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This book examines the words and actions of people who live in regions in the state of Maharashtra in Western India to illustrate the idea that regions are not only created by humans, but given meaning through religious practices. By exploring the people living in the area of Maharashtra, Feldhaus draws some very interesting conclusions about how people differentiate one region from others, and how we use stories, rituals, and ceremonies to recreate their importance. Feldhaus discovers that religious meanings attached to regions do not necessarily have a political teleology. According to Feldhaus, 'There is also a chance, even now, that religious imagery can enrich the lives of individuals and small communities without engendering bloodshed and hatred'.
Vitthal, also called Vithoba, is the most popular god in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, and the best-known Hindu god of that region outside of India. This book by Ramchandra Chintaman Dhere is the foremost study of the history of Vitthal, his worship, and his worshippers.
Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the region of western India called Maharashtra. The Marathi-language oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds of Maharashtra is not only one of the most important elements of their own traditional cultural life, but also a treasure of world literature. This volume presents two lively and well-crafted examples of the ovi, a genre typical of the oral literature of Dhangars. The two ovis in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba and Dhuloba, two of the most important gods of Dhangar shepherds. Each of the ovis tells an elaborate story of the birth of the god - a miraculous and complicated process in both cases - and of the struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride. The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ovis and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography, society, administrative structures, and economy of their performers' world, and about the performers views of pastoralistsand women.
Rivers in India are commonly associated with certain worldly religious values: wealth, beauty, long life, good health, food, love, and the birth of children. However, these "domestic" values have been relatively neglected by Indologists, who have tended to view India and Hinduism through the prism of poverty, misery, asceticism, and themes of purity or pollution. Following recent scholarship by arguing that the earthly pursuits are equally vital to an understanding of popular Hinduism, Feldhaus examines the role of these ideals in the religious meanings of rivers in Maharashtra, a large region of western India. Drawing both on written religious texts and on a wide range of oral, iconographic, and ritual materials gathered in the course of field work in India, she shows that these values, which are usually associated with women or represented by goddesses, are an important motif in popular religious practices and oral traditions associated with the rivers of Maharashtra, and she presents the many different ways in which rivers are imagined, enshrined, worshipped, and feared.
"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...
This volume, a companion to Images of Women in Maharashtrian Literature and Religion (SUNY Press, 1996), approaches more closely the realities of women's lives. Using historical documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and photographs, interviews, and conversations from the twentieth, the book constructs images of the conditions of women's lives in the modern state and traditional region of Maharashtra over the past three hundred years. The authors search for the ideas, understandings, and judgments that have shaped those conditions, for the conscious and unconscious images that have made women's lives what they have been. The contributors examine ways femininity and the power...
On the political ideologies of Dalits and their literature
The essays investigate the images of women and femininity found in the traditions of the Marathi language region of India, Maharashtra, and how these images contradict the actualities of women's lives.
The essays investigate the images of women and femininity found in the traditions of the Marathi language region of India, Maharashtra, and how these images contradict the actualities of women's lives.
Explores the conditions of women's lives in the modern state and traditional region of Maharashtra.