Aditya Malik – författare

This book offers a detailed study of the Devnarayan ki par, along with the first English translation of this well-known Rajasthani oral narrative. The tale of the god Devnarayan is performed by itinerant singer-priests during night-wakes in front of a very large painted scroll depicting characters and scenes from the story. It is the focus of one of the most popular folk cults of the Rajasthan region of India. Aditya Malik uses the narrative to explore a range of questions relevant to the study of Indian folk culture and Hinduism as a whole: How is orality conceptualized and practiced? What is the relationship between spoken and visual signs? How are ideas about religion, society, and history envisioned within the framework of the narrative? Malik argues that to understand ideas of history in Indian cultural contexts we must go to oral narratives, epics, regional tellings, and local knowledge. By making the Narrative of Devnarayan available in English, he provides an important resource for that task.

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Central Himalayan region of Kumaon, Tales of Justice and Rituals of Divine Embodiment from the Central Himalayas explores ideas of justice by drawing on oral and written narratives, stories, testimonies, and rituals told and performed in relation to the 'God of Justice', Goludev, and other regional deities. The book seeks to answer several questions: How is the concept of justice defined in South Asia? Why do devotees seek out Goludev for the resolution of matters of justice instead of using the secular courts? What are the sociological and political consequences of situating divine justice within a secular, democratic, modern context? Moreover, how do human beings locate themselves within the indeterminateness and struggles of their everyday existence? What is the place of language and ritual in creating intimacy and self? How is justice linked to intimacy, truth, and being human? The stories and narratives in this book revolve around Goludev's own story and deeds, as well as hundreds of petitions (manauti) written on paper that devotees hang on his temple walls, and rituals (jagar) that involve spirit possession and the embodiment of the deity through designated mediums. The jagars are powerful, extraordinary experiences, mesmerizing because of their intensity but also because of what they imply in terms of how we conceptualize being being human with the seemingly limitless potential to shift, alter, and transform ourselves through language and ritual practice. The petitions, though silent and absent of the singing, drumming, and choreography that accompany jagars, are equally powerful because of their candid and intimate testimony to the aspirations, breakdowns, struggles, and breakthroughs that circumscribe human existence.

This book is about the legendary Rajput chieftain Hammira Chauhan, the king of the impregnable fortress of Ranthambore in southern Rajasthan who died in 1301 CE after a monumental battle against Alauddin Khalji, the sultan of Delhi. This singular event reverberates through time to the point of creating a historical and cultural region that crystallizes through copious texts composed in different genres and languages (Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Rajasthani, English) in shifting religious and political contexts, medieval as well as modern. The main poetical-historical work composed in Sanskrit, the Hammira-Mahakavya (‘great poem’) by the Jaina poet Nayachandra Suri (15th century), is propelled by a dream in which the dead king urges the poet to write about his deeds. Can history with its preoccupation for the factual, begin in a dream? What does it mean to think about history and time via the imagination? Is time, whether past, present or future linked to imagination? Do imagination, time, and history arise together? What are the implications of thinking of history as something that appears in our experience? What does it mean to write a history as a historical being in whom diverse temporalities intertwine in the here and now?

This book is about the legendary Rajput chieftain Hammira Chauhan, the king of the impregnable fortress of Ranthambore in southern Rajasthan who died in 1301 CE after a monumental battle against Alauddin Khalji, the sultan of Delhi. This singular event reverberates through time to the point of creating a historical and cultural region that crystallizes through copious texts composed in different genres and languages (Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Rajasthani, English) in shifting religious and political contexts, medieval as well as modern. The main poetical-historical work composed in Sanskrit, the Hammira-Mahakavya (‘great poem’) by the Jaina poet Nayachandra Suri (15th century), is propelled by a dream in which the dead king urges the poet to write about his deeds. Can history with its preoccupation for the factual, begin in a dream? What does it mean to think about history and time via the imagination? Is time, whether past, present or future linked to imagination? Do imagination, time, and history arise together? What are the implications of thinking of history as something that appears in our experience? What does it mean to write a history as a historical being in whom diverse temporalities intertwine in the here and now?

How is justice conceptualized? Does it appear as a distinct, guiding norma­tive principle in Indian intellectual traditions? How does it relate to other concepts like equality, and responsibility? What are the ground realities of justice in India? Are there competing normative orders? Are there forms of compliance, or are there discrepancies between normative rules of justice and the everyday practices of social actors? Are ideal rules ignored, modi­fied, adapted in everyday practices according to the particular contextual realities? Could we identify particular arenas of (in)justice, like class, caste, gender, or natural resources? Is justice something that is continuously being ‘realized’ in shifting historical and social contexts? These questions compel us to reconsider interlinked fields essential to theorizations of modernity – the autonomous individual, extraordinary kinds of agency and knowledge, equality, aspiration, and choice. Such theorizations of the individual in the context of defining modernity and justice have deep implications in how the political world is organized and imagined that, in turn, inform the ideas of citizenship, democracy and secularism that underlie modern political systems such as the nation state, but also entrenched forms of institutional, social and personal violence, inequality, and discrimination.