Download or read book Religion and Rajput Women written by Lindsey Harlan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices--chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book. What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices--chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book.
Download or read book Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India written by Surinder M. Bhardwaj and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983-07-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dr. Bhardwaj's in-depth study of the various aspects of the institution of pilgrimage shows that instead of being a simple practice it has been a gigantic phenomenon affecting all aspects of Indian life. . . integrating diverse forces, various cults, and numerous traditions over the ages."--Asian Student "This is the best general survey of a major religion's total pilgrimage system and the best intensive investigation of one of its subsystems. . . . Dr. Bhardwaj's book is an important step towards the recognition of a social phenomenon which has for millennia played a crucial role in the integration of religions, nationalities, and international communities. And, not least importantly, it is highly readable."--Journal of the American Academy of Religion "Detailed, accurate, and generally informative; he has succeeded in tracing, for the first time, the relationship of the rank-order or 'level' of a sacred place. . . to its degree of sanctity, type of deity, and caste and motivation of the pilgrim. . . .The implications of Mr. Bhardwaj's study are profound and necessary to the understanding of Indian religion. . . it is fascinating."--Times Literary Supplement "Here is a fine example of what the geographic study of India needs: disciplined work that shows full awareness of Indian cultural meanings. . . .it sets a worth standard."--Professional Geographer
Download or read book The Goddesses Henchmen written by Lindsey Harlan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-05 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rajputs ruled the vast majority of the kingdoms that were joined together after Indian independence to form the state of Rajasthan, "Land of Kings." An important part of Rajput religion is the worship of "heroes" who have died in battle. This practice has attained new significance in recent years, as right-wing Hindu activists have deployed narratives about heroism in Rajput wars with Muslim emperors. In this book, Lindsey Harlan explores the idea of the Rajput hero. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in stories about heroes and in their worship. She looks at the differences between female and male storytellers, the relationships of the hero to the women in his tale, and the relationship of the hero to the goddess for whom he is both sacrifice and henchman. She obtains her materials from interviews with Rajput families and their servants, from songfests, from bystanders at shrines, from ritual specialists. Ultimately she shows how heroic traditions encapsulate and express ideals of perfection and masculinity, defined most visibly against the backdrop of domesticity and femininity. More broadly she argues that heroes reflect ever-changing valuations of history, and serve as sources of inspiration for facing contemporary challenges (domestic, communal, national) and concerns about the future.
Download or read book Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India written by Sarbeswar Sahoo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the politics of Pentecostal conversion and anti-Christian violence in India. It asks: why has India been experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since the 1990s? Why are the Bhil Adivasis increasingly converting to Pentecostalism? And, what are the implications of conversion for religion within indigenous communities on the one hand and broader issues of secularism, religious freedom and democratic rights on the other? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Bhils of Northern India since 2006, this book asserts that ideological incompatibility and antagonism between Christian missionaries and Hindu nationalists provide only a partial explanation for anti-Christian violence in India. It unravels the complex interactions between different actors/ agents in the production of anti-Christian violence and provides detailed ethnographic narratives on Pentecostal conversion, Hindu nationalist politics and anti-Christian violence in the largest state of India that has hitherto been dominated by upper caste Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology.
Download or read book Sati the Blessing and the Curse written by John Stratton Hawley and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1994 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sati symbolizes ultimate loyalty and self-sacrifice. It often figures near the core of a Hindu identity that feels embattled in a modern world. Yet to those who deplore it, sati is a curse, a violation of every woman's womanhood.
Download or read book Women of India written by Arun R. Kumbhare and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A systematic presentation of the status of women of India throughout the long history of about 6000 years has been presented starting from the Vedic times to the post-independence period. A detailed description of the status of women during the Vedic times, which is rarely available in any of the existing literature, and in the following periods is very significant to the study of this subject. The author has discussed how the political and religious conditions over the periods have affected the conditions of women. The age-old evils, which had got firmly entrenched in the Indian society, such as the tradition of Sati, illiteracy, child marriages, and deplorable treatment of widows and so on, still persist and some new ones have joined the list. These are: bride burning, dowry, female feticide, domestic violence, to name a few. Short biographies of some outstanding women have been included to illustrate that in spite of adversities some women had achieved eminence. To the credit of the Indian Government, legislative measures have been taken to protect and improve the status of women after independence and just prior to it. These have been outlined. Unfortunately, these measures have not been able to achieve their intended results on account of wide spread corruption and lack of education and awareness among women, especially in the rural areas. A snapshot of the present conditions is given along with concluding remarks and recommendations for improvement. Improvement of the status of women is extremely improvement for India if it wishes to become a developed and progressive country and a world leader in culture and ideology.
