In literature and popular imagination, the Bauls of India and Bangladesh are characterized as musical mystics: orange-clad nomads of both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds. They wander the countryside and entertain with their passionate singing and unusual behavior, and they are especially well-known for their evocative songs, which challenge the caste system and sectarianism prevalent in South Asia.
Although Bauls claim to value women over men, little is known about the individual views and experiences of Baul women. Based on ethnographic research in both the predominantly Hindu context of West Bengal (India) and the Muslim country of Bangladesh, this book explores the everyday lives of Baul women. Lisa Knight examines the contradictory expectations regarding Baul women: on the one hand, the ideal of a group unencumbered by societal restraints and concerns and, on the other, the real constraints of feminine respectability that seemingly curtail women's mobility and public performances.
Knight demonstrates that Baul women respond to these conflicting expectations in various ways, sometimes adopting and other times subverting local gendered norms to craft meaningful lives. More so than their male counterparts, Baul women feel encumbered by norms. But rather than seeing Baul women's normative behavior as indicative of their conformity to gendered roles (and, therefore, failures as Bauls), Knight argues that these women creatively draw on societal expectations to transcend their social limits and create new paths.

This book studies the early development of Skanda-Karttikeya's Hindu cult from its earliest textual and material sources to the end of the Gupta Empire in the north of India. The text argues that Skanda's early 'popular' cult is found in Graha and Matr traditions oriented towards appeasing potentially dangerous spirits. Once propitiated, however, Skanda and his Grahas/ Matrs could become fierce protectors of their followers. During the Kusana and Gupta empires, this tradition gains the attention of rulers, who transform the deity's protective cult into one focused on the ruler's military prowess and right to rule. Once detached from his former popular traditions the deity's cult begins to falter in the north as it becomes increasingly focused on elite agendas.

Life History of Shirdi Sai Baba was originally written in Telugu by Ammula Sambasiva Rao, and translated into English by Thota Bhaskara Roa. The book delves deep into the details of the life of Shirdi Sai Baba right from his birth till his attainment of Samadhi. The author has expounded Sai Tatwa or Sai philosophy in a simple language, interspersed with engrossing anecdotes in the life of Sai devotees.

Muthuraj Swamy provides a fresh perspective on the world religions paradigm and 'interreligious dialogue'. By challenging the assumption that 'world religions' operate as essential entities separate from the lived experiences of practitioners, he shows that interreligious dialogue is in turn problematic as it is built on this very paradigm, and on the myth of religious conflict. Offering a critique of the idea of 'dialogue' as it has been advanced by its proponents such as religious leaders and theologians whose aims are to promote inter-religious conversation and understanding, the author argues that this approach is 'elitist' and that in reality, people do not make sharp distinctions between religions, nor do they separate political, economic, social and cultural beliefs and practices from their religious traditions. Case studies from villages in southern India explore how Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities interact in numerous ways that break the neat categories often used to describe each religion. Swamy argues that those who promote dialogue are ostensibly attempting to overcome the separate identities of religious practitioners through understanding, but in fact, they re-enforce them by encouraging a false sense of separation. The Problem with Interreligious Dialogue: Plurality, Conflict and Elitism in Hindu-Christian-Muslim Relations provides an innovative approach to a central issue confronting Religious Studies, combining both theory and ethnography.

A comprehensive guide to three global religions that have established strong local communities in South Africa, this work is a valuable resource for scholars, students in religious studies, African studies, anthropology, and history. Beginning with a general introduction to the immigrant origins, minority status, and global connections of each tradition, the book proceeds to organize and generously annotate the literature according to religion. This volume, combined with two other annotated bibliographies, "African Traditional Religion in South Africa" and "Christianity in South Africa" (both Greenwood, 1997), will become the standard reference text for South African religions.

