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Books on the topic 'Bhakti traditions'
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1
Charlotte, Vaudeville, Eck Diana L, and Mallison Franc̜oise, eds. Devotion divine: Bhakti traditions from the regions of India : studies in honour of Charlotte Vaudeville. E. Forsten, 1991.
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2
Daya, Krishna, Lāṭha Mukunda, Krishna Francine E, Indian Council of Philosophical Research., and Seminar on the Intellectual Dimensions of Bhakti Tradition in India (1988 : Sri Caitanya Prema Sansthan), eds. Bhakti, a contemporary discussion: Philosophical explorations in the Indian Bhakti tradition. Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 2000.
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3
Seminar on Bhakti Literature and Social Reform (2013 Kakatiya University). Bhakti movement and literature: Re-forming a tradition. Rawat Publications, 2016.
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4
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, ed. Devotion in Indian tradition. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 2017.
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5
author, Parthiban R. K., and Kalidos, R. (Raju), 1947- author, eds. Samāpti-suprabhātam: Reflections on South Indian bhakti tradition in literature and art. Sharada Publishing House, 2017.
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6
Eck, Diana L. Devotion Devine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India : Studies in Honour of Charlotte Vaudeville (Groningen Oriental Studies). John Benjamins Pub Co, 1991.
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7
Keune, Jon. Shared Devotion, Shared Food. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197574836.001.0001.
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This book is about a deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people—women, low castes, and Dalits—were they promoting social equality? This is 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 into 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 Vārkarī tradition, 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.
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Yadlapati, Madhuri M. Faith and Transcendence in Hindu Traditions. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037948.003.0005.
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This chapter explores several notes of ambiguity or self-correction in Hindu faith: the relationship between mystical certitude and discursive doubt in the Upanishads; bhakti (devotional faith) and the limitations of dharma in the epics; the questioning of assumptions about reality spurred by the doctrine of maya; and the paradoxical character of Hindu theism as reflected in the figure of Shiva. This fourfold examination illustrates ambiguities in a few of the very different strands of Hindu thought and practice. Behind all four thematic strands is a sense that beyond the worldly values of dharma teachings, the spiritual journey requires self-correction as part of the transformative experience of religious transcendence.
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Ferrari, Fabrizio, and Thomas Dähnhardt, eds. Roots of Wisdom, Branches of Devotion: Plant Life in South Asian Traditions. Equinox Publishing, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/isbn.9781781791196.
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Plant life has figured prominently in Indian culture. Archaeobotanical findings and Vedic texts confirm that plants have been central not only as a commodity (sources of food; materia medica; sacrificial matter; etc.) but also as powerful and enduring symbols. Roots of Wisdom, Branches of Devotion: Plant Life in South Asian Traditions explores how herbs, trees, shrubs, flowers and vegetables have been studied, classified, represented and discussed in a variety of Indian traditions such as Vedism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, indigenous cultures and Islam. Moving from an analysis of the sentience of plants in early Indian philosophies and scientific literature, the various chapters, divided in four thematic sections, explore Indian flora within devotional and mystic literature (bhakti and Sufism), mythological, ritual and sacrificial culture, folklore, medicine, perfumery, botany, floriculture and agriculture. Arboreal and floral motifs are also discussed as an expression of Indian aesthetics since early coinage to figurative arts and literary figures. Finally, the volume reflects current discourses on environmentalism and ecology as well as on the place of indigenous flora as part of an ancient yet still very much alive sacred geography.
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McDaniel, June. Hinduism. Edited by John Corrigan. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195170214.003.0004.
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Emotion is viewed in both positive and negative ways in the Hindu religious and philosophical traditions. In those traditions that are more ascetic and emphasize mental control, emotions are distractions which need to be stilled. In those traditions that emphasize love of a deity, emotions are valuable—but they must be directed and transformed. However, in order to study emotion in the Hindu tradition, we must first look at the meaning of the term “Hinduism.” There are at least six major types of Hinduism: Hindu folk religion, Vedic religion, Vedantic Hinduism, yogic Hinduism, dharmic Hinduism, and bhakti or devotional Hinduism. All of these involve emotion in various ways, but two traditions—those of Bengali Vaishnavism and raja yoga—have written about emotion in greatest depth. This article examines what the term “emotion” means in India, and then describes the beliefs about emotion in Vaishnavism and Yoga in greater detail. In discussing the nature of emotion, it considers bhava and rasa. Finally, the article discusses the literature on emotion in Hindu tradition, focusing on religious poetry.
