Kali's Odiyya
Kali's Odiyya

Author: Amarananda Bhairavan

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780892540488

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This is a rare exciting inside story of worship in a small Indian matriarchal village formed around a Kali temple. Bhairavan writes of initiation into the world of Kali's odiyyas: shamans of the goddess, following Shambu and Sandhya from initiation, through an exorcism, and an initiation into mystical sexuality. Kundalini arousal, karma, a funeral celebration, the matriarchal transference of power following the search for spirituality, the sorcerers who shape-shift into the astral world, where Shambu experiences his astral form as a being of light, are interspersed with the wise words of Aunt Preema, the sorceress-teacher. We learn what it means to be a devotee, how Kali followers view sexuality and mores, the day-to-day lifestyle in this holy village, and how the shamanic community takes care of the needs of the people. Never before have these secrets been revealed!

Divine Duality
Divine Duality

Author: William Keepin

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2013-03-16

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 193582631X

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A Breakthrough in Healing, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Between Men and Women I have been looking a long time to find a way to bring healing and reconciliation between women and men here in South Africa. This work is the answer. We need much more of this work in South Africa. – Nozizwe Madlala Routledge, Deputy Minister of Health and Member of Parliament, South Africa Will Keepin’s pioneering, passionate, deeply thoughtful work has been on the cutting edge for years. Now his book gives us all access to his profound insights and effective methods. This is crucial work. – Andrew Harvey, author of twenty books, including Son of Man and The Direct Path This is the first workshop I have experienced that fully integrates educational and spiritual components in a balanced manner. – Ela Gandhi, founding director of Satyagraha Center, Durban, South Africa; granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi That rarest of books – it challenges and changes your mind, but only after it penetrates your heart. – Peter Rutter, M.D., Jungian psychiatrist, author of Sex in the Forbidden Zone and Understanding and Preventing Sexual Harassment An extraordinary contribution to fostering gender reconciliation ... practical and empowering. – Angeles Arrien, Ph.D., cultural anthropologist, author of The Four-Fold Way and The Second Half of Life [The] profound crisis in relations between men and women in today’s world causes enormous suffering ... Divine Duality is an extraordinary and groundbreaking book ... that holds great promise as a way to its alleviation. – Stanislav Grof, M.D., author of Psychology of the Future and The Ultimate Journey

The Big Book of Odia Literature
The Big Book of Odia Literature

Author: Manu Dash

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2024-07-22

Total Pages: 695

ISBN-13: 9357089519

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With a literary history spanning centuries, the languages of Odisha have found myriad expression in prose, poetry, mythology, history, and politics. The Big Book of Odia Literature goes where very few have dared—into a history of language, literature and song that can be traced back all the way to the tenth century. In this careful curation, The Big Book curates essays, stories, poems, and plays that have defined the culture of a state and a people. A first of its kind, the volume is for lovers of linguistic history and literary traditions.

Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town
Women, Wellbeing, and the Ethics of Domesticity in an Odia Hindu Temple Town

Author: Usha Menon

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-01

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 8132208854

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This book is a detailed ethnography of traditional, predominantly upper-caste, sequestered Hindu women in the temple town of Bhubaneswar in Odisha, a state in eastern India. It elaborates on a distinctive paradigm of domesticity and explicates a particular model of human wellbeing among this category. Part of the growing literature in “third wave” or “multicultural feminism”, it seeks to broaden the parameters of feminist discourse by going beyond questions of individual liberty or gender equality to examine the potential for female empowerment that exists in the context of these women’s lives. Its aims are twofold: first, to represent these women in ways that they themselves would recognize; and, second, to interpret, rather than merely “translate”, the beliefs and practices of the temple town such that their underlying logic becomes readily accessible to readers, even those unfamiliar with the Hindu world.

Appreciating Melodrama
Appreciating Melodrama

Author: Piyush Roy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-01-30

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9354354882

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Appreciating Melodrama: Theory and Practice in Indian Cinema and Television seeks to identify and appreciate the continual influence of the ancient Sanskrit drama treatise, the Natyashastra, and its theory of aesthetics, the rasa theory, on the unique narrative attributes of Indian cinema. This volume of work critically engages with a representative sample of landmark films from 100 years of Indian film history across genres, categories, regions and languages. This is the first time a case study-based rigorous academic review of popular Indian cinema is done using the Indian aesthetic appreciation theory of rasa (affect/emotion). It proposes a theoretical model for film appreciation, especially for content made in the melodramatic genre, and challenges existing First World/Euro-American film criticism canons and notions that privilege cinematic 'realism' over other narrative forms, which will generate passionate debates for and against its propositions in future studies and research on films. This is a valuable academic reference book for students of film and theatre, world cinema and Indian cinema studies, South Asian studies and culture, Indology and the 'Sociology of Cinema' studies. It is a must-have reference text in the curriculum of both practical-oriented acting schools, as well as courses and modules focusing on a theoretical study of cinema, such as film criticism and appreciation, and the history of movies and performance studies.

