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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Religions of Indic & Oriental origin > Hinduism
Hinduism is practised by nearly eighty per cent of India's
population, and by some seventy million people outside India. In
this Very Short Introduction, Kim Knott offers a succinct and
authoritative overview of this major religion, and analyses the
challenges facing it in the twenty-first century. She discusses key
preoccupations of Hinduism such as the centrality of the Veda as
religious texts, the role of Brahmins, gurus, and storytellers in
the transmission of divine truths, and the cultural and moral
importance of epics such as the Ramayana. In this second edition
Knott considers the impact of changes in technology and the
flourishing of social media on Hinduism, and looks at the presence
of Hinduism in popular culture, considering pieces such as Sita
Sings the Blues. She also analyses recent developments in India,
and the impact issues such as Hindu nationalism and the
politicization of Hinduism have on Hindus worldwide. ABOUT THE
SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University
Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area.
These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new
subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis,
perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and
challenging topics highly readable.
Hadimba is a primary village goddess in the Kullu Valley of the
West Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, a rural area known
as the Land of Gods. As the book shows, Hadimba is a goddess whose
vitality reveals itself in her devotees' rapidly changing
encounters with local and far from local players, powers, and
ideas. These include invading royal forces, colonial forms of
knowledge, and more recently the onslaught of modernity,
capitalism, tourism, and ecological change. Hadimba has provided
her worshipers with discursive, ritual, and ideological arenas
within which they reflect on, debate, give meaning to, and
sometimes resist these changing realities, and she herself has been
transformed in the process. Drawing on diverse ethnographic and
textual materials gathered in the region from 2009 to 2017, The
Many Faces of a Himalayan Goddess is rich with myths and tales,
accounts of dramatic rituals and festivals, and descriptions of
everyday life in the celebrated but remote Kullu Valley. The book
employs an interdisciplinary approach to tell the story of Hadimba
from the ground up, or rather, from the center out, portraying the
goddess in varying contexts that radiate outward from her temple to
local, regional, national, and indeed global spheres. The result is
an important contribution to the study of Indian village goddesses,
lived Hinduism, Himalayan Hinduism, and the rapidly growing field
of religion and ecology.
Covering all the major Hindu practices, festivals, beliefs, gods,
sacred sites, languages, and religious texts, this is the most
comprehensive Hinduism dictionary of its kind. It contains 2,800
entries on everything from Tantra to temples, from bhakti to
Divali, as well as biographical entries for key thinkers, teachers,
and scholars. All entries are clear, concise, up to date, and fully
cross-referenced. With its coverage spanning 3,500 years of
Hinduism - from the religion's conception to Hinduism in the 21st
century - this brand new A-Z also acknowledges the historical
interplay between Hindu traditions and others, for example,
Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and Islamic. Detailed appendices include
maps, pronunciation guide, a chronology, principal sources and
further reading, and useful websites. This dictionary is an
invaluable first port of call for students and teachers of
Hinduism, theology, Asian studies, or philosophy, as well as the
related disciplines of history, sociology, and anthropology. It is
also an ideal source of reference for all practicing Hindus and for
anyone with an interest in Indian religions and culture.
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Ardor
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Roberto Calasso
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In this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom the Paris Review
has called 'a literary institution', explores the ancient texts
known as the Vedas. Little is known about the Vedic people who
lived more than three thousand years ago in northern India: they
left behind almost no objects, images, ruins. Only a 'Parthenon of
words' remains: verses and formulations suggesting a daring
understanding of life. 'If the Vedic people had been asked why they
did not build cities,' writes Calasso, 'they could have replied: we
did not seek power, but rapture.' This is the ardor of the Vedic
world, a burning intensity that is always present, both in the mind
and in the cosmos. With his signature erudition and profound sense
of the past, Calasso explores the enigmatic web of ritual and myth
that define the Vedas. Often at odds with modern thought, he shows
how these texts illuminate the nature of consciousness more than
neuroscientists have been able to offer us up to now.
In thirteenth-century Maharashtra, a new vernacular literature
emerged to challenge the hegemony of Sanskrit, a language largely
restricted to men of high caste. In a vivid and accessible idiom,
this new Marathi literature inaugurated a public debate over the
ethics of social difference grounded in the idiom of everyday life.
