Heroic Saktism is the belief that a good king and a true warrior must worship the goddess Durga, the form and substance of kingship. This belief formed the bedrock of ancient Indian practices of cultivating political power. Wildly dangerous and serenely benevolent at one and the same time, the goddess's charismatic split nature promised rewards for a hero and king and success in risky ventures. This book is the first expansive historical treatment of the cult of Durga and the role it played in...
Sages, Saints & Kings of Ancient India
by Swami B. B. Tirtha Maharaja
The people of ancient times were inclined to give their attention not only to the external world of inert matter, but also to the world within, the vital world of consciousness. Those sages who understood the importance of such contemplation comprise the prime subject matter of this book. Especially in the troubled world of today, it is by the conscientious study of their activities and teachings that we may come to understand the Absolute Truth, or the Ultimate Reality, and attain lasting pea...
Narasimha is one of the least studied major deities of Hinduism. Furthermore, there are limited studies of the history, thought, and literature of middle India. Lavanya Vemsani redresses this by exploring a range of primary sources, including classical Sanskrit texts (puranas and epics), and regional accounts (sthalapuranas), which include texts, artistic compositions, and oral folk stories in the regional languages of Telugu, Oriya, and Kannada. She also examines the historical context as well...
Valmiki Ramayan Simplified Part 1 (Indian Mythology, #1)
by Krishnakumar T K
A spiritual history of the world's most religiously complex and diverse society, from one of Harvard's most respected scholars. India: A Sacred Geography is the culmination of more than a decade's work from the renowned Harvard scholar Diana L. Eck. The book explores the sacred places of India, taking the reader on an extraordinary trip through the beliefs and history of this rich and profound place, as well as providing a basic introduction to Hindu religious ideas and how those ideas influenc...
With historical-critical analysis and dialogical even-handedness, the essays of this book re-assess the life and legacy of Swami Vivekananda, forged at a time of colonial suppression, from the vantage point of socially-engaged religion at a time of global dislocations and international inequities. Due to the complexity of Vivekananda as a historical figure on the cusp of late modernity with its vast transformations, few works offer a contemporary, multi-vocal, nuanced, academic examination of hi...
Bringing together the study of the Greek classics and Indology, Arjuna–Odysseus provides a comparative analysis of the shared heritage of the Mahābhārata and early Greek traditions presented in the texts of Homer and Hesiod. Building on the ethnographic theories of Durkheim, Mauss, and Dumont, the volume explores the convergences and rapprochements between the Mahābhārata and the Greek texts. In exploring the networks of similarities between the two epic traditions, it also reformulates the th...
Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the so-called traditional practice of Hindu cremation on an open-air funeral pyre was culturally transformed and materially refashioned under British rule, following intense Western hostility, colonial sanitary acceptance, and Indian adaptation. David Arnold examines the c...
Religious Cultures in Early Modern India (Routledge South Asian History and Culture)
Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India's history. The centuries of the 'early modern' in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals d...
Shakuntala ou l'anneau du souvenir (Contes Et Legendes de l'Inde, #2)
by Christine Devin
A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Daemons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings--daemons--and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: daemon-ology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of the Silk Road, a common daemonological vernacular has been shared among populations ra...
Introducing Hinduism (Introducing...)
by Associate Professor of History Department of History and Center for Southeast Asian Studies Vinay Lal and Borin Van Loon
The dietary prohibitions in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 represent one of the most detailed textual overlaps in the Pentateuch between the Priestly material and Deuteronomy, yet study of them is often stymied by the rare terminology. This is especially the case for the birds: their identities are shrouded in mystery and the reasons for their prohibition debated. Peter Altmann attempts to break this impasse by setting these flyers within the broader context of birds and flying creatures in the...
This volume includes a wide range of studies on pain and its representation in texts and non-literary remains of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, suggesting both the richness and complexity of the topic and the need for scholars to address it from a variety of perspectives. The essays engage the subject of pain and its representation in a multitude of ways, including consideration of the representation of physical pain, of psychological anguish, and the often complex relationship between the t...
Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls (Archaeology and Bible, #3)
A constant re-evaluation of the new archaeological and textual material unearthed and edited in recent decades is a recurrent duty of ancient and modern scholars. Since the overwhelming amount of available data and the complexity of new methodologies can be competently handled only by specialized scholars, such a re-evaluation is no longer possible for a single scholar. For this reason, archaeologists, cuneiform and biblical scholars as well as classicists joined forces at an international confe...