Literary and Cultural Readings of Goddess Spirituality
Literary and Cultural Readings of Goddess Spirituality

Author: Anway Mukhopadhyay

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1443855537

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This volume explores the potentials of Goddess spirituality in the field of cultural critique, and strings together innovative readings of already existing literary texts and cultural phenomena from the critical perspective of Goddess spirituality. The chapters explore a colourful array of texts and authors, and focus on issues as diverse as the persistence of the figure of the Magna Mater in the life, writing and thought of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, the inability of Advaita Vedanta to come out of the shadow of the Great Mother, the possibility of pluralizing the Eurocentric notion of the Muse by invoking the figure of Goddess Sarasvati in the field of English Studies, and a reappraisal of Kipling’s Kim from the perspective of the philosophical and spiritual discourses of Prajnaparamita, the Buddhist Goddess of Perfect Wisdom. The book also offers a comparative study of Minoan Goddess Spirituality and tantric philosophy with reference to Aphrodite, Diotima and the Indian Mother Goddesses, the possibility of simultaneously tantricizing notions of modernity and modernizing tantra itself with reference to the works of Lata Mani and William Schindler, and an investigation of the Mother-centric spiritual sensibilities in various religious discourses and devotional literatures, among other discussions. In short, this book investigates the possibilities of inserting the figure of the Great Mother into the critical domain of cultural pluralism, thereby celebrating a multiculturalism that is not based on violence and conflict (antagonism) but grounded in harmony. The Mother is seen by the discourse articulated here mainly as a middle ground between flesh and spirit, knowledge and passion, justice and compassion – and, in the red shadow of the Mother, social epistemologies and academic discourses are radically renegotiated.

Critical Discourse in Odia
Critical Discourse in Odia

Author: Jatindra Kumar Nayak

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1000470466

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This volume forms part of the Critical Discourses in South Asia series, which deals with schools, movements and discursive practices in major South Asian languages. It offers crucial insights into the making of Odia literature and its critical tradition across a century. The book brings together English translation of major writings of influential figures dealing with literary criticism and theory, aesthetic and performative traditions, and re-interpretations of primary concepts and categories in Odia. It presents twenty-five key texts in literary and cultural studies from late-nineteenth century to early-twenty-first century, translated by experts for the first time into English. These seminal essays explore complex interconnections between socio-historical events in the colonial and post-Independence period in Odisha and the language movement. They discuss themes such as the evolving idea of literature and criteria of critical evaluation; revision and expansion of the literary canon; the transition from orality to print; emergence of new reading practices resulting in shifts in aesthetic sensibility; dialectics of tradition and modernity; and the formation, consolidation and political consequences of a language-based identity. Comprehensive and authoritative, this volume offers an overview of the history of critical thought in Odia literature in South Asia. It will be essential for scholars and researchers of Odia language and literature, literary criticism, literary theory, comparative literature, Indian literature, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, performance studies, history, sociology, regional studies and South Asian studies. It will also interest the Odia-speaking diaspora and those working on the intellectual history of Odisha and Eastern India and conservation of language and culture.

Of Reels, Romance and Retakes
Of Reels, Romance and Retakes

Author: Sanjoy Patnaik

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-24

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1000994066

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Of Reels, Romance and Retakes carries the reader on a fascinating journey into the genesis, evolution and reception of Odia cinema. Telling the story of its quiet emergence in 1936, the book goes on to chronicle its unexpected triumphs in the coming decades when cinema arose as an undisputed cultural form of both the middle class and the masses. The account the book gives of how Odia cinema, aesthetically intertwined with the indigenous folk and literary tradition, carried forward both the project of modernity and Odia cultural identity is particularly illuminating and instructive. At the same time it takes an introspective look at the crisis Odia cinema faces now, sandwiched as it is between two competing social trends - one following the route to Hindi as the chief language of entertainment and the other that is focused on regional cultural assertion as a key to commercial success. On the whole, it is a timely and much awaited book that seeks to construct the hitherto uncharted ‘social narratives’ of cinema in Odisha.

Fierce Shakti, Fierce Love
Fierce Shakti, Fierce Love

Author: Mari P. Ziolkowski

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2010-11-25

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 0557888018

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From the realms of consciousness studies and the shamanic, from pre-history, myth and religion, from shakta tantric India - out of our psyches her archetypal power calls. Journey along with one western woman who heeds the call of the dark goddess Kali Ma. Follow her path in research and dreams, meditations and breathwork. Jump into the void, the chaos, the black night of the cosmos- as she is challenged to claim the fierceness, ecstasy, and oneness of the dark goddess - the birthright of all women. [A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Religion, with a concentration in Women Spirituality, 2003].