The arguments of vernacular intellectuals pushed the question of
social inclusion into ever-wider social realms, spearheading the
development of a nascent premodern public sphere that valorized the
quotidian world in sociopolitical terms. The Quotidian Revolution
examines this pivotal moment of vernacularization in Indian
literature, religion, and public life by investigating courtly
donative Marathi inscriptions alongside the first extant texts of
Marathi literature: the Lilacaritra (1278) and the Jnanesvari
(1290). Novetzke revisits the influence of Chakradhar (c. 1194),
the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, and Jnandev (c. 1271), who
became a major figure of the Varkari religion, to observe how these
avant-garde and worldly elites pursued a radical intervention into
the social questions and ethics of the age. Drawing on political
anthropology and contemporary theories of social justice, religion,
and the public sphere, The Quotidian Revolution explores the
specific circumstances of this new discourse oriented around
everyday life and its lasting legacy: widening the space of public
debate in a way that presages key aspects of Indian modernity and
democracy.
Hinduism comprises perhaps the major cluster of religio-cultural
traditions of India, and it can play a valuable role in helping us
understand the nature of religion and human responses to life.
Hindu image-worship lies at the core of what counts for Hinduism -
up-front and subject to much curiosity and misunderstanding, yet it
is a defining feature of this phenomenon. This book focuses on
Hindu images and their worship with special reference to
Vaisnavism, a major strand of Hinduism. Concentrating largely, but
not exclusively, on Sanskritic source material, the author shows in
the course of the book that Hindu image-worship may be understood
via three levels of interpretation: the metaphysical/theological,
the narratival or mythic, and the performative or ritual. Analysing
the chief philosophical paradigm underlying Hindu image-worship and
its implications, the book exemplifies its widespread application
and tackles, among other topics such as the origins of
image-worship in Hinduism, the transition from Vedic to image
worship, a distinguishing feature of Hindu images: their multiple
heads and limbs. Finally, with a view to laying the grounds for a
more positive dialogic relationship between Hinduism and the
"Abrahamic" faiths, which tend to condemn Hindu image-worship as
"idolatry", the author examines the theological explanation and
justification for embodiment of the Deity in Hinduism and discusses
how Hinduism might justify itself against such a charge. Rich in
Indological detail, and with an impressive grasp of the
philosophical and theological issues underlying Hindu material
culture, and image-worship, this book will be of interest to
academics and others studying theology, Indian philosophy and
Hinduism.
This book investigates women's ritual authority and the common
boundaries between religion and notions of gender, ethnicity, and
identity. Nanette R. Spina situates her study within the
transnational Melmaruvathur Adhiparasakthi movement established by
the Tamil Indian guru, Bangaru Adigalar. One of the most prominent,
defining elements of this tradition is that women are privileged
with positions of leadership and ritual authority. This represents
an extraordinary shift from orthodox tradition in which religious
authority has been the exclusive domain of male Brahmin priests.
Presenting historical and contemporary perspectives on the
transnational Adhiparasakthi organization, Spina analyzes women's
roles and means of expression within the tradition. The book takes
a close look at the Adhiparasakthi society in Toronto, Canada (a
Hindu community in both its transnational and diasporic
dimensions), and how this Canadian temple has both shaped and
demonstrated their own diasporic Hindu identity. The Toronto
Adhiparasakthi society illustrates how Goddess theology, women's
ritual authority, and "inclusivity" ethics have dynamically shaped
the identity of this prominent movement overseas. Based on years of
ethnographic fieldwork, the volume draws the reader into the rich
textures of culture, community, and ritual life with the Goddess.
This book explores the representation of Hinduism through myth and
discourse in urban Hindi theatre in the period 1880-1960. It
discusses representative works of seven influential playwrights and
looks into the ways they have imagined and re-imagined Hindu
traditions. Diana Dimitrova examines the intersections of Hinduism
and Hindi theatre, emphasizing the important role that both myth
and discourse play in the representation of Hindu traditions in the
works of Bharatendu Harishcandra, Jayshankar Prasad, Lakshminarayan
Mishra, Jagdishcandra Mathur, Bhuvaneshvar, Upendranath Ashk, and
Mohan Rakesh. Dimitrova'a analysis suggests either a traditionalist
or a more modernist stance toward religious issues. She emphasizes
the absence of Hindi-speaking authors who deal with issues implicit
to the Muslim or Sikh or Jain, etc. traditions. This prompts her to
suggest that Hindi theatre of the period 1880-1960, as represented
in the works of the seven dramatists discussed, should be seen as
truly 'Hindu-Hindi' theatre.