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Hernández, Gloria Maité. Savoring God. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190907365.001.0001.
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This book compares two mystical works central to the Christian Discalced Carmelite and the Hindu Bhakti traditions: the sixteenth-century Spanish Cántico espiritual (Spiritual Canticle), by John of the Cross, and the Sanskrit Rāsa Līlā, originated in the oral tradition. These texts are examined alongside theological commentaries: for the Cántico, the Comentarios written by John of the Cross on his own poem; for Rāsa Līlā, the foundational commentary by Srīdhara Swāmi along with commentaries by the sixteenth-century theologian Jīva Goswāmī, from the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava school, and other Gauḍīya theologians. The phrase “savoring God” in the title conveys the Spanish gustar a Dios (to savor God) and the Sanskrit madhura bhakti rasa (the sweet savor of divine love). While “savoring” does not mean exactly the same thing for these theologians, they use the term to define a theopoetics at work in their respective traditions. The book’s methodology transposes their notions of “savoring” to advance a comparative theopoetics grounded in the interaction of poetry and theology. The first chapter explains in detail how theopoetics is regarded considering each text and how they are compared. The comparison is then laid out across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which examines one of the three central moments of the theopoetic experience of savoring that is represented in the Cántico and Rāsa Līlā: the absence and presence of God, the relationship between embodiment and savoring, and the fulfillment of the encounter between the divine and the lovers.
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Hale, Christopher Dicran. Are Western Christian Bhajans “Reverse” Mission Music? Edited by Jonathan Dueck and Suzel Ana Reily. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199859993.013.10.
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This chapter contrasts the contextualization of the Hindu bhajan in Christian churches in North India with its recontextualization as a medium of worship in North America. The author discusses his engagement with “Yeshu bhakti,” a North Indian Hindu modality of devotion (bhakti) focused on Jesus Christ (Yeshu) as the “God of choice.” The band Aradhna, composed of the children of missionaries to India and Nepal, draws on its members’ multiple musical backgrounds to present a “third” religious domain, derived from Hinduism and Christianity. The chapter shows how Aradhna’s music tries to draw together different religious traditions, focusing on their points of conversion. Addressing possible problems of cultural and religious ownership in the band’s practice, the author notes that Aradhna aims to create a new religious space, a meeting place of musics and religions that is something new—and an alternative to Eurocentric Christianity.
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Venkatkrishnan, Anand. Love in the Time of Scholarship. Oxford University PressNew York, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197776636.001.0001.
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Abstract Where is the life in scholarly life? Is it possible to find life in academic writing, so otherwise abstracted from everyday life? How might religion bridge that gap? This book explores these questions in the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, or love for God, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge. Their personal religious commitments featured in a language and a genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learning and the local devotional practices of everyday people, although not in a top-down manner. Instead, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality. The book also revisits the historiography of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to expand our knowledge of the many different religious and philosophical communities that interpreted and laid claim to the themes of the text. While most commonly associated with the traditions of Vaiṣṇavism, the Bhāgavata was also studied by Śaivas, Śāktas, and others on the periphery of the text’s history.
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Hayes, Glen Alexander. The Guru’s Tongue. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190636647.003.0008.
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This essay explores the nature of religious language and uses of conceptual metaphors in an important branch of medieval Bengali Hinduism known as the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā traditions which practiced a form of esoteric tantric yoga involving a series of external rituals, internalized visualizations, a special mystical language, and a rejection of the norms of Hindu caste and ritual purity. Developing after the time of the great Bengali devotional leader Kṛṣṇa Caitanya, they also incorporated emotional and devotional practices known as bhakti (“devotion”) which enriched their religious practices, language, and uses of conceptual metaphors. The essay considers how using several approaches to studying conceptual metaphors can help to better understand the process and dynamics of these traditions, how the usage of the vernacular language of Bengali influenced their religious language and metaphors, and how the historical and cultural contexts of deltaic Bengal influenced their beliefs, practices, and textual expressions.
