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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
The first comprehensive book on alcohol in pre-modern India, An
Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions uses a wide
range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore drinks
and styles of drinking, as well as rationales for abstinence from
the earliest Sanskrit written records through the second millennium
CE. Books about the global history of alcohol almost never give
attention to India. But a wide range of texts provide plenty of
evidence that there was a thriving culture of drinking in ancient
and medieval India, from public carousing at the brewery and
drinking house to imbibing at festivals and weddings. There was
also an elite drinking culture depicted in poetic texts (often in
an erotic mode), and medical texts explain how to balance drink and
health. By no means everyone drank, however, and there were many
sophisticated religious arguments for abstinence. McHugh begins by
surveying the intoxicating drinks that were available, including
grain beers, palm toddy, and imported wine, detailing the ways
people used grains, sugars, fruits, and herbs over the centuries to
produce an impressive array of liquors. He presents myths that
explain how drink came into being and how it was assigned the
ritual and legal status it has in our time. The book also explores
Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain moral and legal texts on drink and
abstinence, as well as how drink is used in some Tantric rituals,
and translates in full a detailed description of the goddess
Liquor, Suradevi. Cannabis, betel, soma, and opium are also
considered. Finally, McHugh investigates what has happened to these
drinks, stories, and theories in the last few centuries. An Unholy
Brew brings to life the overlooked, complex world of brewing,
drinking, and abstaining in pre-modern India, and offers
illuminating case studies on topics such as law and medicine, even
providing recipes for some drinks.
Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets provides an ethnographic study of
varmakkalai, or "the art of the vital spots," a South Indian
esoteric tradition that combines medical practice and martial arts.
Although siddha medicine is officially part of the Indian
Government's medically pluralistic health-care system, very little
of a reliable nature has been written about it. Drawing on a
diverse array of materials, including Tamil manuscripts, interviews
with practitioners, and his own personal experience as an
apprentice, Sieler traces the practices of varmakkalai both in
different religious traditions-such as Yoga and Ayurveda-and within
various combat practices. His argument is based on in-depth
ethnographic research in the southernmost region of India, where
hereditary medico-martial practitioners learn their occupation from
relatives or skilled gurus through an esoteric, spiritual education
system. Rituals of secrecy and apprenticeship in varmakkalai are
among the important focal points of Sieler's study. Practitioners
protect their esoteric knowledge, but they also engage in a kind of
"lure and withdrawal"--a performance of secrecy--because secrecy
functions as what might be called "symbolic capital." Sieler argues
that varmakkalai is, above all, a matter of texts in practice;
knowledge transmission between teacher and student conveys tacit,
non-verbal knowledge, and constitutes a "moral economy." It is not
merely plain facts that are communicated, but also moral
obligations, ethical conduct and tacit, bodily knowledge. Lethal
Spots, Vital Secrets will be of interest to students of religion,
medical anthropologists, historians of medicine, indologists, and
martial arts and performance studies.
Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars
from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How
does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults
on its pluralistic values? India's stunning linguistic, cultural,
and religious diversity has been supported since Independence by a
political structure that emphasizes equal rights for all, and
protects liberties of religion and speech. But a decent
Constitution does not implement itself, and challenges to these
core values repeatedly arise---not least in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, when the rise of Hindu Right movements
threatened to destabilize the nation and upend its core values, in
the wake of a notorious pogrom in the state of Gujarat in which
approximately 2000 Muslim civilians were killed.
Focusing on this time of tension and threat, the essays in this
volume consider how a pluralistic democracy managed to survive.
They examine the role of political parties and movements, including
the women's movement, as well as the role of the arts, the press,
the media, and a historical legacy of pluralistic thought and
critical argument. Featuring essays from eminent scholars in
history, religious studies, political science, economics, women's
studies, and media studies, Pluralism and Democracy in India offers
an urgently needed case study in democratic survival. As Nehru said
of India on the eve of Independence: ''These dreams are for India,
but they are also for the world.'' The analysis this volume offers
illuminates not only the past and future of one nation, but the
prospects of democracy for all.
Tantric traditions in both Buddhism and Hinduism are thriving
throughout Asia and in Asian diasporic communities around the
world, yet they have been largely ignored by Western scholars until
now. This collection of original essays fills this gap by examining
the ways in which Tantric Buddhist traditions have changed over
time and distance as they have spread across cultural boundaries in
Asia. The book is divided into three sections dedicated to South
Asia, Central Asia, and East and Southeast Asia. The essays cover
such topics as the changing ideal of masculinity in Buddhist
literature, the controversy triggered by the transmission of the
Indian Buddhist deity Heruka to Tibet in the 10th century, and the
evolution of a Chinese Buddhist Tantric tradition in the form of
the True Buddha School. The book as a whole addresses complex and
contested categories in the field of religious studies, including
the concept of syncretism and the various ways that the change and
transformation of religious traditions can be described and
articulated. The authors, leading scholars in Tantric studies, draw
on a wide array of methodologies from the fields of history,
anthropology, art history, and sociology. Tantric Traditions in
Transmission and Translation is groundbreaking in its attempt to
look past religious, linguistic, and cultural boundaries.
