The History of Sacred Places in India As Reflected in Traditional Literature
Author: Hans Bakker
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 1990
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9789004093188
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Religious Cultures in Early Modern India
Author: Rosalind O'Hanlon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-02
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1317982878
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReligious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences. Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Studies in Jaina History and Culture
Author: Peter Flügel
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-02-01
Total Pages: 497
ISBN-13: 1134235526
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe last ten years have seen interest in Jainism increasing, with this previously little-known Indian religion assuming a significant place in religious studies. Studies in Jaina History and Culture breaks new ground by investigating the doctrinal differences and debates amongst the Jains rather than presenting Jainism as a seamless whole whose doctrinal core has remained virtually unchanged throughout its long history. The focus of the book is the discourse concerning orthodoxy and heresy in the Jaina tradition, the question of omniscience and Jaina logic, role models for women and female identity, Jaina schools and sects, religious property, law and ethics. The internal diversity of the Jaina tradition and Jain techniques of living with diversity are explored from an interdisciplinary point of view by fifteen leading scholars in Jaina studies. The contributors focus on the principal social units of the tradition: the schools, movements, sects and orders, rather than Jain religious culture in abstract. Peter Flügel provides a representative snapshot of the current state of Jaina studies that will interest students and academics involved in the study of religion or South Asian cultures.
Devotional Literature in South Asia
Author: R. S. McGregor
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1992-09-25
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9780521413114
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume addresses recent research topics within the field of bhakti literature, the devotional poetry and other compositions of devotional character in the earlier literature of the modern South Asian languages. Its papers range from the roots of the bhakti tradition in the early history of krsna to its modern adaptations in nineteenth and twentieth-century culture. Geographically, they span Bengal to Sind, Panjab to Maharashtra. Materials in six modern languages are discussed: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi in its main literary forms, Marathi, Panjabi and Sindhi; with assessment also of material in Sanskrit, Arabic and Chinese.
Pilgrims and Travellers in Search of the Holy
Author: René Gothóni
Publisher: Peter Lang
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9783034301619
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Papers ... delivered at an international symposium entitled "Pilgrims and travellers in search of the holy" convened in Helsinki in 2008"--Introd.
Maithil Women's Tales
Author: Coralynn V. Davis
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2014-06-30
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13: 0252096304
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConstrained by traditions restricting their movements and speech, the Maithil women of Nepal and India have long explored individual and collective life experiences by sharing stories with one another. Sometimes fantastical, sometimes including a kind of magical realism, these tales allow women to build community through a deeply personal and always evolving storytelling form. In Maithil Women’s Tales, Coralynn V. Davis examines how these storytellers weave together their own life experiences--the hardships and the pleasures--with age-old themes. In so doing, Davis demonstrates, they harness folk traditions to grapple personally as well as collectively with social values, behavioral mores, relationships, and cosmological questions. Each chapter includes stories and excerpts that reveal Maithil women’s gift for rich language, layered plots, and stunning allegory. In addition, Davis provides ethnographic and personal information that reveal the complexity of women’s own lives, and includes works painted by Maithil storytellers to illustrate their tales. The result is a fascinating study of being and becoming that will resonate for readers in women’s and Hindu studies, folklore, and anthropology.
Kailas Histories
Author: Alex McKay
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2015-10-27
Total Pages: 550
ISBN-13: 9004306188
DOWNLOAD EBOOKTibet’s Mount Kailas is one of the world’s great pilgrimage centres, renowned as an ancient sacred site that embodies a universal sacrality. But Kailas Histories: Renunciate Traditions and the Construction of Himalayan Sacred Geography demonstrates that this understanding is a recent construction by British colonial, Hindu modernist, and New Age interests. Using multiple sources, including fieldwork, Alex McKay describes how the early Indic vision of a heavenly mountain named Kailas became identified with actual mountains. He emphasises renunciate agency in demonstrating how local beliefs were subsumed as Kailas developed within Hindu, Buddhist, and Bön traditions, how five mountains in the Indian Himalayan are also named Kailas, and how Kailas sacred geography constructions and a sacred Ganges source region were related.
The Mahanubhavs
Author: Antonio Rigopoulos
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2011-12-15
Total Pages: 104
ISBN-13: 1843317583
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe ascetic, devotional sect known as the Mahanubhavs – ‘Those of the Great Experience’ – arose in 13th century Maharashtra. The Mahanubhavs initially experienced a fairly rapid expansion, particularly across the northern and eastern regions of Maharashtra. However, by the end of the 14th century their movement went underground as they sought a defensive isolation from the larger Hindu context, and they withdrew to remote areas and villages. Although the prominent leaders of the early Mahanubhavs were Brahmans (often converts from the prevailing advaita vaisnavism), their followers were and are mostly non-Brahmans, i.e. low caste people and even untouchables. Thus the Mahanubhavs were met with prejudice and distrust outside their own closed circles, and this isolation continued until the beginning of the 20th century. This volume offers an overview of the origins and main religious and doctrinal characteristics of the Mahanubhavs, with a particular focus on the aspects that reveal their difference and nonconformity.
Belief, Bounty, and Beauty
Author: Albertina Nugteren
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2018-08-14
Total Pages: 519
ISBN-13: 9047415612
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study is focused on the interaction of material and symbolic values in the domain of sacred trees in India. By presenting samples from 3,000 years of Indian ritual practice, it is shown that in many sacred geographies trees continue to connect the present with the past, the material with the symbolic, and the contemporary ecological with the traditionally sacred. Although in India religion may have become very much a temple cult, its embeddedness in the natural world enhances today's 'green' interpretation of religious traditions. That in environmental matters such religious inspiration may be both successful and highly ambivalent at the same time is the thought-provoking position taken in the final chapters.
Papers of the 12th World Sanskrit Conference, Held in Helsinki, Finland 13-18 July, 2003: 2 Origin and growth of the Purāṇic text corpus : with special reference to the Skandapurāṇa
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13:
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