Browse

The chapters in this volume resulted from an international conference held at the University of Texas at Austin on April 3–6, 2003. The conference explored the period between roughly the 4th century bce and the 5th century ce, a period that saw unparalleled developments within the Indian subcontinent, developments that defined classical Indian culture and society. The conference was dubbed Between the Empires, because the heart of the period falls between the decline of the first major Indian empire, that of the Mauryas (whose last king died in the early 2nd century bce), and the rise of the Gupta Empire (beginning in the 4th century ce). The aim of the conference was to bring together scholars pursuing advanced research relating to this period and to provide them the opportunity to interact with each other over a two- or three-day period. The participants included archeologists, art historians, numismatists, historians, experts in literature, law, and linguistics, philosophers, and historians of religion.

Kabir, the fifteenth‐century weaver‐poet of Varanasi, is still one of the most revered and popular saint‐singers of North India. He belonged to a family of Muslim julahas (weavers of low‐caste status), is believed to have been a disciple of the Hindu guru Ramanand, and often sang of inner experience using language of the subtle yogic body. Yet he cannot be classified as Hindu, Muslim, or yogi. Fiercely independent, he has become an icon of speaking truth to power. In a blunt and uncompromising style, he exhorted his listeners to shed their delusions, pretensions, and orthodoxies in favor of a direct experience of truth. He satirized hypocrisy, greed, and violence—especially among the religious. Belonging to a social group widely considered low and unclean, he criticized caste ideology and declared the equality of all human beings. Kabir was an oral poet whose works were written down by others. His oral traditions have flourished for more than 500 years, producing a rich array of musical forms, folk and classical, in countless local dialects and regional styles. Thousands of poems are popularly attributed to Kabir, but only a few written collections have survived over the centuries. The Bījak is the sacred book of the Kabir Panth, or sect devoted to Kabir's teachings. This book presents about half of the Bījak; the translators have selected those poems which seem most representative and which work best in translation. The Bījak includes three main sections called Ramainī, Śabda, and Sākhī, and a fourth section containing miscellaneous folksong forms. Most of the Kabir material has been popularized through the song form known as śabda (or pada), and through the aphoristic two‐line sākhī (or doha) that serves throughout north India as a vehicle for popular wisdom. These two forms have been emphasized in this translation; a group of ramainīs have also been included. An introduction by Hess precedes the translations; scholarly notes and three appendices, including an essay on Kabir's ulatbamsi or “upside‐down language,” are also by Hess.

This work closely examines the architectural and sculptural “texts” of the Vaikuntha Perumal Temple built for Vishnu/Krishna at Kanchipuram in the 8th century. The keys to unlock the meaning of these “texts” are in a poem written about the temple by Tirumangai Alvar shortly after it was built. Sacred texts and liturgical practices are also analyzed to understand the vision this Vishnu‐house was intended to embody for sophisticated Bhagavatas of the time. The three‐story temple, conceived as a mandala, houses figures representing various aspects or formations of the supreme Vishnu, and it is covered with some fifty-six panels of figures representing scenes from sacred texts, primarily the Bhagavata Purana. Not only are the stories illustrated by the panels important but also their physical placement, which takes into account metaphysical and cosmological implications of where they are situated on the building and their positions relative to one another. Pancharatra doctrine informs and is illustrated by the panels, opening up complex and subtle relations between the stories and teachings represented. The sculptural program also portrays the spiritual progress of the builder, the emperor Nandivarman Pallavamalla. His life and career are illustrated on the interior of the surrounding walls.