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Ben-Herut, Gil. The Poetics of Bhakti. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878849.003.0002.
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The first chapter of this book focuses on the way the tradition commemorates the Ragaḷegaḷu and its author, the unique poetics that govern the text, and the relation between the text’s form and its generation of meaning for its intended audiences. The chapter begins with an overview of the commemorative tradition pertaining to Harihara, author of the Ragaḷegaḷu. Then, through examination of some of the work’s textual particularities, it underscores Harihara’s contribution to Kannada literature in his Ragaḷegaḷu through the introduction of a new and simplified mode of literary expression (in terms of choice of meter, language register, and more) and of previously unfamiliar themes (such as characters from the margins of society). The chapter shows how the public memory of Harihara acknowledged his literary innovations by mentioning them at key moments in his life story.
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Flood, Gavin, ed. The Oxford History of Hinduism. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198733508.001.0001.
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This history of Hindu religious practices examines traditions of asceticism, yoga, and devotion (bhakti), including dance and music, developed in Hinduism over a long period of time, placing the theme of practice within a broader trajectory of cultural history. Some of these practices, notably those denoted by the term yoga, are orientated towards salvation from the cycle of reincarnation and go back several thousand years, borne witness to in ancient texts called Upaniṣads, as well as in other traditions, notably early Buddhism and Jainism. Practices of meditation are also linked to asceticism (tapas) and its institutional articulation in renunciation (saṃnyāsa). There are devotional practices that might involve ritual, making an offering to a deity and receiving a blessing, dancing, or visualization of the master (guru) and a range of disciplines from ascetic fasting to taking a vow (vrata) for a deity in return for a favour. This whole range of meditative and devotional practices that have developed in the history of Hinduism are represented in this book.
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Bangha, Imre, and Danuta Stasik, eds. Literary Cultures in Early Modern North India. Oxford University PressOxford, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889348.001.0001.
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Abstract Literary Cultures in Early Modern North India: Current Research grows out of over a 40-year tradition of the triennial International Conferences on Early Modern Literatures in North India (ICEMLNI), initiated to share ‘Bhakti in current research’. This volume brings together a selection of contributions from some of the leading scholars as well as emerging researchers in the field, originally presented at the 13th ICEMLNI (University of Warsaw, 18–22 July 2018). ICEMLNI have become an established forum for scholars working on literary cultures of the early modernity, conceived broadly as ranging from the fifteenth/sixteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries, that as a new concept is particularly relevant to this book. Considering innovative methodologies and tools, the volume presents the current state of research on early modern sources and offers new inputs into our understanding of this period in the cultural history of India. The essays cover multiple languages (Indian vernaculars, Sanskrit, Apabhramsha, Persian), different media (texts, performances, paintings, music) and traditions (Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sant, Sikh), analysing them as individual phenomena that function in a wider network of connections at textual, intertextual, and knowledge-system levels.
18
Bhakti tradition of Vaiṣṇava Āḷvārs and theology of religions. Punthi Pustak, 2006.
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19
Ben-Herut, Gil. A Bhakti Guide for the Perplexed Brahmin. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878849.003.0005.
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The fourth chapter addresses Brahminism. Against contemporary understandings of Brahminism as completely antagonistic to (and antagonized by) Vīraśaivas, I read the relevant stories in the Ragaḷegaḷu as accommodating Brahmins who are also avid devotees of Śiva. In my approach I use a basic distinction between “Brahminness”—a birth-given condition that allows for the ceding of some Brahminical practices for maintaining devotional values when a social context generates conflict—and “Brahminism,” which stands for the set of traditional and orthodox Brahminical values of social difference and separation. While Brahminism is met with staunch resistance in the stories of the Ragaḷegaḷu, Brahminness is accommodated under certain conditions. Read with this distinction in mind, I argue, the Ragaḷegaḷu points to the wish of Harihara, himself a Brahmin, to guide the traditional Brahmin in the unorthodox social terrain of Bhakti while allowing him to maintain his traditional religious and social identity as a Brahmin.
20
Martin, Nancy M., and Joseph Runzo. Love. Edited by John Corrigan. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195170214.003.0018.