The 19th century was a pioneering age for vernacular texts in
India. Vernacular writings became popular for making the 'first'
interventions of their kind, written by Indians for Indians, and
establishing new genres such as the novel. The Subhedar's Son, an
award-winning Marathi novel, was written in 1895 and published by
the Bombay Tract and Book Society. The novel comprises overlapping
personal and political trajectories.The author, The Rev. Dinkar
Shankar Sawarkar, inscribed multiple viewpoints into his narrative,
including that of his own father, the Shankar Nana (1819-1884), a
Brahmin who was one of the early converts of the Church Missionary
Society in Western India and served the CMS and the Anglican Church
in various capacities for many years. Apart from Shankar Nana's
conversion-story, Sawarkar provides readers with a blueprint of
what a Brahminical journey towards Christian conversion
encompassed, while describing his personal background of having
lived a Christian life as a product of both Brahminism and
Christianity. He in effect attempts to deconstruct Brahmanism
through Christianity and as a Christian he claims Brahmin roots,
with the aim of combatting the stigma of Christian conversion.
Contextualized by the history of Maharashtra's early missions and
the specificities of individual conversions, the novel allows
modern researchers to appreciate the particularity of regional and
vernacular Indian Christianity. This culturally-specific
Christianity spurred the production of Christian vernacular print
culture, associating 'being Marathi' with broader and more
universal frameworks of Christianity. But this new genre also
produced nativist forms of Christian devotion and piety. Deepra
Dandekar introduces this annotated translation of The Subhedar's
Son, with: an examination of the Church Missionary Society's socio-
political context; a biography of Shankar Nana gleaned from
archival sources; a brief summary of Sawarkar's biography; and an
analysis of the multiple political opinions framing the book. An
appendix contains a transcription of Shankar Nana's Christian
witness.
The figure of Sakuntala appears in many forms throughout South
Asian literature, most famously in the "Mahabharata" and in
Kalidisa's fourth-century Sanskrit play, "Sakuntala and the Ring of
Recollection." In these two texts, Sakuntala undergoes a critical
transformation, relinquishing her assertiveness and autonomy to
become the quintessentially submissive woman, revealing much about
the performance of Hindu femininity that would come to dominate
South Asian culture. Through a careful analysis of sections from
"Sakuntala" and their various iterations in different contexts,
Romila Thapar explores the interactions between literature and
history, culture and gender, that frame the development of this
canonical figure, as well as a distinct conception of female
identity.
A celebration of Neem Karoli Baba, one of the most influential
spiritual leaders of our time, the divine guru who inspired and led
a generation of seekers-including Ram Dass, Daniel Goleman, and
Larry Brilliant-on life-changing journeys that have ultimately
transformed our world. In 1967, Baba Ram Dass-former American
Harvard professor Richard Alpert-left India to share stories of his
mysterious guru, Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharajji. Introducing
idealistic Western youth to the possibilities inherent in spiritual
development, Ram Dass inspired a generation to turn on and tune in
to a reality far different from the one they had known. From the
spring of 1970 until Maharajji died on September 11, 1973, several
hundred Westerners had his darshan (in Hinduism, the beholding of a
deity, revered person, or sacred object). Those who saw him formed
the Maharajji satsang-fellow travelers on the path. Love Everyone
tells the stories of those who heard the siren call of the East and
followed it to the foothills of the Himalayas. The ways they were
called to make the journey, their experiences along the way, and
their meeting with Maharajji form the core of this multicultural
adventure in shifting consciousness. The contributors share their
recollections of Maharajji and how his wisdom shaped their lives.
All have attempted to follow Maharajji's basic teaching, his
seemingly simple directives: Love everyone, feed everyone, and
remember God. All have found their own way to be of service in the
world and, in so doing, have collectively touched the hearts and
souls of countless others.
The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions
of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it
across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Siva shrines.
