Tantra is a family of rituals modeled on those of the Vedas and their attendant texts and lineages. These rituals typically involve the visualization of a deity, offerings, and the chanting of his or her mantra. Common variations include visualizing the deity in the act of sexual union with a consort, visualizing oneself as the deity, and "transgressive" acts such as token consumption of meat or alcohol. Most notoriously, non-standard or ritualized sex is sometimes practiced. This accounts for Tantra's negative reputation in some quarters and its reception in the West primarily as a collection of sexual practices.
Although some today extol Tantra's liberating qualities, the role of women remains controversial. Traditionally there are two views of women and Tantra. Either the feminine is a metaphor and actual women are altogether absent, or Tantra involves the transgressive use of women's bodies to serve male interests. Loriliai Biernacki presents an alternative view, in which women are revered, worshipped, and considered worthy of spiritual attainment. Her primary sources are a collection of eight relatively modern Tantric texts written in Sanskrit from the 15th through the 18th century. Her analysis of these texts reveals a view of women that is generally positive and empowering. She focuses on four topics: 1) the "Kali Practice," in which women appear not only as objects of reverence but as practitioners and gurus; 2) the Tantric sex rite, especially in the case that, contrary to other Tantric texts, the preference is for wives as ritual consorts; 3) feminine language and the gendered implications of mantra; and 4) images of male violence towards women in tantric myths.Biernacki, by choosing to analyse eight particular Sanskrit texts, argues that within the tradition of Tantra there exists a representation of women in which the female is an authoritative, powerful, equal participant in the Tantric ritual practice.

Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "Hinduism" came into being. He argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalists and missionaries. Rather, he says, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors as well, who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, sati, tolerance, and conversion.

In this book, Tracy Pintchman has assembled ten leading scholars of Hinduism to explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's rituals and their lives beyond ritual. The book focuses particularly on the relationship of women's ritual practices to domesticity, exposing and exploring the nuances, complexities, and limits of this relationship. In many cultural and historical contexts, including contemporary India, women's everyday lives tend to revolve heavily around domestic and interpersonal concerns, especially care for children, the home, husbands, and other relatives. Hence, women's religiosity also tends to emphasize the domestic realm and the relationships most central to women. But women's religious concerns certainly extend beyond domesticity. Furthermore, even the domestic religious activities that Hindu women perform may not merely replicate or affirm traditionally formulated domestic ideals but may function strategically to reconfigure, reinterpret, criticize, or even reject such ideals.
This volume takes a fresh look at issues of the relationship between Hindu women's ritual practices and normative domesticity. In so doing, it emphasizes female innovation and agency in constituting and transforming both ritual and the domestic realm and calls attention to the limitations of normative domesticity as a category relevant to many forms of Hindu women's religious practice.

Hanuman, the devoted monkey helper of Rama and Sita, has long been recognized as a popular character in India's ancient Ramayana epic. But more recently he has also become one of the most beloved and worshiped gods in the Hindu pantheon - enshrined in majestic new temples, but equally present in poster art, advertising, and mass media. Drawing on Sanskrit and vernacular texts, classical iconography and modern TV serials, and extensive fieldwork and interviews, Philip Lutgendorf challenges the academic cliche of Hanuman as a "minor" or "folk" deity by exploring his complex and growing role in South Asian religion and culture. This wide-ranging study examines the historical evolution of Hanuman's worship, his close association with Shiva and goddesses, his invocation in tantric ritual, his physical immortality and enduring presence in sacred sites, and his appeal to devotees who include scholars, wrestlers, healers, politicians, and middle-class urbanites.
Lutgendorf also offers a rich array of entertaining stories not previously available in English: an expanding epic cycle that he christens the "Hanumayana." Arguing that Hanuman's role as cosmic "middle man" is intimately linked to his embodiment in a charming and provocative simian form, Lutgendorf moves beyond the Indian subcontinent to interrogate the wider human fascination with anthropoid primates as boundary beings and as potent signifiers of both Self and Other.

Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, Casting Kings explores the manner in which semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand, and also subvert, caste hierarchies. A number of scholars have recently contended that caste is invented and thus a fiction of a kind. But focus in these studies is typically placed on the way caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners such as colonial officials. In this book, by contrast, the author argues that Bhats themselves understand the imaginative dimensions of caste relations. Indeed, such insights are shown to lie at the heart of the Bhats traditional profession of praise- and insult-singing. Likewise, the author demonstrates how the ability to cleverly rework and even sabotage lingering caste inequalities continues to form the basis for Bhat claims to status and dignity in contemporary India.

Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation explores Hinduism and the distinction between the secular and religious on a global scale. According to Ranganathan, a careful philosophical study of Hinduism reveals it as the microcosm of philosophical disagreements with Indian resources, across a variety of topics, including: ethics, logic, the philosophy of thought, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. This analysis offers an original and fresh diagnosis of studying Hinduism, colonialism, and a global rise of hyper-nationalism, as well as the frequent acrimony between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions. This text is appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate courses on Hinduism, and Indian philosophy, and can be used as an advanced introduction to the problems of philosophy with South Asian resources.

Many people assume, largely because of Gandhi's legacy, that Hinduism is a religion of non-violence. In this 2006 book William R. Pinch shows just how wrong this assumption is. Using the life of Anupgiri Gosain, a Hindu ascetic who lived at the end of the eighteenth century, he demonstrates that Hindu warrior ascetics were an important component of the South Asian military labor market in the medieval and early modern Indian past, and crucial to the rise of British imperialism. Today, they occupy a prominent place in modern Indian imaginations, ironically as romantic defenders of a Hindu India against foreign invasion, even though they are almost totally absent from Indian history. William R. Pinch's innovative and gloriously composed book sets out to piece together the story of the rise and demise of warrior asceticism in India from the 1500s to the present. It will appeal to students of religion and historians of empire.

As religion and politics become ever more intertwined, relationships between religion and political parties are of increasing global political significance. This handbook responds to that development, providing important results of current research involving religion and politics, focusing on: democratisation, democracy, party platform formation, party moderation and secularisation, social constituency representation and interest articulation. Covering core issues, new debates, and country case studies, the handbook provides a comprehensive overview of fundamentals and new directions in the subject. Adopting a comparative approach, it examines the relationships between religion and political parties in a variety of contexts, regions and countries with a focus on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Contributions cover such topics as: religion, secularisation and modernisation; religious fundamentalism and terrorism; the role of religion in conflict resolution and peacebuilding; religion and its connection to state, democratisation and democracy; and regional case studies covering Asia, the Americas, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa. This comprehensive handbook provides crucial information for students, researchers and professionals researching the topics of politics, religion, comparative politics, secularism, religious movements, political parties and interest groups, and religion and sociology.

In analyzing the parallels between myths glorifying the Indian Great Goddess, Durga, and those glorifying the Sun, Surya, found in the Markandeya Purana, this book argues for an ideological ecosystem at work in the Markandeya Purana privileging worldly values, of which Indian kings, the Goddess (Devi), the Sun (Surya), Manu and Markandeya himself are paragons. This book features a salient discovery in Sanskrit narrative text: just as the Markandeya Purana houses the Devi Mahatmya glorifying the supremacy of the Indian Great Goddess, Durga, it also houses a Surya Mahatmya, glorifying the supremacy of the Sun, Surya, in much the same manner. This book argues that these mahatmyas were meaningfully and purposefully positioned in the Markandeya Purana, while previous scholarship has considered this haphazard interpolation for sectarian aims. The book demonstrates that deliberate compositional strategies make up the Saura-Sakta symbiosis found in these mirrored mahatmyas. Moreover, the author explores what he calls the "dharmic double helix" of Brahmanism, most explicitly articulated by the structural opposition between pravrtti (worldly) and nivrtti (other-worldy) dharmas. As the first narrative study of the Surya Mahatmya, along with the first study of the Markandeya Purana (or any Purana), as a narrative whole, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Religion, Hindu Studies, South Asian Studies, Goddess Studies, Narrative Theory and Comparative Mythology.

Questioning the conventional depiction of India as a nation divided between religious communities, Gottschalk shows that individuals living in India have multiple identities, some of which cut across religious boundaries. The stories narrated by villagers living in the northern state of Bihar depict everyday social interactions that transcend the simple divide of Hindu and Muslim.

This major study reconsiders the creation of the Gandhian legend through the myriad texts and images that helped spread it through both India and the Western world. In revealing how the picture of the Mahatma as saint-as-politician was founded on Indian nationalistic selectivity and limited Western representations of Gandhi, Claude Markovits shows how Gandhi s legend has obscured the facts of his public career. Gandhi's professional role in the public sphere, Markovits argues, was heavily influenced by his long and critical phase of maturation in South Africa, a period often dismissed as the precursor to his celebrated work in India. Markovits proposes that Gandhi s later Indian career, marked by his meteoric rise to prominence, was the result of his own radical self-reinvention as he negotiated the pitfalls of political life in order to create his influential political manifesto.In reevaluating critical stages of Gandhi's career, and his sometimes ambivalent ideological positions, Markovits confronts the discrepancies between his early and late careers, closely rereading the Mahatma's varying intellectual positions as described both within his own writings and in those by commentators and biographers. Rather than seeing Gandhi as an upholder of traditional Indian values, Markovits stresses the paradoxical modernity of Gandhi's anti-modernism.The picture of Gandhi that emerges from "The Un-Gandhian Gandhi" is of a contradictory, multifaceted figure, whose peculiar modernity, and susceptibility to varying appropriations, makes him of enduring significance for future generations.