In 1839, a group of Hindu elite gathered in Calcutta to share and propagate their faith in a non-idolatrous form of worship. The group, known as the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, met weekly to worship and hear discourses from members on ways to promote a rational and morally responsible mode of worship. They called upon ancient sources of Hindu spirituality to guide them in developing a modern form of theism they referred to as “Vedanta”.This book situates the theology and moral vision set forth in these hitherto unknown discourses against the backdrop of religious and social change in early colonial Calcutta. In doing so, it demonstrates how the theology of the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā legitimated the worldly interests of Calcutta's emergent bourgeoisie. This “bourgeois Vedanta” sanctioned material prosperity while providing members with a means of spiritual fulfillment. The book includes the first ever complete, annotated translation of Sabhyadiger vaktṛtā, the earliest extant record of the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā. The translation is supplemented with an analysis of the text demonstrating that its twenty-one unsigned discourses were composed by such major figures in 19th-century Bengal as Debendranath Tagore, Inullvaracandra Vidyasagara, Inullvaracandra Gupta, and Aksayakumara Datta. The book explores a decisive moment in the construction of modern Vedanta, and comments on the concerns this Vedantic movement raised for contemporary Christian observers. It demonstrates the decisive role played by the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā in both reviving and reformulating the teachings of Rammohan Roy, the founder of Vedantic reform in colonial India. It also suggests that the earliest members of the Sabhā are best viewed as “Brhamos without Rammohan”. Only later would they look to Rammohan as their founding father.

Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, this book explores the manner that 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. Focus in these studies, however, is typically placed on the way that caste is imagined according to the agendas and desires of elite Westerners such as colonial officials. By contrast, this book argues that Bhats themselves understand the imaginative dimensions of caste relations. It focuses on the way that Bhats (literally, “Bards”) now entertain a variety of contemporary sponsors — village patrons, foreign and domestic tourists, urban elites, government officials, development experts, and Hindu nationalists — with ballads, epics, and puppet plays detailing the exploits of Rajasthan’s long-dead kings and heroes. As the book delves deeper into the complexities and contradictions of Bhat art, identity, and political resistance, the complexities and contradictions of modern India are likewise revealed.

This book sets out to explore the doctrinal dimension of classical Hinduism (eighth century BCE to circa 1000 CE.), and is organized in terms of its key concepts: brahman, karma, karma-yoga, etc. which are discussed in their logical connection as well as in the context of a period of Hinduism which is chronologically connected with those that precede and succeed it. In textual terms, this covers the period from the Upanishads down to the late Purānas, and all that comes between them: the Smrtis (law books), the Itihāsas (epics), the Purānas (ancient lore), the Āgamas (liturgical manuals) and Darśanas (philosophical literature), etc. The purpose of the book is to synchronically and systematically present the governing concepts of classical Hinduism and their operation during the delimited period of classical Hinduism. Three features of the book to enable readers to use it to full advantage: (1) the first chapter constitutes the text of an oral presentation made at the Smithsonian Institution, designed to present classical Hindu thought in a concise and accessible manner. It forms a useful introduction to the conceptual framework of Hinduism, as the key ideas have deliberately been presented in a simple and direct manner. Their complexities and nuances are uncovered under the specific chapters that follow. (2) The rest of the book may be viewed as a magnification of the first chapter. (3) Among the essentials of classical Hindu thought, special and detailed consideration has been accorded to the concept of varna.

What does it mean to be a Brahmin? And what could it mean to become one? While Brahmin intellectuals have offered plenty of answers to the first question, the latter presents a puzzle, since the normative ideology of caste deems it impossible for an ordinary individual to do so without first undergoing death and rebirth. In Hindu mythology, however, one notable figure named Viśvāmitra is said to have transformed himself from a king into a Brahmin sage by amassing great ascetic power, or tapas. This book examines the rich mosaic of legends about Viśvāmitra that are found across the Hindu mythological tradition—through texts composed in Sanskrit and vernacular languages, oral performances, and visual media—and offers a comprehensive historical analysis of how the “storyworlds” conjured up through these various tellings have, time and again, served to adapt, upgrade, and reinforce the social identity of real-world Brahmin communities, from the ancient Vedic past up to the hypermodern present. Using a performance-centered approach to situate the production of the Viśvāmitra legends within specific historical contexts, this study reveals how and why mythological culture has played an active, dialogical role in the naturalization of Brahmin social power over the last three thousand years.