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Love lies at the heart of the religious life, as a principle mode of relationship between the human and the transcendent, as a guiding motivation for the moral life, and, for many, as a defining attribute of the transcendent. Among all the emotions, love is the most transformative. Yet the transformative power of love can be highly disruptive, contravening the careful conceptual apparatus of religion, undermining institutional religious authority, and upsetting social expectations and hierarchies. And if the power of the emotion of love is not harnessed for self-transformation, then rather than enhancing the other-regarding perspective prescribed by religion, this emotion can increase attachment, partiality, and self-centeredness. In theistic traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha'i, bhakti Hinduism, and Sikhism, love is considered an essential defining attribute of God and a definitive mode—if not the single definitive mode—of relationship between humans and the divine. This article discusses the nature of love and emotion, love as an attribute of the transcendent, and love as the response to the transcendent.
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Bhatia, Varuni. Unforgetting Chaitanya. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190686246.001.0001.
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What role do premodern religious traditions play in the formation of modern secular identities? What relationship exists between regional devotional cultures, key bhakti figures, and anticolonial nationalism in South Asia? What are some of the multiple sites of forgetting and unforgetting that determine how we receive iconic historical figures in the present? Unforgetting Chaitanya addresses these questions by examining late nineteenth-century transformations of Vaishnavism in Bengal—a religious tradition emanating from the figure of Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533), and articulated in this region through various bodily and artistic practices. Building upon the concept of viraha as longing for the absent one within the Vaishnava worldview, this book argues that educated and middle-class Hindu Bengalis, the bhadralok, (re)turned to Chaitanyite Vaishnavism as a unique expression of excavating their authentic selves. It argues that by searching for literary and historical pasts, discovering long lost sacred spaces, recovering manuscripts, and disciplining Vaishnava practices across sects and castes, the Bengali Hindu middle-class successfully forged a respectable, bhadralok Vaishnavism. The book engages with questions around memory and history, poetics and praxis, and sacred space and print culture in the making of modern Vaishnavism as a devotional and cultural complex, simultaneously. Thus, Unforgetting Chaitanya argues for the methodological relevance of relocating the study of Bengali or Gaudiya Vaishnavism within the historical, intellectual, and cultural context of colonial Bengal, where it assumed its modern form. In doing so, this interdisciplinary book contributes to the fields of both Religion and History of South Asia.
22
Lele, J. Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements (International Studies in Sociology and Social Anthropology). Brill Academic Pub, 1997.
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23
Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India. Oxford University Press India, 2018.
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24
Singing the praises divine: Music in the Hindu tradition. A.P.H. Pub. Corp., 2000.
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25
Chandra, R. Sant Ravidas and his Contemporaries ; A Rich Tradition of Shudra Saint-Poet of Bhakti Cult. Shree Publishers & Distributors, 2004.
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26
State Pluralism And The Indian Historical Tradition. Oxford University Press, 2009.
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27
Stainton, Hamsa. Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190889814.001.0001.
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This book investigates the history of a popular genre of Sanskrit devotional poetry in Kashmir: the stotra, or hymn of praise. Such hymns demonstrate and frequently reflect upon the close link between literary and religious expression in South Asia—the relationship between poetry and prayer. This study presents an overview and reassessment of the stotra genre, including its definition and history, focusing on literary hymns in Kashmir from the eighth to the twentieth century. Investigating these hymns as theological texts, it argues for their pedagogical potential and their particular appeal for non-dualistic authors. Analyzing such hymns as prayers, it unpacks the unique capabilities of the stotra form and challenges persistent assumptions in the study of Hindu prayer. The book argues for the literary ambition and creativity of many stotras across the centuries, and it complicates standard narratives about the vitality and so-called death of Sanskrit in the region. Śaiva poets also engaged with the rich discourse on aesthetics in Kashmir, and this study charts how they experiment with the idea of a devotional “taste” (bhaktirasa) long before Vaiṣṇava authors would make it well known in South Asia. Finally, it presents new perspectives on the historiography of bhakti traditions and “Kashmir Śaivism.” Overall, this book reveals the unique nature and history of stotra literature in Kashmir; demonstrates the diversity, flexibility, and persistent appeal of the stotra genre; and introduces new sources and ways of thinking about these popular texts and the comparative study of devotional poetry and prayer.