One of India's greatest epics, the Ramayana pervades the country's moral and cultural consciousness. For generations it has served as a bedtime story for Indian children, while at the same time engaging the interest of philosophers and theologians. Believed to have been composed by Valmiki sometime between the eighth and sixth centuries BC, the Ramayana tells the tragic and magical story of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, an incarnation of Lord Visnu, born to rid the earth of the terrible demon Ravana. An idealized heroic tale ending with the inevitable triumph of good over evil, the Ramayana is also an intensely personal story of family relationships, love and loss, duty and honor, of harem intrigue, petty jealousies, and destructive ambitions. All this played out in a universe populated by larger-than-life humans, gods and celestial beings, wondrous animals and terrifying demons. With her magnificent translation and superb introduction, Arshia Sattar has successfully bridged both time and space to bring this ancient classic to modern English readers.

We live in an era defined by a sense of separation, even in the midst of networked connectivity. As cultural climates sour and divisive political structures spread, we are left wondering about our ties to each other. Consequently, there is no better time than now to reconsider ideas of unity. In The Ethics of Oneness, Jeremy David Engels reads the Bhagavad Gita alongside the works of American thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Drawing on this rich combination of traditions, Engels presents the notion that individuals are fundamentally interconnected in their shared divinity. In other words, everything is one. If the lessons of oneness are taken to heart, particularly as they were expressed and celebrated by Whitman, and the ethical challenges of oneness considered seriously, Engels thinks it is possible to counter the pervasive and problematic American ideals of hierarchy, exclusion, violence, and domination.

The Rajputs ruled the vast majority of the kingdoms that were joined together after Indian Independence to form the state Rajasthan, "Land of Kings." An important part of Rajput religion is the worship of "heroes" who have died in battle. In this book, Harlan explores the idea of the Rajput hero. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in stories about heroes and their worship. She looks at the differences between female and male storytellers, the relationships of the hero to the woman in his tale, and the relationship of the hero to the goddess for whom he is both a sacrifice and henchman. She obtains her materials from interviews with Rajput families and their servants, from songfests, from bystanders at shrines, from ritual specialists. Ultimately she shows how heroic traditions encapsulate and express ideals of perfection and masculinity, defied most visibly against the backdrop of domesticity and femininity. More broadly she argues that heroes reflect ever-changing valuations of history, and serve as sources of inspiration for facing contemporary challenges (domestic, communal, national) and concerns about the future.

A series of books aimed at offering the reader a glimpse inside the places where people go to spend extended periods of time -- sometimes entire lifetimes -- focused on prayer, meditation, or study. Each volume conveys a detailed and accurate view of daily life "inside the walls" in clear, jargon-free language, and also serves as an introduction to the heart of a great spiritual tradition.

Ashram is the general term for a study center, retreat house, or monastic community in Hinduism, the millennia-old religious tradition of India. Ashrams of various kinds are now found throughout North America, and are popular venues for spiritual retreats, workshops, and classes.

Lighting the Lamp of Wisdom takes you into a typical week of retreat inside an ashram to demystify the ashram experience and show you what to expect from your own visit. You will experience all the elements of a typical day and week, including:
-- The colorful puja, or worship services
-- Meditation practices and yoga classes
-- Classes on Hindu scriptures
-- Chanting and music
-- Satsang: an informal talk with the ashram's guru
-- Work practice

...and much more.

You'll also meet some of the people who visit ashrams to hear their reasons for going, as well as the spiritual benefits they derive from the experience. Also included are a helpful glossary, a list of books for further reading, and a directory to ashrams in North America and elsewhere that will enable you to locate one near you and set up your own visit.

Through analysis of an impressive array of "low" and "high" Hindi literature, particularly pamphlets, tracts, magazines and newspapers, compounded with archival data, Gupta explores the emerging discourse of gender and sexuality, which was essential to the development of notions of Hindu nationalism and community identity in the colonial period. The book offers an exceptionally nuanced account of Hindu gender politics.

