Nectar Gaze and Poison Breath

Aditya Malik is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director of Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Aditya Malik's new work on the Devnarayan epic of Rajasthan provides valuable access in English to an important oral and print tradition of Western India and a comprehensive introduction to related scholarly issues ... This field of research does not often see new additions, so a work of this kind and scope is particularly welcome. The translations are beautifully rendered ... This work makes a significant contribution to the study of oral narrative in South Asia and in comparative contexts, to a broader discourse on the representation of history and the past within South Asian intellectual and cultural traditions, to the larger study of folk and popular religious traditions, and to the crucial interaction between oral and written texts and performance Aditya Malik's meticulous and sensitive study of the Rajasthani Devnarayan epic opens up a world of surpassing richness. The sung epic text, hitherto unstudied, is one of the most colorful and imaginative known to us from South Asia. Malik interprets