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Mathai, Varghese. Mahakavi K. V. Simon. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501388521.
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The first English study of poet K. V. Simon (1883-1944), with sample translations, including of his 12,000-line epic Vedaviharam, and a critical biography. Opening with the story of South Indian poet laureate (or mahakavi) K. V. Simon’s heroic life, this book escorts its global reader through the legendary Malabar Coast, transiting into the densely rich Simon verse in translation, and closing with a comparative reading of a rewarding range of texts from Simon and Milton. When Simon's epic Vedaviharam, a verse rendition of The Book of Genesis, appeared in the Malayalam language in 1931, The Guardian hailed the multifaceted Simon as “India’s veritable Milton.” Like Milton, Simon was a polymath, poet, hymnodist, composer, religious reformer and an educator. Like Milton, he was a man of immense learning, writing prose and verse with equal brilliance. As a result of his writings – in which he exhorted the Church of his era to seek scriptural literacy rather than uphold uncritical traditions – Simon was catapulted into public life as a reformer, apologist, and a nationally known prophetic figure. In Mahakavi K. V. Simon: The Milton of the East, translations of Simon’s works cover a range, from purpose-driven topic studies to interpretive Bible commentaries, poems, and hymns. Scholarship has so far placed Simon’s poetical work on par with the bhakti classics of Ezhuthachen, the Father of modern Malayalam, and of Poonthanam, a Hindu metaphysical poet, both household names in India. But in this study, Varghese Mathai shows how Simon distinguishes himself by his contributions to numerous knowledge fields that bridge him to world literature, modern history, colonial studies, religion, apologetics, rhetorical studies, and more.
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Seeing Krishna in America: The Hindu Bhakti tradition of Vallabhacharya in India and its movement to the West. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2014.
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30
Ben-Herut, Gil. 'Siva's Saints. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878849.001.0001.
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The Vīraśaiva tradition, which developed over the last eight centuries in the Kannada-speaking region of the Deccan plateau in India, holds a unique place in Hindu society. Its members do not adhere to the hierarchical structures of Brahminical-centered society, and they practice a distinct set of rituals, such as carrying a personal liṅga on their body and worshiping it individually (as well as in groups). The roots of the tradition are linked to a revolutionary community of devotees of the Hindu god Śiva from the twelfth century, headed by the saintly figures Basavaṇṇa, Allama Prabhu, and Mahādēviyakka, whose poetry is the most translated and read literature ever produced in the Kannada language. This book takes a pioneering approach to understanding the origins of Vīraśaivism by focusing for the first time in English-language scholarship on a corpus of hagiographies about the twelfth-century devotees that was produced at a very early stage of the tradition. This untitled collection of narrative poems, commonly called the Śivaśaraṇara Ragaḷegaḷu (“Poems in the Ragaḷe Meter for Śiva’s Saints”), is the first written account of the devotees of the Kannada-speaking region, and its author was an accomplished poet called Harihara. By closely reading the saints’ stories in this text, the book 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.
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Samanta, Suchitra. Kali in Bengali Lives. Lexington Books, 2021. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666994612.
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In Kali in Bengali Lives, Suchitra Samanta examines Bengalis’ personal narratives of Kali devotion in the Bhakti tradition. These personal experiences, including miraculous encounters, reflect on broader understandings of divine power. Where the revelatory experience has long been validated in Indian epistemology, the devotees’ own interpretive framework provides continuity within a paradigm of devotion and of the miraculous experience as intuitive insight (anubhuti) into a larger truth. Through these unique insights, the miraculous experience is felt in its emotional power, remembered, and reflected upon. The narratives speak to how the meaning of a religious figure, Kali, becomes personally significant and ultimately transformative of the devotee’s self.
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State, pluralism, and the Indian historical tradition. Oxford University Press, 2008.
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Coleman, Tracy. Rādhā. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767022.003.0007.
