'Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata and Culture: The History of Understanding and Understanding of History' explores the interrelationships between individual and cultural historical dynamics in interpreting texts, using key concepts from Bakhtin's theory of dialogics. This ambitious volume discusses the limits of fixed monologic discourses and the benefits of fluid dialogic discourses, and provides a cultural and psychological analysis of the epic Indian text the 'Mahabharata'. The problem addressed by 'Dialogics of Self, the Mahabharata and Culture' is not just how we understand and narrate history, but also how the very mechanism by which we understand and narrate history itself has a history. This volume is about the interplay of several histories - that of the individual, individual's past relationship to the text, which in turn is dependent on the nature of encounters they have had in the past, and the history of the text, and the very history of understanding.
The Mahabharata, one of the major epics of India, is a sourcebook complete by itself as well as an open text constantly under construction. This volume looks at transactions between its modern discourses and ancient vocabulary. Located amid conversations between these two conceptual worlds, the volume grapples with the epic’s problematisation of dharma or righteousness, and consequently, of the ideal person and the good life through a cluster of issues surrounding the concept of agency and action. Drawing on several interdisciplinary approaches, the essays reflect on a range of issues in the Mahabharata, including those of duty, motivation, freedom, selfhood, choice, autonomy, and justice, both in the context of philosophical debates and their ethical and political ramifications for contemporary times. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers engaged with philosophy, literature, religion, history, politics, culture, gender, South Asian studies, and Indology. It will also appeal to the general reader interested in South Asian epics and the Mahabharata.
Difference, Dialogue, and Development is an in-depth exploration of the collected works of Mikhail Bakhtin to find relevance of key concepts of dialogism for understanding various aspects of human development. Taking the reality of differences in the world as a given, Bandlamudi argues that such a reality necessitates dialogue, and actively responding to that necessity leads to development. The varied works of Bakhtin that span several decades passing through the most tumultuous period in Russian history, are brought under one banner of three D’s – Difference, Dialogue and Development – and the composite features of the three D’s emerge as leitmotifs in every chapter.
This volume, an important contribution to dialogic and Bakhtin studies, shows the natural fit between Bakhtin’s ideas and the pluralistic culture of India to a global academic audience. It is premised on the fact that long before principles of dialogism took shape in the Western world, these ideas, though not labelled as such, were an integral part of intellectual histories in India. Bakhtin’s ideas and intellectual traditions of India stand under the same banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages and social speech types and, therefore, the affinity between the thinker and the culture seems natural. Rather than being a mechanical import of Bakhtin’s ideas, it is an occasion to reclaim, reactivate and reenergize inherent dialogicality in the Indian cultural, historical and philosophical histories. Bakhtin is not an incidental figure, for he offers precise analytical tools to make sense of the incredibly complex differences at every level in the cultural life of India. Indian heterodoxy lends well to a Bakhtinian reading and analysis and the papers herein attest to this. The papers range from how ideas from Indo-European philology reached Bakhtin through a circuitous route, to responses to Bakhtin’s thought on the carnival from the philosophical perspectives of Abhinavagupta, to a Bakhtinian reading of literary texts from India. The volume also includes an essay on ‘translation as dialogue’ – an issue central to multilingual cultures – and on inherent dialogicality in the long intellectual traditions in India.
The localisation of a region, group, or culture was a common social phenomenon in pre-modern Asia, but global colonialism began to affect the lifestyle of local people. What was the political condition of the relationship between insiders and outsiders? The impact of colonial authorities over religious communities has not received significant attention, even though the Asian continent is the home of many religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Shintoism, and Shamanism. Colonial Transformation and Asian Religions in Modern History presents multi-angled perspectives of socio-religious transition. It uses the cultural religiosity of the Asian people as a lens through which readers can re-examine the concepts of imperialism, religious syncretism and modernisation. The contributors interpret the growth of new religions as another facet of counter-colonialism. This new approach offers significant insight into comprehending the practical agony and sorrow of regional people throughout Asian history.
Devotional Fanscapes examines the practices and materiality of fans who worship film stars as divine figures. This book is an analysis of visual culture and star temples that bring cinema, fandom, religion, and politics into undocumented negotiations in national and transnational contexts.
Author Jennifer MacKay provides background on the Hindu religion and how the tales, as well as the gods and goddesses, evolved throughout history. Readers will be introduced to marvelous epic tales of Hindu heroes and gods, and learn how followers worship the Pantheon of Hindu Gods. They will also learn about Hinduism's role in the world today.
With the ancient epic Mahabharat as her source, and the battle of Kurukshetra as a central motif, Mahasweta Devi weaves three stories in which we visit unexpected alleys and by-lanes of the traditional epic saga, and look at events from the eyes of women marginalized, dispossessed, dalit. Their eyes condemn the wanton waste and inhumanity of war. This Kurukshetra is not the legendary Dharmayuddha of the popular imagination but rather a cold-blooded power game sacrificing countless human lives. How do the women s quarters of the palace, a colourless place of shadowy widowhood, appear to five peasant women whose lives are no less shattered by the Kurukshetra massacre, but who are used to dealing with trauma in a more robust manner? How does their outlook on life and survival influence the young pregnant princess who is abruptly plunged into the half-life of uppercaste widowhood? How does a lower caste serving woman, who was brought in to service king Dhritarashtra when his queen was with child, view her half-royal offspring and his decision to perform the last rites for a father who never acknowledged him as a son? How does an ageing Kunti, living out her last years in the forest, come to terms with her guilt over her unacknowledged son, Karna? And, having finally voiced her shame aloud, how then does she face up to a crime she has not even remembered: the murder of a family of nishad forest dwellers? These tales, brewed in the imagination of a master story-teller, make us look at the Mahabharata with new eyes, insisting as they do on the inclusion, within the master narrative, of the fates and viewpoints of those previously unrepresented therein: women and the underclass. MAHASWETA DEVI is one of India s foremost writers. Her powerful, satiric fiction has won her recognition in the form of the Sahitya Akademi (1979), Jnanpith (1996) and Ramon Magsaysay (1996) awards, the title of Officier del Ordre Des Arts Et Des Lettres (2003) and the Nonino Prize (2005), amongst several other literary honours. She was also awarded the Padmasree in 1986, for her activist work amongst dispossessed tribal communities. ANJUM KATYAL is as an editor who has also translated several plays and short stories.
This volume, an important contribution to dialogic and Bakhtin studies, shows the natural fit between Bakhtin’s ideas and the pluralistic culture of India to a global academic audience. It is premised on the fact that long before principles of dialogism took shape in the Western world, these ideas, though not labelled as such, were an integral part of intellectual histories in India. Bakhtin’s ideas and intellectual traditions of India stand under the same banner of plurality, open-endedness and diversity of languages and social speech types and, therefore, the affinity between the thinker and the culture seems natural. Rather than being a mechanical import of Bakhtin’s ideas, it is an occasion to reclaim, reactivate and reenergize inherent dialogicality in the Indian cultural, historical and philosophical histories. Bakhtin is not an incidental figure, for he offers precise analytical tools to make sense of the incredibly complex differences at every level in the cultural life of India. Indian heterodoxy lends well to a Bakhtinian reading and analysis and the papers herein attest to this. The papers range from how ideas from Indo-European philology reached Bakhtin through a circuitous route, to responses to Bakhtin’s thought on the carnival from the philosophical perspectives of Abhinavagupta, to a Bakhtinian reading of literary texts from India. The volume also includes an essay on ‘translation as dialogue’ – an issue central to multilingual cultures – and on inherent dialogicality in the long intellectual traditions in India.
