrounds (Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu), the chapters discuss the importance of Muḥarram celebrations in terms of their respective actors. While in some cases these include an interrelationship with Shia Muslims and their traditions of mourning during Muḥarram, other contributions address contexts in which Shias, and even Muslims, form only a minor component of the celebrations, or even none at all. Focusing on Muḥarram celebrations that are beyond the script provided by Shia Muḥarram practices, this book opens up new perspectives on Muḥarram as a social practice widely shared by South Asians across regions. The book will be a key resource to scholars and students of South Asian studies, Asian religion, in particular rituals and religious practices, and Islamic studies but also engaging to non-academic readers interested in the practices of several regions.

Author : Christoph Bergmann,Jürgen Schaflechner
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2019-08-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351679503

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Ritual Journeys in South Asia by Christoph Bergmann,Jürgen Schaflechner Pdf

This book focuses on the ritualized forms of mobility that constitute phenomena of pilgrimage in South Asia and establishes a new analytical framework for the study of ritual journeys. The book advances the conceptual scope of ‘classical’ Pilgrimage Studies and provides empirical depth through individual case studies. A key concern is the strategies of ritualization through which actors create, assemble and (re-)articulate certain modes of displacement to differentiate themselves from everyday forms of locomotion. Ritual journeys are understood as being both productive of and produced by South Asia’s socio-economically uneven, politically charged and culturally variegated landscapes. From various disciplinary angles, each chapter explores how spaces and movements in space are continually created, contested and transformed through ritual journeys. By focusing on this co-production of space and mobility, the book delivers a conceptually driven and empirically grounded engagement with the diverse and changing traditions of ritual journeying in South Asia. Interdisciplinary in its approach, the book is a must-have reference work for academics interested in South Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology and Human Geography with a focus on pilgrimage and the socio-spatial ideas and practices of ritualized movements in South Asia.

Author : Jon Keune
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780197574836

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Shared Devotion, Shared Food by Jon Keune Pdf

"This book is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society"--

Author : Jacqueline H. Fewkes,Megan Adamson Sijapati
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 140 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2020-12-20
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780429560064

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Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalayas by Jacqueline H. Fewkes,Megan Adamson Sijapati Pdf

This book chronicles individual perspectives and specific iterations of Muslim community, practice, and experience in the Himalayan region to bring into scholarly conversation the presence of varying Muslim cultures in the Himalaya. The Himalaya provide a site of both geographic and cultural crossroads, where Muslim community is simultaneously constituted at multiple social levels, and to that end the essays in this book document a wide range of local, national, and global interests while maintaining a focus on individual perspectives, moments in time, and localized experiences. It presents research that contributes to a broadly conceived notion of the Himalaya that enriches readers’ understandings of both the region and concepts of Muslim community and highlights the interconnections between multiple experiences of Muslim community at local levels. Drawing attention to the cultural, social, artistic, and political diversity of the Himalaya beyond the better understood and frequently documented religio-cultural expressions of the region, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Anthropology, Geography, History, Religious Atudies, Asian Studies, and Islamic Studies.

Author : Prof.Dr.PEDARAPU CHENNA REDDY
Publisher : Blue Rose Publishers
Page : 464 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2022-02-24
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN : 9789356114463

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Nagabharana: Recent Trends in Jainism Studies by Prof.Dr.PEDARAPU CHENNA REDDY Pdf

Author : Supriya Chaudhuri
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2021-08-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000429015

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Religion and the City in India by Supriya Chaudhuri Pdf

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

Author : Mark P. Whitaker,Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake,Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2021-09-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781000455373

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Multi-religiosity in Contemporary Sri Lanka by Mark P. Whitaker,Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake,Pathmanesan Sanmugeswaran Pdf

This book presents a collection of original research about every day, innovative, interactive, and multiple religiosities among Sri Lankan Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and devotees of New Religious Movements in post-war Sri Lanka. The contributors examine the unique and innovative religiosity that can be observed in Sri Lanka, which reveals a complex reality of mingled, and even simultaneous, cooperation and conflict. The book shows that innovative religious practices and institutions have achieved a new prominence in public life since the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. Using the analytic framework of ‘innovative religiosity’ to allow researchers to look at this question between and across Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape in order to escape both the epistemological and ethnographic isolation of studies that limit themselves to one form of religious practice, the chapters also investigate the extent to which inter-religious tolerance is still possible in the wake of Sri Lanka’s religion-involving civil war, and the continuing influence of populist Buddhist nationalism, globalization and geopolitics on Sri Lanka’s post-war governance. The book offers a novel approach to the study of post-conflict societies and furthers the understanding of the status of tolerance between religious practitioners in contexts where both ethnic conflict and multi-religious sites are prominent. This book is an important resource for researchers studying Anthropology, Asian Religion, Religion in Context and South Asian Studies.

