Download or read book Puranas Reimagined written by Pooja Jain and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2022-05-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puranas Reimagined: Attaining Enlightenment Through Samudra Manthan shares a new perspective of the popular folklore of Samudra Manthan cited in the Holy Scriptures. It draws an allegory between the religious folktale of the Daityas, the Devtas and the celestial gifts with inner sciences of spirituality. Each celestial gift obtained, such as Airawat, Kalpvriksha, Shankh, etc., in the tale, is considered as an amazing psychic power or Siddhi. The miraculous powers can be developed by an individual following the Ashthang Yoga or the eight-fold path of yoga. Further, following extensive research, the book highlights astounding anecdotes from the lives of revered Holy Saints who had engaged the said Siddhi in their life. In the words of Galileo: “All truths are easy to understand, once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” The book comprehends and shares a new dimension of the truth of the immortal tale.
Download or read book The Legend of Shara written by Srinivas Bharadwaj and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Legend of Shara records the story of a deity from the third millennium BC. It explains how multiple religions, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, came to absorb a story well-understood by many followers of Hinduism. We explore the Hindu origins of the early Torah and its deep Puranic roots along with the historical backdrop that produced the Patriarchs, the stories of David, and finally, Exodus. How closely are these stories tied to Puranic equivalents, and why do they follow the same structure and function that we see in Hindu MahaPuranas like the Matsya Purana? From its origins in the Rig Veda, we trace the flow of the legend of Shara along with the rest of its Puranic backdrop into the Hurrian lands. From here, we explore the journey into Judah and its return with the rise of Judaism in the Middle East.
Download or read book Banaras Urban Forms and Cultural Histories written by Michael S. Dodson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents a rich and surprising account of the recent history of the north Indian city of Banaras. Supplementing traditional accounts, which have focused upon the city’s religious imaginary, this volume brings together essays written by acknowledged experts in north Indian culture and history to examine the construction of diverse urban identities in, and after, the British colonial period. Drawing on fields such as archaeology, literature, history, and architecture, these accounts of Banaras understand the narratives which inscribe the city as having been forged substantially in the experiences of British rule. But while British rule transformed the city in many respects, the essays also emphasize the importance of Indian agency in these processes. The book also examines the essential ambiguity of modernization schemes in the city as well as the contingency of elements of religious narrative. The introduction, moreover, attempts to resituate Banaras into a wider tradition of urban studies in South Asia. The book will be of interest to not only scholars and students of north Indian culture and urban history, but also anyone looking to gain a deeper appreciation of this remarkable, and complex, city.
Download or read book Sati Savitri written by Devdutt Pattanaik and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2024-03-29 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manu said that a woman’s dharma is to be mother, daughter, sister and wife in service of men, regardless of the caste. In modern times we call this patriarchy. In the Veda, the need to control and favour hierarchy, is an expression of an anxious mind. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain lore is full of tales where women do not let men define their dharma. In modern times we call this feminism. In the Veda, the acceptance of a woman's choice is an expression of a wise and secure mind. While in Western myth, patriarchy is traditional and feminism is progressive, in Indian myth both patriarchy and feminism have always co-existed, in eternal tension, through endless cycles of rebirth. Liberation thus is not a foreign idea. It has always been here. You have heard tales of patriarchy. This book tells you the other tales—the ones they don’t tell you.
Download or read book Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages written by Prathama Banerjee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume explore the myriad ways in which caste (varna and jati) has been theorized and critiqued in multiple philosophical, religious, logical and narrative traditions in India. Spanning ancient, medieval and modern times, and in diverse classical and vernacular languages, the chapters show how the social fact of caste, and imaginations of kinship, community and humanity were historically subject to epistemological, spiritual, and existential debate in both elite and popular circles in India. Textual Lives of Caste Across the Ages seeks to bridge the interdisciplinary gap between historians and sociologists by focusing on texts that help us think across the sociological and philosophical, the political and the religious, the epistemological and the aesthetic, and indeed, the elite and the popular. The volume also sets up a conversation between scholars specializing in different regions, archives, and historical periods and demonstrates how caste imaginaries have been deeply diverse and contested in India's past. Reconstructing these diverse traditions of social and existential criticism helps us in our contemporary struggles against caste hierarchy and untouchability and enriches our contemporary critical repertoire.