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Although Sītā and Rādhā might seem to represent the ideal woman as pativratā and her adulterous antithesis respectively, this essay initially argues that both paradigmatic figures reflect the same underlying androcentric ideology that values women who selflessly sacrifice their lives for men and thus represent idealized models of feminine devotion (bhakti), submission, and suffering, especially in situations of viraha, separation from their beloveds. Privileging the twelfth-century Gītagovinda, however, and its vision of Kṛṣṇa’s passionate love for Rādhā, this chapter argues that the poet Jayadeva glorifies a radically subversive secret that threatens hegemonic masculinity: an erotic image of divinity both masculine and feminine, an image of dual divinity that sanctifies sexuality and values women as independent and powerful in sharp contrast to traditional structures of patriarchal power.
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Austin, Christopher R. Pradyumna. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190054113.001.0001.
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This monograph provides the first full-scale English language study of Pradyumna, the son of the Hindu god Kṛṣṇa. Often represented as a young man in mid-adolescence, Pradyumna is both a handsome double of his demon-slaying father and the rebirth of Kāmadeva, the God of Love. Sanskrit epic, purāṇic, and kāvya narratives of the 300–1300 CE period celebrate Pradyumna’s sexual potency, mastery of illusory subterfuges, and military prowess in supporting the work of his avatāra father. These materials reflect chiefly the values of an evolving Brahminical and Vaiṣṇava tradition deeply invested in the imperatives of family, patriline, the violent but necessary defense of the social and cosmic order, and the celebration of beauty and desire as a means to the divine. As such, Pradyumna’s evolving narratives, almost completely unknown in existing studies of Hindu mythology, provide a point of access to the development of Krishna bhakti and Vaiṣṇava theism more broadly. However, Jain sources cast Pradyumna as an exemplary figure through whom a pointed rejection of these values can be articulated, even while sharing certain of their elementary premises. This book assembles these narratives, presents key Sanskrit materials in translation and summary form, and articulates the social, gender, and religious values encoded in them. Most importantly, the study argues that Pradyumna’s signature two-handed maneuver—the audacious appropriation of a feminine partner, effectuating and enabled by the emasculating destruction of her demonic male protector—communicates a persisting fantasy of male power, expressed in the language of mutually implicating sex and violence.
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Talbot, Ian, and Tahir Kamran. Poets, Wrestlers and Cricketers. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190642938.003.0005.
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Chapter four discusses the impact of colonial rule on traditional cultural and sporting pastimes and the new activities that emerged, most notably cricket. There are three case studies of mushairas (poetic contests), wrestling and cricket. The chapter reveals how their key participants in Lahore were able to perform on a wider stage because of the communications revolution. Nonetheless, they remained rooted in the mohallas and local institutions of the city. Lahore’s mushairas of the 1870s which received contributions from Muhammad Hussain Azad and Altaf Hussain Hali are seen as possessing an important impact on the evolution of Urdu poetry in North India. Competitions took Lahore’s most famous wrestler Gama from his akhara (wrestling arena) in the city to England. Many of Lahore’s most famous colonial era cricketers lived in the Bhati Gate and Mochi Gate area. The fierce rivalry in the 1920s and 1930s between Islamia College and Government College drew talent from across the Punjab. Cricket was not divided on communal lines, Lala Amarnath the future Indian test captain who toured England in the 1930s played for the Crescent Club based at Minto Park which was patronized by the middle class Rana family of the Mochi Gate locality.
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Sharma, Mukul. Dalit Memories and Water Rights. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199477562.003.0004.
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Water is a deeply contentious issue, intersecting with caste, class, and gender in India in multifaceted ways, and producing complex cultural meanings and social hierarchies. Culturally, politically and economically, it has been a source of power. It has been controlled by the powerful, and used as a means to exert control over others. It has been a traditional medium for exclusion of Dalits in overt and covert ways: denying Dalits the right over, and access to, water; asserting monopoly of upper-castes over water bodies, including rivers, wells, tanks and taps; constructing casteist water texts in cultural and religious domains; obscuring Dalit narratives and knowledge of water; and rendering thinking and speaking about caste, water and Dalits together as peripheral to discourses on water. The chapter takes up two case studies from two different regions of Bihar, where Dalits have used water to represent their own ecological vision in a collective manner, drawing from a rich repertoire of their religious, cultural, and social resources. Cultural symbols and myths of Deena-Bhadri and Ekalavya are assembled by Dalits as a community tool-box, to demand river and fishing rights, and to attach themselves to pasts, places, and resources.