Explores the way personhood is constructed in public ritual performance. The performances are pandav lilas, ritual dramatizations of India's great epic, Mahabharata. They take place in the former Hindu kingdom of Garhwal, located in the central Himalayas of North India. The book begins by summarizing the theoretical literature on personhood (or ”selfhood”) and performance and providing a brief summary of the epic. Next, it describes one particular performance in detail and then goes on to discuss questions of caste, gender, and locality – all in the context of an overarching discussion of the performative construction of the self. The last few chapters describe a fascinating valley in the Western part of Garhwal, where the villains of the Mahabharata are worshiped as local, divine kings. The major conclusion reached by the book is that public ritual performances are one of the chief arenas where ”persons” are constructed – in Garhwal as well as in other cultures.

From a verbal root meaning “to hold” or “uphold,” dharma is taken to have been the main term by which Buddhism and Hinduism came, over about five centuries, to describe their distinctive visions of the good and well‐rewarded life. From about 300 BCE to about 200 CE, Buddhist and Brahmanical authors used it to clarify and classify their mutual and contending values in relation to dramatically changing historical conditions. Before this, the term had no such centrality, and after it, each tradition came to define normative dharma separately as the term's interreligious dimension lost interest. This book about dharma in history thus attempts to get at the concepts and practices associated with the term mainly during this window, which opens on dharma's vitality as it played, and was played, across political, religious, legal, literary, ethical, and philosophical domains and discourses about what “holds” life together. It examines what dharma meant in eleven texts, including text clusters like the Aśokan edicts and the canonical Buddhist Three Baskets, that can be said to have made dharma their central concern. These eleven “dharma texts,” nine “major” (including those just mentioned, the dharmasūtras, the Sanskrit epics, The Laws of Manu, and the Buddhacarita), and two “minor” (the Yuga Purāṇa and a set of Buddhist prophesies of the end of the Buddhist dharma), are explored for their treatments of dharma as experienced “over time” during this period of dynamic change. Each chapter brings out ways in which dharma is interpreted temporally: from grand cosmic chronometries of yugas and kalpas to narratives about divine plans, implications of itihāsa or “history,” war, and peace, gendered nuances of genealogical time, royal biography (even autobiography with Aśoka), guidelines for the royal life including daily routines, householder regimens including daily obligations and life‐stages, and monastic regimens including meditation.

From Chennai (Madras), India to London and Washington D.C., contemporary urban middle-class Hindus invest earnings, often derived from the global economy, into the construction or renovation of temples. South Indians often lead such efforts to re-establish authentic temples that nonetheless become sites for innovative communities, new visions of the Gods, and distinctive middle-class religious sensibilities. Although a part of the much-discussed resurgence of Hinduism, Gods and their ritual worship — not nationalistic ideology — center these enterprises. This book aims to go beyond the more common analytical starting points of identity, multiculturalism, transnationalism, or globalism to understand contemporary Hinduism. In both conversation and contention with current theory, the book highlights the Gods, their shrines, and the middle-class people who re-establish them. Using surveys of modern temples in Chennai, London, and Washington D.C. patronized by South Indians, it focuses on the ubiquity of certain Gods and Goddesses — but not all — their portrayal, the architecture of their new “homes”, and their place in the modern urban commercial and social landscapes. Arguing that this migration of Gods in tandem with people is not new, the book traces current temple architecture to Indian merchants who constructed new temples within a decade of the founding of Madras by the East India Trading Company in the initial era of the current world economic system. In the process, it questions the interrelationships between ritual worship/religious edifices, the rise of the modern world economy, and the ascendancy of the great middle class in this new era of globalization.