Download or read book The Sacred Waters of Varanasi written by Mahesh Gogate and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book on urban water bodies, catchment areas and drainage pattern is set against the backdrop of the unprecedented heavy rainfall that severely deluged metropolitan cities and other parts of India in recent years. The recurring natural catastrophes in water-stressed cities of India and alarming rate of diminishing water bodies, wetlads and catchment areas needs a re-visit to an entire urban water-cycle. This book, thus, discusses how the processes and implementation of colonial urban development policies and projects have radically transformed the water bodies and their catchment areas – traditional water holding systems of Varanasi city. In this imperative colonial process, through the case study of Varanasi, the book mainly engages with the reasons behind the elimination of the temple tanks and ponds after the annexation of Varanasi by the British from 1775 till 1947. The book investigates the colonial notion of ‘dry city’, and how this notion crafted the process of separating land and water bodies, which arguably resulted in the reclamation and draining of water bodies, and also gave rise to water pollution. Additionally, the book analyzes the elimination of water bodies and loss of catchment areas through the ongoing processes of restoring the ancient city’s natural and cultural heritage. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Bhutan)
Download or read book Lakshmana s Last Stand written by Raj Thambu and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2024-08-28 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aryavarta, the land of Ancient India – 1300 BCE Rama has ruled for over two decades, a period that has seen remarkable prosperity and social stability in all of Aryavarta. But not for long. Rama has a premonition of a danger lurking. He has been betrayed of a long-standing peace agreement by The Chyavanas. Their cunning leader is using the Chyavanas’ wealth, weapons, and worship to further his interests. And he is also responsible for causing a brief split between Rama and Lakshmana, resulting in the latter’s exile. Meanwhile, an important visitor arrives in the capital, alerting Rama of an impending threat from foreign shores. This time it is from the highly trained renegade pirates of Ravana’s followers. This unit, The Kuberasena is already responsible for causing havoc among the ancient foreign kingdoms of Egypt, Greece, and Hittite, and has now set its sights on controlling the lucrative sea trade with Aryavarta. Kuberasena and the Chyavanas both claim common lineage from the ancient, dreaded clan of Nagvanshis. Lakshmana and Rama plan to outwit these Nagvanshis forces. But before that, Rama must find a worthy successor to his throne. Can he keep his restless scions happy? Can he overcome the Nagvanshis and defend his kingdom?
Download or read book The Ahoms written by Arup Kumar Dutta and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ahoms is an epic retelling of the 600-year rule of the Ahom dynasty. In 1228 CE, a group of Shan or Tai warriors, led by a brave leader named Sukapha, left their home in Myanmar and travelled to Upper Assam. Here, they set up the nucleus of what would become the powerful Ahom empire. Till it was annexed by the British in 1826, for nearly six centuries, Sukapha's descendants reigned over a greater part of the Brahmaputra Valley. Few dynasties in the world have enjoyed such a long period of almost unbroken rule. It was primarily due to the Ahoms that the pre-colonial Assamese nation was born. Their reign witnessed the synthesis of disparate tribes of the Brahmaputra Valley and the evolution of a distinct Assamese language, culture and identity. The Ahom dynasty was one of the greatest political entities of medieval Asia, equal to, if not greater than, its better-known counterparts in other parts of the world. The history of the Ahoms is replete with tales of war, bravery, brutality, love, loyalty, treachery and treason. This book seeks to imaginatively acquaint readers with the fascinating saga of the dynasty along with the major events during its rule.
