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This book brings together for the first time in English all the major essays written by François Gros on Tamil literature. An impressive range of topics is covered here from studies of Caṅkam literature and devotional texts of the Tamil Bhakti traditions to contemporary Tamil novels and short stories. Many of the essays include an overview of French Indological work over past three centuries made available to the English speaking scholarly world for the first time here. While the author urges European and American scholars of Tamil history and culture to take the intellectual discourses of Tamil scholarship seriously, he insists at the same time that Tamil not be ghettoized but should rather be read alongside texts in other South Indian languages, with reference to the evidence of epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology and art history.
Pondichéry, Chandernagor, Karikal, Yanaon, Mahé!... Comme la litanie des sous-préfectures de l'Hexagone, ces cinq noms constituaient l'un des tests de l'école primaire, à l'époque où la tache rose de la France d'outre-mer s'étendait sur les planisphères. Les Établissements de l'Inde, ballottés pendant un demi-siècle entre Paris et Londres après l'écroulement du rêve de Dupleix, sont restitués à la France en 1814 avec quelques autres vestiges de son premier empire colonial. Mais il faut attendre Napoléon III pour que la métropole, jusqu'alors surtout tournée vers l'Afrique, s'intéresse de nouveau à ces comptoirs éparpillés le long des côtes de l'Inde anglaise. Si des ...
Minor Majesties studies the small ancient kingdom of Pa?uvūr, active between the ninth and the eleventh centuries C.E. in the modern South-Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Author Valérie Gillet extensively surveys four temples dedicated to the god Śiva that were built during this period, combining in-depth analyses of their materiality, their location, and their epigraphy. Through these, Gillet provides a better understanding of the complexities related to temple sponsorship, organisation, and functioning as well as how these religious monuments became a place for the fabrication of political discourses and powers, specific social configurations, and religious practices.Â
Academic study of the tantric traditions has blossomed in recent decades, in no small measure thanks to the magisterial contributions of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson, until 2015 Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. This collection of essays honours him and touches several fields of Indology that he has helped to shape (or, in the case of the Śaiva religions, revolutionised): the history, ritual, and philosophies of tantric Buddhism, Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism; religious art and architecture; and Sanskrit belles lettres. Grateful former students, joined by other experts influenced by his scholarship, here offer papers that make significant contributions to our understanding of the cultural, religious, political, and intellectual histories of premodern South and Southeast Asia. Contributors are: Peter Bisschop, Judit Törzsök, Alex Watson, Isabelle Ratié, Christopher Wallis, Péter-Dániel Szántó, Srilata Raman, Csaba Dezső, Gergely Hidas, Nina Mirnig, John Nemec, Bihani Sarkar, Jürgen Hanneder, Diwakar Acharya, James Mallinson, Csaba Kiss, Jason Birch, Elizabeth Mills, Ryugen Tanemura, Anthony Tribe, and Parul Dave-Mukherji.
This edited volume programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Far from being a mere southern conduit for the maritime circulation of Indic religions, in the period from ca. the 7th to the 14th century those regions transformed across mainland and island polities the rituals, icons, and architecture that embodied these religious insights with a dynamism that often eclipsed the established cultural centres in Northern India, Central Asia, and mainland China. This collective body of work brings together new research aiming to reca...
The essays in the volume Consecration Rituals in South Asia address the ritual procedures that accompany the installation of temple images in Shaiva, Vaishnava, Buddhist and Jain contexts, in various traditions and historical periods.
A town is not simply a collection of streets and houses with a certain number of inhabitants, but is, above all, the profound expression of the culture of the people who live in it. This book aims to provide students and teachers with analytical methods and ways of considering a town, so that they may make the place where they live their own. Pondicherry has been chosen as an example for this analysis. Various chapters deal with the site of Pondicherry, its morphology and plan, its urban landscape and landmarks, its architecture (with emphasis on the Tamil house) and its socio-cultural aspects. The book provides several drawings, maps, lists, elevations and photographs for a better reading of the town. It is available in three versions: French, English and Tamil.
Focusing on Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces, this book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India. Starting in the sixteenth century, it discusses how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, it considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, the book situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts. By contributing to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, the book illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics of world history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.