Anandamayi Ma (1896-1982) is generally regarded as the most
important Hindu woman saint of the twentieth century. Venerated
alternately as a guru and as an incarnation of God on earth, Ma had
hundreds of thousands of devotees. Through the creation of a
religious movement and a vast network of ashrams-unprecedented for
a woman-Ma presented herself as an authority figure in a society
where female gurus were not often recognized. Because of her
widespread influence, Ma is one of the rare Hindu saints whose cult
has outlived her. Today, her tomb is a place of veneration, and she
is venerated by those who knew her and by those too young to have
known her. Orianne Aymard has performed extensive fieldwork among
Ma's current devotees. In this book, she examines what happens to a
cult after the death of its leader. Does it decline, stagnate, or
grow? Or is it rather transformed into something else entirely?
Aymard's work sheds new light not only on Hindu sainthood-and
particularly female Hindu sainthood-but on the nature of
charismatic religious leadership and devotion
Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar
characters on the American popular culture scene. Jane Iwamura
examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and
provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian
religions in American mass media. Encounters with monks, gurus,
bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of
ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions provided initial
engagements with Asian spiritual traditions. Virtual Orientalism
shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements
with specific individuals to mediated relations with a
conventionalized icon: the Oriental Monk. Visually and psychically
compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of
translation''--a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities
and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who
generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian
religiosity is made manageable-psychologically, socially, and
politically--for popular culture consumption. Iwamura's insightful
study shows that though popular engagement with Asian religions in
the United States has increased, the fact that much of this has
taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of "the
spiritual East" obdurate and especially difficult to challenge.
Provincial Hinduism explores intersecting religious worlds in an
ordinary Indian city that remains close to its traditional roots,
while bearing witness to the impact of globalization. Daniel Gold
looks at modern religious life in Gwalior, in the state of Mahdya
Pradesh, drawing attention to the often complex religious
sensibilities behind ordinary Hindu practice. Turning his attention
to public places of worship, Gold describes temples of different
types in the city, their legendary histories, and the people who
patronize them. Issues of community and identity are discussed
throughout the book, but particularly in the context of caste and
class. Gold also explores concepts of community among Gwalior's
Maharashtrians and Sindhis, groups with roots in other parts of the
subcontinent that have settled in the city for generations.
Functioning as internal diasporas, they organize in different ways
and make distinctive contributions to local religious life. The
book concludes by exploring characteristically modern religious
institutions. Gold considers three religious service organizations
inspired by the nineteenth-century reformer Swami Vivekenanda, as
well as two groups that stem from the nineteenth-century Radhasoami
tradition but have developed in different ways: the very large and
populist North Indian movement around the late Baba Jaigurudev (d.
2012); and the devotees of Sant Kripal, a regional guru based in
Gwalior who has a much smaller, middle-class following. As the
first book to analyze religious life in an ordinary, midsized
Indian city, Provincial Hinduism will be an invaluable resource for
scholars of contemporary Indian religion, culture, and society.
Neelima Shukla-Bhatt offers an illuminating study of Narsinha
Mehta, one of the most renowned saint-poets of medieval India and
the most celebrated bhakti (devotion) poet from Gujarat, whose
songs and sacred biography formed a vital source of moral
inspiration for Gandhi. Exploring manuscripts, medieval texts,
Gandhi's more obscure writings, and performances in multiple
religious and non-religious contexts, including modern popular
media, Shukla-Bhatt shows that the songs and sacred narratives
associated with the saint-poet have been sculpted by performers and
audiences into a popular source of moral inspiration.
Drawing on the Indian concept of bhakti-rasa (devotion as nectar),
Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat reveals that the sustained popularity of
the songs and narratives over five centuries, often across
religious boundaries and now beyond devotional contexts in modern
media, is the result of their combination of inclusive religious
messages and aesthetic appeal in performance. Taking as an example
Gandhi's perception of the songs and stories as vital cultural
resources for social reconstruction, the book suggests that when
religion acquires the form of popular culture, it becomes a widely
accessible platform for communication among diverse groups.
Shukla-Bhatt expands upon the scholarship on the embodied and
public dimension of bhakti through detailed analysis of multiple
public venues of performance and commentary, including YouTube
videos.
This study provides a vivid picture of the Narasinha tradition, and
will be a crucial resource for anyone seeking to understand the
power of religious performative traditions in popular media.