In academic no less than popular thought, India is frequently represented as the quintessential land of religion. Disenchanting India qualifies this representation through an analysis of the contemporary Indian rationalist organisations (those that affirm the values and attitudes of atheism, humanism or free-thinking).To understand the genesis of organised rationalism in India the book addresses the rationalists’ emphasis on maintaining links to atheism and materialism in ancient India and outlines their strong ties to the intellectual currents of modern European history. At the heart of Disenchanting India lies an ethnography of the organisation “Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti” (Organisation for the Eradication of Superstition) based in Maharashtra. This account describes the organization’s efforts to promote a scientific temper and combat the beliefs and practices it regards as superstitious. It also includes an analysis of rationalism in the day to day lives of its members and in relation to the organization’s controversial position within Indian society.The book outlines the distinguishing characteristics of this organisation through a depiction of the rationalists’ specific “mode of unbelief” in comparison to “modes of religiosity”. Alongside a critical engagement with the work of Max Weber and Charles Taylor, the theoretical discussion of modes of unbelief further provides an original basis for comparative studies of similar movements in a trans-cultural perspective. Finally, Disenchanting India can be situated within the contemporary debates about the nature of rationalism in Indian intellectual life and cultural politics. It thereby engages with debates that are as crucial for Anthropology and Religious Studies as they are for Post-colonial Studies, Sociology and History.

This book explores the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and religion in classical Indian literature and literary theory by focusing on one of the most celebrated and enigmatic texts to emerge from the Sanskrit epic tradition, the Mahābhārata. This text, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important sources for the study of South Asian religious, social, and political thought, is a foundational text of the Hindu tradition(s) and considered to be a major transmitter of dharma (moral, social, and religious duty), perhaps the single most important concept in the history of Indian religions. However, in spite of two centuries of Euro-American scholarship on the epic, basic questions concerning precisely how the epic is communicating its ideas about dharma and precisely what it is saying about it have not been satisfactorily answered. Disorienting Dharma brings to bear a variety of interpretive lenses (Sanskrit literary theory, reader-response theory, and narrative ethics) to answer these questions. One of the first book-length studies to explore the subject from the lens of Indian aesthetics, it argues that such a perspective yields startling new insights into the nature of the depiction of dharma in the epic through bringing to light one of the principle narrative tensions of the epic: the vexed relationship between dharma and suffering. In addition, it seeks to make the Mahābhārata interesting and accessible to a wider audience by demonstrating how reading the Mahābhārata, perhaps the most harrowing story in world literature, is a fascinating, troubling, disorienting, and ultimately transformative experience.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this book investigates aesthetic, symbolic, metaphorical, literary, mathematical, and philosophical meanings of the kōlam, the popular Tamil women’s daily ephemeral practice, a ritual art tradition performed with rice flour on the thresholds of houses in southern India. They range from concepts such as auspiciousness, inauspiciousness, ritual purity, and ritual pollution. Several divinities, too, play a significant role: Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, good luck, well-being, and a quickening energy; Mūdevi, the goddess of poverty, bad luck, illness, and laziness; Bhūdevi, the goddess of the soils, the earth, and the fields; and the god Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. Braiding art history, aesthetics, and design, this book analyzes the presence of the kōlam in medieval Tamil literature, focusing on the saint-poet Āṇṭāḷ. The author shows that the kōlam embodies mathematical principles such as symmetry, fractals, array grammars, picture languages, and infinity. Three types of kōlam competitions are described. The kinship between Bhūdevi and the kōlam is discussed as the author delves into the topics of “embedded ecologies” and “intermittent sacrality.” The author explores the history of the phrase “feeding a thousand souls,” tracing it back to ancient Sanskrit literature, where it was connected to Indian notions of hospitality, karma, and strangers. Its relationship to the theory of karma is represented by its connection to the five ancient sacrifices. This ritual is distinguished as one of the many “rituals of generosity” in Tamil Nadu.

Despite strong associations with the concept of reincarnation, Hinduism, and its Vedic antecedents, exhibit a strong tradition of ancestor worship. This book describes the development of the classic form of ancestral rite, the śrāddha, which is still practiced in its contemporary form in India today. The author outlines the process whereby the domestic concern about sustaining one's Ancestors in heaven is incorporated into the Vedic ritual cycle and the codification of the domestic rituals of ancestor worship in the G?hyasātras, the domestic ritual manuals. Central to the process of synthesis he describes is the recreation of the role of ritual expert, a pivotal change in the religious practice in ancient India, which is most well-developed in the Brahmanical treatment of ancestral rites. Additionally, the standardization of the śrāddha that begins in the G?hyasātras and continues in the early dharma literature is central to the competitive religious marketplace of India in the last few centuries before the Common Era. The competition was between ritualist and renouncer traditions within the Brahmanical tradition and between the Brahmanical traditions and, among others, the Buddhist tradition. Theologians in each of these traditions sought to establish their soteriology and their religious expert as crucial to success in one's religious practice and these efforts are most animated in the textual discussions of ancestor worship.

