Manohar Publishers and Distributors: 07/26/12

26 July, 2012

Essays on Religion Literature and Law

By- Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer

Heidrun Bruckner, Anne Feldhaus, Aditya Malik (eds.)

The present volume contains fourteen selected papers in English by the late G.-D. Sontheimer and follow up on his earlier volume King of Hunters, Warriors, and Shephers: Essays on Khandoba (Delhi 1997). The articles chosen for publication here pan a wide thematic and temporal range and will be of interest to students of Hinduism. The volume contains essays on the juristic personality of Hindu deities, the history and religion of pastoral groups in the Deccan and the interdependence of folk and scriptural religion. The articles reflect Sontheimer’s multidisciplinary approach, combining the methodologies of philosophy, anthropology, history, archaeology, epigraphy and iconography. Three other articles, illustrated by over a hundred photographs, focus on hero and sati-stones of the Deccan and Western India. Sonteimer identified the worship of heroes and satis as an important element of folk religion. He analyses the memorial stones in the context of other historical, social and religious references, physical ecology and literary sources. Yet another set of articles deals with aspects of oral literature. Two papers can be considered building blocks for a model of Hinduism that was finally worked out in ‘Hinduism- The Five Components and their Interaction’ (1989), the article which concludes the present volume.

Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer died in 1992. He was Professor of Indian Religion and Philosophy at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Heidrun Bruckner is Professor of Indology and South Asian Studies at the University of Wurzurg.

Anne Feldhaus is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

Aditya Malik is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

ISBN 81-7304-521-6 2004 468p. Rs.755/ pounds 65

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An Abode of the Goddess

By- Masahiko Togawa

This book, based on the field survey, is about a village society in Bengal, and its relationships with Hindu kingship on the ritual organization of an old temple. The village temple is well known for being one o 51 sakta-pithas scattered over the Indian subcontinent. Sakta-pithas mean centres of Sakti worship or seat of the goddess Sati (another name of the goddess Durga) in Bengali, where the body parts of the goddess Sati fell to earth after she had been cut to pieces by the discus of Vishnu. Every place believed to have a Sati’s limb became the centre for the worship of the sakti-cult, or an abode of the goddess (pritha-sthan).

The village temple prospered under the patronage of Maharaja Kirtichand (1702-40) of Bardhaman Raj, though the temple history is fr older than this. At the beginning of British rule, the Royal family of Bardhaman became the largest zamindar in Bengal. They exercised great authority over the local society which is still observable in the various ritual processes.

The temple organization consists of the ritual posts and roles assigned to the various castes, lineages and households, which are fundamentally based on the kinship relations in the village. At the same time, the temple organization is founded on the service tenures granted by the Bardhaman Raj since the early eighteenth century, and even the village untouchables are endowed with indispensable roles in the temple ritual as servants of the goddess. The analysis reveals the strong influences of the indigenous polity over ordinary life in the rural society.

Masahiko Togawa is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Hiroshima University, Japan.

ISBN 81-7304-677-8 2006 362p. Rs.236/ pounds 40

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Warfare, Religion and Society in Indian History

By- Raziuddin Aquil and Kaushik Roy

This volume includes essays on a wide range of themes, marked by various distinct approaches to the study of connections between religion and warfare in Indian history from earliest times to the present. Such a collection could possibly cause some consternations, even as editors began with the basic premise that some of the critical questions be discussed as freely as possible, despite constraints of ideological barriers limiting the fields of inquiry.

Written by a mix of veterans as well as young scholars—Raziuddin Aquil, Richard B. Barnett, C.A. Bayly, Torkel Brekke, Richard M. Eaton, Michael H. Fisher, Pratyay Nath, Kaushik Roy, Arupjyoti Saikia, and Sandhya Sharma—the essays will provoke some debate on what all could possibly be undertaken as legitimate historical exercise and whether it is impossible to write a professional and non-partisan history of such politically sensitive issues as the entanglement of religion and warfare in Indian history and society.

Raziuddin Aquil: is Associate Prof. in the Dept. of History, University of Delhi.