Throughout the history of Indian religions, the ascetic figure is
most closely identified with power. Power is a by-product of the
ascetic path, and is displayed in the ability to fly, walk on water
or through dense objects, read minds, discern the former lives of
others, see into the future, harm others, or simply levitate one's
body. Using religio-philosophical discourses and narratives from
epic, puranic, and hagiographical literature, Indian Asceticism
focuses on the powers exhibited by ascetics of India from ancient
to modern time. The discourses and narratives show ascetics
performing violent acts and using language to curse and harm
opponents. They also give rise to questions about how power and
violence are related to the phenomenon of play. Olson discusses the
erotic, the demonic, the comic, and the miraculous forms of play
and their connections to power and violence. His focus is on
Hinduism, from early Indian religious history to more modern times,
but evidence is also presented from both Buddhism and Jainism,
which provides evidence that the subject matter of this book
pervades India's major indigenous religious traditions. The book
also includes a look at the extent to which contemporary findings
in cognitive science can add to our understanding about these
various powers; Olson argues that violence is built into the
practice of the ascetic. Indian Asceticism culminates with an
attempt to rethink the nature of power in a way that does justice
to the literary evidence from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources.
Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to
researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs
by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly
transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in
Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major
objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions
of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs
accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, its duties,
and its ultimate destiny. His songs also contain thinly veiled
references to esoteric yogic practices (sadhana), including
body-centered Hathayogic techniques that are related to those found
in Buddhist, Kaula, Natha, and Sufi medieval tantric literature.
Dr. Salomon's translation of the work is the first dedicated
English translation of Lalan's songs to closely follow the Bangla
text, with all of its dialectical variations, and is here produced
alongside the original text. Although her untimely death left her
work unpublished, the editors have worked diligently to reconstruct
her translations from her surviving printed and handwritten
manuscripts. The result is a finished product that can finally
share her groundbreaking scholarship on Baul traditions with the
world.
Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century
North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others
in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars
and translators usually attend to written collections, but these
present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained
vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms.
Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya
Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in
exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content
and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book
investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative
traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral,
written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways. As texts
and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings
readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere,
and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Song is rich in stories of
individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular
organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between
religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a
continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between
Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities,
pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the
religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and
psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized
caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits
and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.
An ancient conversation for a modern audience - anyone who has ever
asked 'what is the purpose of life? or 'who am I?' will find
something in this book. The Bhagavad Gita has been around a long
time, but remains little known outside India. This edition sets out
to change that. The ancient Gita is a world text dealing with the
mysteries of life. At its heart is a conversation between the soul
and God. Ranchor Prime's version adopts a non-sectarian approach,
making the Gita relevant to those of all religions or none, and
emphasising the link between religion and self-development. It is
distinguished by its easy accessibility. His section-by-section
commentary opens the text to the spiritual seeker. He never loses
sight of the audience for his book, and that he wants his readers
to understand the Gita in a personal way.
Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Central
Himalayan region of Kumaon, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine
Embodiment from the Central Himalayas explores ideas of justice by
drawing on oral and written narratives, stories, testimonies, and
rituals told and performed in relation to the 'God of Justice',
Goludev, and other regional deities. The book seeks to answer
several questions: How is the concept of justice defined in South
Asia? Why do devotees seek out Goludev for the resolution of
matters of justice instead of using the secular courts? What are
the sociological and political consequences of situating divine
justice within a secular, democratic, modern context? Moreover, how
do human beings locate themselves within the indeterminateness and
struggles of their everyday existence? What is the place of
language and ritual in creating intimacy and self? How is justice
linked to intimacy, truth, and being human? The stories and
narratives in this book revolve around Goludev's own story and
deeds, as well as hundreds of petitions (manauti) written on paper
that devotees hang on his temple walls, and rituals (jagar) that
involve spirit possession and the embodiment of the deity through
designated mediums. The jagars are powerful, extraordinary
experiences, mesmerizing because of their intensity but also
because of what they imply in terms of how we conceptualize being
being human with the seemingly limitless potential to shift, alter,
and transform ourselves through language and ritual practice. The
petitions, though silent and absent of the singing, drumming, and
choreography that accompany jagars, are equally powerful because of
their candid and intimate testimony to the aspirations, breakdowns,
struggles, and breakthroughs that circumscribe human existence.
Born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, on January the 5th, 1893, Sri Sri
Paramahansa Yogananda devoted his life to helping people of all
races and creeds to realize and express more fully in their lives
the beauty, nobility and true divinity of the human spirit. After
graduating from Calcutta University in 1915, Sri Yogananda was
initiated into "sannyas" by his guru Sri Sri Swami Sri Yukteswar
Giri. Sri Yukteswar had foretold that his life's mission was to
spread throughout the world India's ancient meditation technique of
"Kriya Yoga". Sri Yogananda accepted an invitation in 1920 to serve
as India's delegate to an International Congress of Religious
Liberals in Boston, USA. Paramahansa Yoganda founded Yogoda
Satsanga Society of India/Self-Realization Fellowship as the
channel for the dissemination of his teachings. Through his
writings and extensive lecture tours in India, America and Europe
he introduced thousands of truth-seekers to the ancient science and
philosophy of yoga and its universally applicable methods of
meditation. Paramahansaji entered "mahasamadhi" on March the 7th,
1952 in Los Angeles. This autobiography offers a look at the
ultimate mysteries of human existence and a portrait of one of the
great spiritual figures of the 20th century.
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