In the early 16th c., Bengali brahmin Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1476–1533) inspired a community of Kṛṣṇa worshipers in Bengal, Orissa, and Vraja. This study examines the ways those devotees came to be unified through the intervention of a Sanskrit and Bengali hagiography, the Caitanya caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja. Devotees thought Caitanya to be god, Kṛṣṇa, and eventually saw in him an unusual form of divine androgyny, Kṛṣṇa fused with his consort Rādhā. His many Sanskrit and Bengali hagiographies depict scattered independent groups, each proposing a different theology and practice. Kṛṣṇadāsa’s hagiography sought to synthesize these disparate positions into a unified tradition by deploying a sophisticated rhetoric that would hierarchize theology, standardize ritual, and fix literary canon. This is a study of how Kṛṣṇadāsa, in the absence of any institutional authority, synthesized a uniquely Bengali Vaiṣṇava tradition. In the early 17th c., three devotees, led by brahmin Śrīnivāsa, carried the Caitanya caritāmṛta back to Bengal from Vraja. Within a decade of losing and then recovering the text, this trio placed copies in the hands of every Vaiṣṇava in Bengal and Orissa. The literary practices surrounding the circulation established the text as the final word by fixing a grammar of tradition, by which communities could continually replicate the original experience of Caitanya’s presence, by interpreting their own as a fractal history. So persuasive was this single document that today it has assumed iconic status, even taking its place on the altar alongside images of Kṛṣṇa and Caitanya.

The Strides of Vishnu explores a wide range of topics in Hindu culture and history. Hinduism has often set out to mediate between the practical needs of its many communities and a transcendent realm. Illuminating this connection, The Strides of Vishnu focuses not only on religious ideas but also on the various arts and sciences, as well as crafts, politics, technology, and medicine. The book emphasizes core themes that run through the major historical periods of Northern India, beginning with the Vedas and leading up to India's independence. Sophisticated sciences such as geometry, grammar, politics, law, architecture, and biology are discussed within a broad cultural framework. Special attention is devoted to historical, economic, and political developments, including urbanism and empire‐building. The Strides of Vishnu situates religious and philosophical ideas within such broad contexts so religion sheds its abstract and detached reputation. The message of classical and medieval religious masterpieces—including the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, plays of Kalidasa, and many others—comes to life within a broad world‐making agenda. But while the literary masterpieces reflected the work of the cultural elites, The Strides of Vishnu also devotes considerable attention to the work that did not make it into the great texts: women's rituals, magic, alchemy, medicine, and a variety of impressive crafts. The book discusses the stunning mythology of medieval India and provides the methods for interpreting it, along with the vast cosmologies and cosmographies of the Puranas. The Strides of Vishnu is an introductory book on Hindu culture, but while it highlights central religious themes, it explores these within broader historical and cultural contexts. It gives its readers a clear and highly textured overview of a vast and productive civilization.

This first three chapters or first third of this book documents the ups and downs in the conflictual correspondence between Sigmund Freud and India’s first psychoanalyst, Girindrasekhar Bose. They trace the relationship through three phases of their 1920–1937 correspondence, and also compare their correspondence with Freud’s contemporary correspondence with Romain Rolland, noting similar disaffections while documenting in both exchanges Freud’s evasions about India. Psychoanalytic topics covered in these chapters include maternal transference as it relates to Bose’s work, to Freud’s therapeutic work with the poet H. D., to Bose’s and Freud’s treatments of the Oedipal and pre-Oedipal, and to André Green’s “dead mother complex.” The middle three chapters each treat a concept by which Bose sought to challenge Freud, producing conflicts between tham that had a much richer content than either of them realized or cared to elaborate upon. New answers to two questions are posed: why Bose never wrote an article for Freud on his signature concept of “opposite wishes,” the topic of chapter 4; and why Bose chose an icon of Viṣṇu for Freud’s 75th birthday gift rather than a Bengali goddess, which is asked through the last three chapters.