With special attention to historical and social conditions, this work examines the distinctively South African forms of these important minority religions in South Africa. In each section, an introductory essay identifies significant themes. The bibliography annotations that follow are concise yet detailed essays, written in an engaging and accessible style and supported by an exhaustive index. The book, therefore, provides a full and complex profile of three religious traditions that are firmly located in South African history and society.

Argument and Design features fifteen essays by leading scholars of the Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, discussing the Mahabharata's upakhyanas, subtales that branch off from the central storyline and provide vantage points for reflecting on it. Contributors include: Vishwa Adluri, Joydeep Bagchee, Greg Bailey, Adam Bowles, Simon Brodbeck, Nicolas Dejenne, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Robert P. Goldman, Alf Hiltebeitel, Thennilapuram Mahadevan, Adheesh Sathaye, Bruce M. Sullivan, and Fernando Wulff Alonso.

The Upanishads are among the source books of the Hindu faith, being the concluding portion of the Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, also the Vedanta. This selection of translations by Swami Nikhilananda contains the Svetasvatara, Prasna and Mandukya Upanishads together with a special contribution to Western understanding of these important books in the form of a noteworthy essay on Hindu Ethics. Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction embodying a study of Hindu Ethics, and with Notes and Explantions based on the Commentary of Sri Sankaracharya, the great Eighth-Century Philosopher and Saint of India. Contents Include: Svetasvatara Upanishad - Prasna Upanishad - Mandukya Upanishad

Asian religious traditions have always been deeply concerned with "sins" and what to do about them. As the essays in this volume illustrate, what Buddhists in Tibet, India, China or Japan, what Jains, Daoists, Hindus or Sikhs considered to be a "sin" was neither one thing, nor exactly what the Abrahamic traditions meant by the term. "Sins"could be both undesireable behavior and unacceptable thoughts. In different contexts, at different times and places, a sin might be a ritual infraction or a violation of a rule of law; it could be a moral failing or a wrong belief. However defined, sins were considered so grave a hindrance to spiritual perfection, so profound a threat to the social order, that the search for their remedies through rituals of expiation, pilgrimage, confession, recitation of spells, or philosophical reflection, was one of the central quests of the religions studied here.

This book is a pioneering attempt to understand the prehistory of Hinduism in South Asia. Exploring religious processes in the Deccan region between the eleventh and the nineteenth century with class relations as its point of focus, it throws new light on the making of religious communities, monastic institutions, legends, lineages, and the ethics that governed them. In the light of this prehistory, a compelling framework is suggested for a revision of existing perspectives on the making of Hinduism in the nineteenth and the twentieth century.

Yoga, karma, meditation, guru--these terms, once obscure, are now a part of the American lexicon. Combining Hinduism with Western concepts and values, a new hybrid form of religion has developed in the United States over the past century. In Transcendent in America, Lola Williamson traces the history of various Hindu-inspired movements in America, and argues that together they constitute a discrete category of religious practice, a distinct and identifiable form of new religion.

Williamson provides an overview of the emergence of these movements through examining exchanges between Indian Hindus and American intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and illuminates how Protestant traditions of inner experience paved the way for Hindu-style movements' acceptance in the West.

Williamson focuses on three movements--Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, and Siddha Yoga--as representative of the larger of phenomenon of Hindu-inspired meditation movements. She provides a window into the beliefs and practices of followers of these movements by offering concrete examples from their words and experiences that shed light on their world view, lifestyle, and relationship with their gurus. Drawing on scholarly research, numerous interviews, and decades of personal experience with Hindu-style practices, Williamson makes a convincing case that Hindu-inspired meditation movements are distinct from both immigrant Hinduism and other forms of Asian-influenced or "New Age" groups.

Through the use of epigraphical evidence, Leslie C. Orr brings into focus the activities and identities of the temple women (devadasis) of medieval South India, and suggests new ways of understanding the character of the temple woman -- and of the role of women in Indian religion and society. This book shows how the temple woman's economic authonomy, independence and initiative allowed her to negotiate medieval temple politics and establish a role for herself with its own peculiar social and religious significance.