Kaushik Roy: is Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Studies of Civil War (CSCW) at International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), Norway, and Reader, in the Dept. of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

ISBN 978-81-7304-958-3 2012 340p. Rs.995/ pounds 50

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The Puranic World: Environment, Gender, Ritual and Myth

By- Vijay Nath

The present book is a collection of essays written at different points of time and published in reputed journals and books. What blends them together is the use of the primary source material in the form of a vast compendium of Puranic literature (backed by epigraphic, archaeological and anthropological data), which has been utilized to arrive at conclusions pertaining to changes in Indian society and religion during the later half of first millennium AD when the major Puranas were being compiled. The period represents a watershed in Indian history, for it marked a transition from a commercially viable economic order to a closed feudal economy. The social and religious dimensions of the brahmanical system were particularly impacted by such a transition resulting in some innovative forms of restructuring.

It has been the purpose behind most of the present articles to reassess and utilize the available Puranic evidence for getting fresh insights into the rationale and precise nature of these changes. The key areas of thrust in these articles are changes in material culture, awareness and mode of dealing with environmental issues, gender based differentiation, recent ritual formations such as Mahadana and Tirthas as well as the utilization of myth as a mode of expressing historical reality.

Vijay Nath, retired as Associate Professor, Department of History, Jankidevi Memorial College, University of Delhi.

ISBN 978-81-7304-801-2 2009 310p. Rs.775/ pounds 50

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The Infinite Story: The Past and Present of the Ramayanas in Hindi

By- Danuta Stasik

The story of the Ramayana is well-known in all Indian language and Hindi literature is no exception to it. It has a long and rich tradition based on Ramkatha that through the centuries has challenged many authors.

The main aim of this work is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to analyse the development of the Ramayana tradition in Hindi literature from the perspective of its most important achievements against their historical background and socio-cultural context. Secondly, it attempts to examine the relationship between the story, i.e. Ramakatha, as told by different authors, and Ram, the protagonist of the Ramayana, who functions as a cultural hero and serves as model of right behaviour for the others and at the same time appears to be one of the most important factors in the continuing popularity of the tradition.

The volume opens with an introduction that outlines the diversity of the Ramayana tradition in India, beginning with the first known Ramayana ascribed to the sage Valimiki. It discusses later developments in Sanskrit and vernacular literatures, as exemplified by their best achievements originating from Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina contexts. It also considers the implications of all these works for the unfolding of the tradition in Hindi. In its closing portion, the volume provides an overview of the growth of the cult of Ram in north India.

This is an indispensable volume for scholars of Hinduism and north Indian cultural life.

Danuta Stasik is Professor and Head of the Department of South Asian Studies. Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Warsaw. Her research interests are the Ramayana tradition in Hindi literature, Rambhakti in north India and the Indian diaspora in the West (particularly as represented in Hindi writing).

She is the author and co-author of seven books, among them: Image of the West in Hindi Literature (1994); a grammar of the Hindi language (in Polish, 2^nd edn 2008); a textbook of Hindi in two parts (in Polish, part 1 – 4^th edn 2007 and part 2 – 2^nd edn 2008), as well as of more than fifty articles published in different books and journals in Polish, English and Hindi. She is also Editor-in-Chief of a Polish journal Przeglad Orientalistyczny (Oriental Review).

ISBN 978-81-7304-815-9 2009 334p. Rs.995/ pounds 50

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Spectacular Politics: Performative Nation-building and Religion in Modern India

By- Clemens Six and Rekha Kamath Rajan

How does one explain the historical processes through which abstract ideas such as the idea of a nation become a motivation for mass mobilization, political re-organization and even violence on a large scale? This book seeks to find answers to this question in the context of India’s modern history during its long eventful twentieth century.

Starting from the early stages of Gandhian mass mobilization after the First World War and subsequently proceeding to more recent examples of Hindu-nationalism, the book analyses ‘spectacular politics’ as a distinct form of political communication. It thereby seeks to understand not only how the idea of the nation turned into the most powerful political idea in modern India, but also how political communication and mobilization work in an extremely heterogeneous and fragmented society. As Indian society becomes more and more involved globalization and internationalization, many seemingly self-evident paradigms of India’s self-understanding such as its national identity, democracy, or secularism are once again subject to intense political controversies and social confrontations.

Finally the example of religiously motivated terrorism illustrates the profound ambivalence of performative politics between inclusive, even participatory effects on the one hand and destabilizing, even destructive consequences of those political discourses, which emphasize their form as much as their content.

Clemens Six is Assisstant Professor at the Department of History, University of Berne, Switzerland.

Rekha Kamath Rajan is Professor of German, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

ISBN 978-81-7304-886-9 2010 264p. Rs.725/ pounds 45