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A Woman's Ramayana
The Rāmāyana, an ancient epic of India, with audiences across vast stretches of time and geography, continues to influence numberless readers socially and morally through its many re-tellings. Made available in English for the first time, the 16th century version presented here is by Candrāvatī, a woman poet from Bengal. It is a highly individual rendition as a tale told from a woman's point of view which, instead of celebrating masculine heroism, laments the suffering of women caught in the play of male ego. This book presents a translation and commentary on the text, with an extensive introduction that scrutinizes its social and cultural context and correlates its literary identity with its ideological implications. Taken together, the narrative and the critical study offered here expand the understanding both of the history of women’s self-expression in India and the cultural potency of the epic tale. The book is of interest equally to students and researchers of South Asian narratives, Rāmāyana studies and gender issues.
Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology
The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki is considered by many contemporary Hindus to be a foundational religious text. But this understanding is in part the result of a transformation of the epic’s receptive history, a hermeneutic project which challenged one characterization of the genre of the text, as a work of literary culture, and replaced it with another, as a work of remembered tradition. This book examines Rāmāyana commentaries, poetic retellings, and praise-poems produced by intellectuals within the Śrīvaisnava order of South India from 1250 to 1600 and shows how these intellectuals reconceptualized Rāma’s story through the lens of their devotional metaphysics. Śrīvaisnavas applied innovative interpretive techniques to the Rāmāyana, including allegorical reading, ślesa reading (reading a verse as a double entendre), and the application of vernacular performance techniques such as word play, improvisation, repetition, and novel forms of citation. The book is of interest not only to Rāmāyana specialists but also to those engaged with Indian intellectual history, literary studies, and the history of religions.
Hinduism and Environmental Ethics
This book argues that the standard arguments for and against the claim that certain Hindu texts and traditions attribute direct moral standing to animals and plants are unconvincing. It presents careful, extensive, and original interpretations of passages from the Manusmrti (law), the Mahābhārata (literature), and the Yogasūtra (philosophy), and argues that these texts attribute direct moral standing to animals and plants for at least three reasons: they are sentient, they are alive, and they possess a range of other relevant attributes and abilities. This book is of interest to scholars of Hinduism and the environment, religion and the environment, Hindu and/or Buddhist philosophy more broadly, and environmental ethics.
The Epic World
Reconceptualizing the epic genre and opening it up to a world of storytelling, The Epic World makes a timely and bold intervention toward understanding the human propensity to aestheticize and normalize mass deployments of power and violence. The collection broadly considers three kinds of epic literature: conventional celebratory tales of conquest that glorify heroism, especially male heroism; anti-epics or stories of conquest from the perspectives of the dispossessed, the oppressed, the despised, and the murdered; and heroic stories utilized for imperialist or nationalist purposes. The Epic World illustrates global patterns of epic storytelling, such as the durability of stories tied to re...
Debating 'Conversion' in Hinduism and Christianity
Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of ‘conversion’ provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds. The book draws upon several historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of ‘conversion’, it demonstrates...
The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays
This collection explores what may be called the idea of India in ancient times. Its undeclared objective is to identify key concepts which show early Indian civilization as distinct and differently oriented from other formations. The essays focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key terms—such as janapada, desa, varṇa, dharma, bhāva—in their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are "given entities," but that they evolved historically. Professor Chattopadhyaya examines these texts to unveil historical processes. Without denying comparative history, he stresses that ...
Hindu Pilgrimage
In recent years, changes in religious studies in general and the study of Hinduism in particular have drawn more scholarly attention to other forms of the Hindu faith that are concretely embodied in temples, icons, artworks, rituals, and pilgrimage practices. This book analyses the phenomenon of pilgrimage as a religious practice and experience and examines Shrî Shailam, a renowned south Indian pilgrimage site of Shiva and Goddess Durga. In doing so, it investigates two dimensions: the worldview of a place that is of utmost sanctity for Hindu pilgrims and its historical evolution from medieval to modern times. Reddy blends religion, anthropology, art history and politics into one interdisci...
Teaching World Epics
Cultures across the globe have embraced epics: stories of memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for their lives and their communities. Incorporating narrative elements also found in sacred history, chronicle, saga, legend, romance, myth, folklore, and the novel, epics throughout history have both animated the imagination and encouraged reflection on what it means to be human. Teaching World Epics addresses ancient and more recent epic works from Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and East, Central, and South Asia that are available in English translations. Useful to instructors of literature, peace and conflict studies, transnational studies, women's stud...
Women in the Hindu World
Women in the Hindu World explores the role of womanhood in Hindu religious culture and how the faith influences women’s social experiences. Women in the Hindu World encourages readers to develop and nurture their own understanding of the life of a woman as a Hindu. The seven chapters proceed both historically and thematically, exploring abstract philosophical concepts about women, as well as concrete worldly conditions of the lives they lead, from the earliest stages of Hindu society to the present, marking through time the evolving religious roles and social status of women. Hindu women have consistently found in their faith resources for claiming selfhood both within their faith and in s...
The Other Ramayana Women
This book is the first to present current scholarship on gender and in regional and sectarian versions of the Rāmāyaṇa. Contributors explore in what ways the versions relate to other Rāmāyaṇa texts as they deal with the female persona and the cultural values implicit in them. Using a wide variety of approaches, both analytical and descriptive, the authors discover common ground between narrative variants even as their diversity is recognized. It offers an analysis in the shaping of the heterogeneous Rāma tradition through time as it can be viewed from the perspective of narrating women's lives. Through the analysis of the representation and treatment of female characters, narrative inventions, structural design, textual variants, and the idiom of composition and technique in art and sculpture are revealed and it is shown what and in which way these alternative versions are unique. A sophisticated exploration of the Rāmāyaṇa, this book is of great interest to academics in the fields of South Asian Studies, Asian Religion, Asian Gender and Cultural Studies.