These devotees-called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as
miscreants by many Indians-are mostly young, destitute men, who
have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these
young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but
a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in
unfavorable social conditions. Vikash Singh walked with the
pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he
highlights how the procession offers a social space where
participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth.
Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics,
and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a
place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare
for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties.
In identifying with Siva, who is both Master of the World and yet a
pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty
and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the
Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but
an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a
rampant global neoliberalism.
The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions
of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it
across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Siva shrines.
These devotees-called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as
miscreants by many Indians-are mostly young, destitute men, who
have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these
young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but
a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in
unfavorable social conditions. Vikash Singh walked with the
pilgrims of the Kanwar procession, and with this book, he
highlights how the procession offers a social space where
participants can prove their talents, resolve, and moral worth.
Working across social theory, phenomenology, Indian metaphysics,
and psychoanalysis, Singh shows that the pilgrimage provides a
place in which participants can simultaneously recreate and prepare
for the poor, informal economy and inevitable social uncertainties.
In identifying with Siva, who is both Master of the World and yet a
pathetic drunkard, participants demonstrate their own sovereignty
and desirability despite their stigmatized status. Uprising of the
Fools shows how religion today is not a retreat into tradition, but
an alternative forum for recognition and resistance within a
rampant global neoliberalism.
Early Tantric Medicine looks at a traditional medical system that
flourished over 1,000 years ago in India. The Garuda Tantras had a
powerful influence on traditional medicine for snakebite, and some
of their practices remain popular to this day. Snakebite may sound
like a rare and exotic phenomenon, but in India it is a problem
that affects 1.4 million people every year and results in over
45,000 deaths. Michael Slouber offers a close examination of the
Garuda Tantras, which were deemed lost until the author himself
discovered numerous ancient titles surviving in Sanskrit
manuscripts written on fragile palm-leaves. The volume brings to
life this rich tradition in which knowledge and faith are harnessed
in complex visualizations accompanied by secret mantras to an array
of gods and goddesses; this religious system is combined with
herbal medicine and a fascinating mix of lore on snakes, astrology,
and healing. The book's appendices include an accurate, yet
readable translation of ten chapters of the most significant
Tantric medical text to be recovered: the Kriyakalagunottara. Also
included is a critical edition based on the surviving Nepalese
manuscripts.
In this work, Brian Philip Dunn focuses on the embodiment theology
of the South Indian theologian, A. J. Appasamy (1891-1975).
Appasamy developed what he called a 'bhakti' (devotional) approach
to Christian theology, bringing his own primary text, the Gospel of
John, into comparative interaction with the writings of the Hindu
philosopher and theologian, Ramanuja. Dunn's exposition here is of
Appasamy's distinctive adaptation of Ramanuja's 'Body of God'
analogy and its application to a bhakti reading of John's Gospel.
He argues throughout for the need to locate and understand
theological language as embedded and embodied within the narrative
and praxis of tradition and, for Appasamy and Ramanuja, in their
respective Anglican and Srivaisnava settings. Responding to
Appasamy, Dunn proposes that the primary Johannine referent for
divine embodiment is the temple and considers recent scholarship on
Johannine 'temple Christology' in light of Srivaisnava conceptions
of the temple and the temple deity. He then offers a constructive
reading of the text as a temple procession, a heuristic device that
can be newly considered in both comparative and devotional contexts
today.
Jews often consider Hinduism to be Avoda Zara, idolatry, due to its
worship of images and multiple gods. Closer study of Hinduism and
of recent Jewish attitudes to it suggests the problem is far more
complex. In the process of considering Hinduism's status as Avoda
Zara, this book revisits the fundamental definitions of Avoda Zara
and asks how we use the category. By appealing to the history of
Judaism's view of Christianity, author Alon Goshen-Gottstein seeks
to define what Avoda Zara is and how one might recognize the same
God in different religions, despite legal definitions. Through a
series of leading questions, the discussion moves from a blanket
view of Hinduism as idolatry to a recognition that all religions
have aspects that are idolatrous and non-idolatrous.
Goshen-Gottstein explains how the category of idolatry itself must
be viewed with more nuance. Introducing this nuance, he asserts,
leads one away from a globalized view of an entire tradition in
these terms.
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