Download or read book Handbook on Rajputs written by A. H. Bingley and published by Asian Educational Services. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Emergence of Modern Hinduism written by Richard S. Weiss and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen written by Ramya Sreenivasan and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies The medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen explores how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of the past through the repeated refashioning of the legend of Padmini. Ramya Sreenivasan investigates these legends and traces their subsequent appropriation by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals, for varying different political ends. Using Padmini as a means of illustrating the power of gender norms in constructing heroic memory, she shows how such narratives about virtuous women changed as they circulated across particular communities in South Asia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and historywriting in South Asia. Illustrating how enduring legends emerged out of particular precolonial repositories of "tradition," the book also addresses the nature of colonial transitions and precolonial historical consciousness.
Download or read book Impersonations written by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.
Download or read book Reflections of Amma written by Amanda J. Lucia and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally presented as the author's dissertation (Ph. D.--University of Chicago, 2010).
Download or read book Women and World Religions written by Lucinda J. Peach and published by Pearson. This book was released on 2002 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features a number of different articles and essays that focus on women as active agents of their spiritual lives--a topic that is often overlooked in most other world religion books. It explores how women from many parts of the world have thought about, acted, and have been treated as members of a religious tradition. Investigates how women of a variety of religious traditions (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc.) practice their religion, how their beliefs differ from men, and how they have carved out their own place within their religious tradition. For anyone interested in how women are shaped by and how they shape the various world religions.
Download or read book Religion and Personal Law in Secular India written by Gerald James Larson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-28 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the papers presented at a conference held at Bloomington in 1999; some previously published.
Download or read book Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions written by Wendy Doniger and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Zorba the Buddha written by Hugh B. Urban and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zorba the Buddha is the first comprehensive study of the life, teachings, and following of the controversial Indian guru known in his youth as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and in his later years as Osho (1931–1990). Most Americans today remember him only as the “sex guru” and the “Rolls Royce guru,” who built a hugely successful but scandal-ridden utopian community in central Oregon during the 1980s. Yet Osho was arguably the first truly global guru of the twentieth century, creating a large transnational movement that traced a complex global circuit from post-Independence India of the 1960s to Reagan’s America of the 1980s and back to a developing new India in the 1990s. The Osho movement embodies some of the most important economic and spiritual currents of the past forty years, emerging and adapting within an increasingly interconnected and conflicted late-capitalist world order. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, Hugh Urban has created a rich and powerful narrative that is a must-read for anyone interested in religion and globalization.
Download or read book A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses written by Michael Slouber and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the divine as female is rare—even controversial—in most religions. Hinduism, by contrast, preserves a rich and continuous tradition of goddess worship. A Garland of Forgotten Goddesses conveys the diversity of this tradition by bringing together a fresh array of captivating and largely overlooked Hindu goddess tales from different regions. As the first such anthology of goddess narratives in translation, this collection highlights a range of sources from ancient myths to modern lore. The goddesses featured here battle demons, perform miracles, and grant rare Tantric visions to their devotees. Each translation is paired with a short essay that explains the goddess’s historical and social context, elucidating the ways religion adapts to changing times.
Download or read book From the Margins of Hindu Marriage written by Lindsey Harlan and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a unique and intimate view of Hindu marriage, the essays in this collection explore points at which the margins of marriage are traversed or transgressed. Rather than focus on normative expectations within marriage, they examine times in which norms are tested or rejected. Using stories, songs, and narrated accounts, the essays treat such topics as widowhood, adultery, levirate, divorce, and suttee, as well as the subversion of marriage by devotion to deities and by alternative constructions of conjugal duty and marital experience.