Download or read book India s Forests Real and Imagined written by Alan Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-29 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As they seek to explore evolving and conflicting ideas of nationhood and modernity, India's writers have often chosen forests as the dramatic setting for stories of national identity. India's Forests, Real and Imagined explores how these settings have been integral to India's sense of national consciousness. Alan Johnson demonstrates that modern writers have drawn on older Indian literary traditions of the forest as a place of exile, trial and danger to shape new ideas of India as a modern nation. The book casts new light on a wide range of modern writers, from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – widely regarded as the first Indian novelist – to contemporary authors such as Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie as well as local attitudes to nationhood and the environment across the country.
Download or read book For God s Sake written by Ambi Parameswaran (Foreword by Amish Tripathi) and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An adman constantly strives to connect market research data to insight on a winning campaign. Ambi Parmeshwaran has developed a fascination for how Indians are getting more religious but also more consumption driven. Combining his thirty- year experience as an adman with a lifelong passion for religious studies, Ambi seeks to answer questions like: • Why has the bindi disappeared from advertisements? • How did Akshaya Trithaya become such a big deal? • What makes Lord Shiva so cool? • How did a Chennai-based department store start the New Year's Sale phenomenon? • Are Muslims more open-minded shoppers? • Why do people who have no interest in using an MBA degree still get an MBA degree? • How did the Manusmriti do a disservice to Hindu women? • What can Harvard Business School learn from the Kumbh Mela? Ambi has filled this book with personal stories, anecdotes, lessons and excerpts from research and other publications. This book is a treat for anyone interested in how religion has evolved and how clever marketers have ridden the wave by tailoring their products and services.
Download or read book Banaras Reconstructed written by Madhuri Desai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues. In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.
Download or read book Imagining a Place for Buddhism written by Anne E. Monius and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-06 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Tamil-speaking South India is celebrated for its preservation of Hindu tradition, other religious communities have played a significant role in shaping the region's religious history. Among these non-Hindu communities is that of the Buddhists, who are little-understood because of the scarcity of remnants of Tamil-speaking Buddhist culture. Here, focusing on the two Buddhist texts in Tamil that are complete (a sixth-century poetic narrative and an eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics), Monius sheds light on the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation, and evolution of religious identity and community.
Download or read book Puppet and Spirit Ritual Religion and Performing Objects written by Claudia Orenstein and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology of essays aims to explore the many types of relationships that exist between puppets, broadly speaking, and the immaterial world. The allure of the puppet goes beyond its material presence as, historically and throughout the globe, many uses of puppets and related objects have expressed and capitalized on their posited connections to other realms or ability to serve as vessels or conduits for immaterial presence. The flip side of the puppet’s troubling uncanniness is precisely the possibilities it represents for connecting to discarnate realities. Where do we see such connections? How do we describe, analyze, and theorize these relationships? The first of two volumes, this book focuses on these questions in relation to long-established, traditional practices using puppets, devotional objects, and related items with sacred aspects to them or that perform ritual roles. Looking at performance traditions and artifacts from China, Indonesia, Korea, Mali, Brazil, Iran, Germany, and elsewhere, the essays from scholars and practitioners provide a range of useful models and critical vocabularies for addressing the ritual and spiritual aspects of puppet performance, further expanding the growing understanding and appreciation of puppetry generally. This book, along with its companion volume, offers, for the first time, robust coverage of this subject from a diversity of voices, examples, and perspectives.