One of today's foremost mystics introduces readers to the thought of one of the most important spiritual teachers of the past century.

Bede Griffiths English Benedictine monk and lifelong friend of C.S. Lewis, who was his tutor at Oxford wrote in 1955 to a friend: "I'm going out to India to seek the other half of my soul." There, he explored the intersection of Hinduism and Christianity and was a driving force behind the growth of interspiritual awareness so common today, yet almost unheard of a half-century ago.

Wayne Teasdale, a longtime personal friend and student of Griffiths, provides readers with an intriguing view into the thoughts, beliefs, and life of this champion of interreligious acceptance and harmony. This volume is the first in-depth study of Bede Griffiths' contemplative experience and thought.

Fully exploring the antecedents and development of Griffiths' theory that the Christian mystery can be expressed through the worldview of Hinduism, Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to His Interspiritual Thought is a vital starting point for any spiritual seeker who wants to understand the shared territories of these two great faiths."

Kabir was an extraordinary oral poet whose works have been sung and recited by millions throughout North India for half a millenium. He may have been illiterate--'I do not touch ink or paper, this hand has never grasped a pen'--and he preached an abrasive, sometimes shocking, always uncompromising message that exhorted his audience to shed their delusions, pretensions, and empty orthodoxies in favour of an intense, direct, and personal confrontation with the truth. Thousands of poems are popularly attributed to Kabir, but only a few written collections have survived over the centuries. The Bijak is one of the most important, and is the sacred book of those who follow Kabir.

Over a period of ten years, William Sax studied the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Garhwal, located in north India. These people are deeply devoted to the great Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. Sax attended and participated in dozens of performances of the pandav lila - a ritual reenactment of scenes from the Mahabharata in dance - and observed in context in village life. He also discovered and documented a bizarre and fascinating cult whose existence was only previously rumoured, which worships and exalts the villains of the epic and reviles the usual heroes. This book not only opens a window on a fascinating (and threatened) aspect of rural Indian life and Hinduism as a living religion, but provides an accessible introduction to the Mahabharata itself, including lively translations of many songs and poems based on the epic, and a prologue containing a concise and readable summary of the entire story.

Over a period of ten years, William Sax studied the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Garhwal, located in north India. These people are deeply devoted to the great Indian national epic, the Mahabharata. Sax attended and participated in dozens of performances of the pandav lila - a ritual reenactment of scenes from the Mahabharata in dance - and observed in context in village life. He also discovered and documented a bizarre and fascinating cult whose existence was only previously rumoured, which worships and exalts the villains of the epic and reviles the usual heroes. This book not only opens a window on a fascinating (and threatened) aspect of rural Indian life and Hinduism as a living religion, but provides an accessible introduction to the Mahabharata itself, including lively translations of many songs and poems based on the epic, and a prologue containing a concise and readable summary of the entire story.

This vibrant collection presents 145 brief Bengali lyric poems dedicated to the Hindu goddesses Kali and Uma. These poems - many of which are presented here for the first time in English translation - were written from the early eighteenth century up to the contemporary period. They represent the unique Bengali tradition of goddess worship (Saktism) as it developed over this period. McDermott's lucid introduction places these works in their historical context and shows how images of the goddesses evolved over the centuries. Her lively translations of these poetic lyrics evoke the passion and devotion of the followers of Kali and Uma and shed light on the history and practice of goddess worship.

These enchanting stories from early modern Bengal reveal how Hindu and Muslim traditions converged on timeless themes of human morality, social culture, and survival. The Bengali stories in this collection are first and foremost tales of survival. Each story in Needle at the Bottom of the Sea underscores the need for people to work together-not just to overcome the challenges of living in the Sundarban swamps of Bengal, but also to ease hostilities born of social differences in religion, caste, and economic class. Translated by award-winning scholar of early modern Bengali literature Tony K. Stewart, Needle at the Bottom of the Sea brims with fantasy and excitement. Sufi protagonists travel through a world of wonder where tigers talk and men magically grow into giants, a Hindu princess falls in love with a Muslim holy man, and goddesses rub shoulders with kings and merchants. Across religion, class, and gender, what binds these fabulous stories together is the characters' pursuit of living honorably and morally in a difficult, corrupt world.

"In BANARAS, Diana Eck . . . has written a notable book about this greatest of Indian pilgrimage sites. . . . Her brilliant, comprehensive book seems likely to remain for a long time the definitive work on this great Indian city".--WASHINGTON POST. 61 photos. 7 maps.