This book has a three-part structure, with the first and last chapters being the first and third parts, respectively. Chapter 1 examines Freud’s essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” and works back from it to the Mahābhārata as we see what Freud had in mind as “uncanny.” The chapter thus offers a pointillistic introduction to a promissory Freud’s Mahābhārata, one in which many points get fuller treatment in later chapters. Chapters 2 through 5 are a medley of post-Freudian readings of Mahābhārata scenes, themes, and episodes. These are viewed through the lenses of authors who are sympathetic with Freud, the author included; in chapters 2 and 3, including Andre Green with his “dead mother complex”; and, in chapter 5, including Stanley Kurtz’s notion that “all the mothers are one” and Freud’s Indian correspondent, Girindrasekhar Bose’s concept of the “Oedius mother”. Chapter 6 is about Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, and shows that, for the Mahābhārata, religious traditions must be studied not only through conscious representations of their history but also regarding unconscious trauma, loss of memory, and a return of the repressed. The book posits a new theory of the Mahābhārata with its central myth of the Unburdening of the goddess Earth, as reflecting Brahmanical trauma from India’s second urbanization, ca. seventh to third centuries BCE.

The edition of the fifty massive volumes of the Sacred Books of the East (1879–1910) was one of the most ambitious and daring editorial projects of late Victorian scholarship. The German-born philologist, orientalist, and religious scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) persuaded Oxford University Press to embark on this venture. ‘Müller’s grand design’ was supported financially by the India Office of the British empire and Oxford University Press. Müller resigned from his Oxford chair of comparative philology to become the general editor of this megaproject. He engaged an international team of renowned scholars (among whom James Legge, James Darmesteter, Hendrik Kern, Julius Eggeling, Thomas William Rhys Davids, Kashinath Trimbak Telang, and Hermann Oldenberg) to translate the ‘sacred texts’. The series used and defined categories of the study of culture, especially of religion. Religious studies was often called ‘comparative religion’ at the time, indicating the importance of the comparative method for this emerging discipline. The edition also contributed significantly to the Western perception of the ‘religious’ or even ‘mystic’ East, which was textually represented in English translations. This book is a study in intellectual history, in particular the history of the study of religions (1860–1900). A close reading of Müller’s work is combined with theoretical reflection on the defining moments in the making of the Sacred Books of the East series. The focus is on Max Müller’s conceptualization, management, and ambitions in bringing this grand project to a conclusion.

This book examines how sacred meaning is created, reinforced, and maintained in Hardwar, an important Hindu pilgrimage site (tirtha). Hardwar’s religious identity is inextricably tied to the river Ganges, and the city’s sacred narratives (present and past) present its identity as fixed and unchanging—as for many Hindu pilgrimage sites. This perspective ignores mundane factors such as economic, social, or technological change, which have sharply affected Hardwar’s development in the past two centuries. Yet these two differing visions of Hardwar are both emphatically, simultaneously “real.” The work begins with a short introduction to orient the reader to Hardwar and to the author’s guiding principles. Chapters 2 and 3 then lay out these contrasting histories (sacred and secular), and Hardwar’s complex identity lies in the tension between these narratives. The book’s second part analyzes Hardwar as a contemporary Hindu pilgrimage center. Chapters 4 through 6 are devoted to differing resident elites—businessmen, pandas (hereditary pilgrim guides), and ascetics—and delineate their roles in managing Hardwar as a holy place. Chapter 7 focuses on Hardwar’s pilgrims and examines factors drawing them there. The interaction between these groups creates and maintains Hardwar’s religious environment, and these forces shaping Hardwar have strong parallels in other north Indian pilgrimage sites. The final chapter addresses this wider context by examining changes in contemporary Hindu pilgrimage, particularly how modern Hindus are reinterpreting traditional symbols to make them meaningful for their time.