Download or read book Indian Short Story A Critical Evaluation written by Dipak Giri and published by Malik and Sons. This book was released on 2024-10-03 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a literary genre, Indian short story, next to poetry, is the most popular and accepted form of literature for its variety and nuance of Indian experience. Evolving over time, it has gained wide currency among people. Even after its recourse to traditional rules of the craft, Indian short story amazingly presents itself an original and distinctive form of art. Developed out of contemporary native literature and western storytelling technique, Indian short story presents an amalgation of two different literary traditions which has become unique and distinctive in course of time and long been catering to the taste of people. Ever since its origin, it has already witnessed a plethora of Indian writers who have made significant contributions to this genre by encapsulating the essence of Indian life and culture. They are Rabindranath Tagore, Munshi Premchand, R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Ismat Chughtai, Ruskin Bond, Khushwant Singh, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ashapurna Devi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Anita Nair, Qurratulain Hyder, Namita Gokhale, Madhulika Liddle , just to name a few. At present Indian short story has taken a wider form, much more than earlier and almost every writer has started trying her or his hand at this field that it is too difficult for one to sum up the whole in one singular work. Still this present book is an endeavour to compile the works of major Indian short story writers in a short but comprehensive way in order to supply the best possible materials to readers, writers, academics, scholars and students who wish to do further studies in this field. There are twenty six chapters in this book which together presents a rich tapestry of this genre. Hopefully this book will march towards many unexplored realms exciting many curious minds, restarting many fruitful dialogues and invigorating many fresh and new ideas among academics, scholars and students alike.
Download or read book If All the World Were Paper written by Tyler W. Williams and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do writing and literacy reshape the ways a language and its literature are imagined? If All the World Were Paper explores this question in the context of Hindi, the most widely spoken language in Southern Asia and the fourth most widely spoken language in the world today. Emerging onto the literary scene of India in the mid-fourteenth century, the vernacular of Hindi quickly acquired a place alongside “classical” languages like Sanskrit and Persian as a medium of literature and scholarship. The material and social processes through which it came to be written down and the particular form that it took—as illustrated storybooks, loose-leaf textbooks, personal notebooks, and holy scriptures—played a critical role in establishing Hindi as a language capable of transmitting poetry, erudition, and even revelation. If All the World Were Paper combines close readings of literary and scholastic works with an examination of hundreds of handwritten books from precolonial India to tell the story of Hindi literature’s development and reveal the relationships among ideologies of writing, material practices, and literary genres. Tyler W. Williams forcefully argues for a new approach to the literary archive, demonstrating how the ways books were inscribed, organized, and used can tell us as much about their meaning and significance as the texts within them. This book sets out a novel program for engaging with the archive of Hindi and of South Asian languages more broadly at a moment when much of that archive faces existential threats.
Download or read book Genre Fiction of New India written by E. Dawson Varughese and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates fiction in English, written within, and published from India since 2000 in the genre of mythology-inspired fiction in doing so it introduces the term ‘Bharati Fantasy’. This volume is anchored in notions of the ‘weird’ and thus some time is spent understanding this term linguistically, historically (‘wyrd’) as well as philosophically and most significantly socio-culturally because ‘reception’ is a key theme to this book’s thesis. The book studies the interface of science, Hinduism and itihasa (a term often translated as ‘history’) within mythology-inspired fiction in English from India and these are specifically examined through the lens of two overarching interests: reader reception and the genre of weird fiction. The book considers Indian and non-Indian receptions to the body of mythology-inspired fiction, highlighting how English fiction from India has moved away from being identified as the traditional Indian postcolonial text. Furthermore, the book reveals broader findings in relation to identity and Indianness and India’s post-millennial society’s interest in portraying and projecting ideas of India through its ancient cultures, epic narratives and cultural (Hindu) figures.
Download or read book Ralph Waldo Emerson written by Prentiss Clark and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his 1837 speech "The American Scholar," Ralph Waldo Emerson noted, "life is our dictionary," encapsulating a body of work that reached well beyond the American 19th century. This comprehensive study explores Emerson as a preacher, poet, philosopher, lecturer, essayist and editor. There are nearly 100 entries on individual texts and their personal, historical and literary contexts. Emerson's work is placed within his relationships with family members, fellow Transcendentalists and transatlantic friends, and his commitment to ethics, self-culture and social change. This book provides the fullest possible exploration of Emerson's writing and philosophy. Far ahead of his own time, the man enthusiastically questioned institutions, communities, friendships, history, individuality and contemporaneous approaches to environmental stewardship.