Author : Srilata Raman
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 344 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2022-04-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317744733

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The Transformation of Tamil Religion by Srilata Raman Pdf

This book analyses the religious ideology of a Tamil reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal of the 19th century and his posthumous reception in the Tamil country and sheds light on the transformation of Tamil religion that both his works and the understanding of him brought about. The book traces the hagiographical and biographical process by which Ramalinga Swamigal is shifted from being considered an exemplary poet-saint of the Tamil Śaivite bhakti tradition to a Dravidian nationalist social reformer. Taking as a starting point Ramalinga’s own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a border zone between early modernity and modernity, between Hinduism and Christianity, between colonialism and regional nationalism, highlighting the influence of his teachings on politics, particularly within Dravidian cultural and political nationalism. Simultaneously, the book considers the implication of such an hagiographical process for the transformation of Tamil religion in the period between the 19th –mid-20th centuries. The author demonstrates that Ramalinga Swamigal’s ideology of compassion, cīvakāruṇyam, had not only a long genealogy in pre-modern Tamil Śaivism but also that it functioned as a potentially emancipatory ethics of salvation and caste critique not just for him but also for other Tamil and Dalit intellectuals of the 19th century. This book is a path-breaking study that also traces the common grounds between the religious visions of two of the most prominent subaltern figures of Tamil modernity – Iyothee Thass and Ramalingar. It argues that these transformations are one meaningful way for a religious tradition to cope with and come to terms with the implications of historicization and the demands of colonial modernity. It is, therefore, a valuable contribution to the field of religion, South Asian history and literature and Subaltern studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315794518 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Author : Gil Ben-Herut
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2018-07-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190878856

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Siva's Saints by Gil Ben-Herut Pdf

Comprising more than twelve million people and renowned for their resistance to Brahminical values, the Virasaivas are a vibrant and unorthodox religious community with a provocative socio-political voice. The Virasaiva tradition has produced a vast and original body of literature, composed mostly in Kannada, a Dravidian language from south India. Siva's Saints introduces a previously unexplored and central primary work produced in the early thirteenth century, the Ragalegalu. This was the first narrative text written about the incipient devotional tradition dedicated to the god Siva in the Kannada-speaking regions; through stories of the saints, it images the life of this new religious community. The Ragalegalu inaugurated a new era in the production of devotional narratives accessible to wide audiences. Gil Ben-Herut challenges common notions about this tradition in its nascent phases. By closely reading the saints' stories in this text, Siva's Saints takes a more nuanced historical view than commonly-held notions about the egalitarian and iconoclastic nature of the early tradition, arguing instead that early bhakti (devotionalism) in the Kannada-speaking region was less-radical and more accommodating toward traditional religious, social, and political institutions than thought of today. In contrast to the narrowly sectarian and exclusionary vision that shapes later accounts, the Ragalegalu is characterized by an opposite impulse of offering an open invitation to people from all walks of life, and their stories illustrate the richness of their devotional lives. Analysis of this seminal text yields important insights into the role of literary representation of the social and political development of a religious community in a pre-modern and non-Western milieu.

Author : Diana Dimitrova
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 109 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2020-12-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781000257953

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Rethinking the Body in South Asian Traditions by Diana Dimitrova Pdf

This book analyses cultural questions related to representations of the body in South Asian traditions, human perceptions and attitudes toward the body in religious and cultural contexts, as well as the processes of interpreting notions of the body in religious and literary texts. Utilising an interdisciplinary perspective by means of textual study and ideological analysis, anthropological analysis, and phenomenological analysis, the book explores both insider- and outsider perspectives and issues related to the body from the 2nd century CE up to the present-day. Chapters assess various aspects of the body including processes of embodiment and questions of mythologizing the divine body and othering the human body, as revealed in the literatures and cultures of South Asia. The book analyses notions of mythologizing and "othering" of the body as a powerful ideological discourse, which empowers or marginalizes at all levels of the human condition. Offering a deep insight into the study of religion and issues of the body in South Asian literature, religion and culture, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian studies, South Asian religions, South Asian literatures, cultural studies, philosophy and comparative literature.

Author : Dr.Varada Sambhus
Publisher : Indus Scrolls Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2024-06-13
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Vari Pilgrimage: Bhakti, Being and Beyond by Dr.Varada Sambhus Pdf

The Vārī to Pandharpur is one of the most significant pilgrimages in Maharashtra and India. It is a living tradition and attracts millions of pilgrims annually from across the Marathi-speaking region and beyond. This book highlights the structure, organization, symbolism, and wide range of social interactions during the Vārī pilgrimage through the dindis and pālkhī processions. Vārkarī Sampradāya is a community of devotees unequivocally associated with the Varī pilgrimage. While understanding and analyzing the Vārī pilgrimage, the book also discusses the Varkarī Sampradāya, its ethos, philosophy, santa tradition, literary canon, and how it has contributed to shaping Maharashtrian culture. It is argued that the Vārkarī bhakti ethos is circulated through various public means of bhakti, and the Vārī pilgrimage is the most prominent site of this circulation. Though the Vārī pilgrimage is considered mainly a spiritual and religious phenomenon, an attempt is made to highlight its social, political, and cultural dimensions. Vārī is a site that enables the negotiation of social and cultural power relations. The book argues that the Vārī is an inclusive and open platform. In the process of the Vārī pilgrimage, a particular kind of public emerges that acquires a Vārkarī identity without necessarily transcending social identities and power structures attached thereto.