Gonda Indological Studies – serie

In Herrschergenealogie und religiöses Patronat, Annette Schmiedchen analyses some 250 inscriptions from the time of the early medieval royal dynasties of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, Śilāhāras, and Yādavas, who reigned in central India from the 8th to the 13th centuries. The information derived from copper-plate charters and stone inscriptions primarily consists of genealogies of the ruling kings as well as of data regarding their religious foundations and endowments and the donations of other members of society.Annette Schmiedchen shows how genealogical accounts were modified to legitimize individual claims to power, and she convincingly proves that the 10th and 11th centuries were a period of religious change, which witnessed a shift in patronage patterns and a closer link between Vedic Brahmanism and Hindu temple worship.

In Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape: Narrative, Place, and the Śaiva Imaginary in Early Medieval North India, Elizabeth A. Cecil explores the sacred geography of the earliest community of Śiva devotees called the Pāśupatas. This book brings the narrative cartography of the Skandapurāṇa into conversation with physical landscapes, inscriptions, monuments, and icons in order to examine the ways in which Pāśupatas were emplaced in regional landscapes and to emphasize the use of material culture as media through which notions of belonging and identity were expressed. By exploring the ties between the formation of early Pāśupata communities and the locales in which they were embedded, this study reflects critically upon the ways in which community building was coincident with place-making in Early Medieval India.

Academic study of the tantric traditions has blossomed in recent decades, in no small measure thanks to the magisterial contributions of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson, until 2015 Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. This collection of essays honours him and touches several fields of Indology that he has helped to shape (or, in the case of the Śaiva religions, revolutionised): the history, ritual, and philosophies of tantric Buddhism, Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism; religious art and architecture; and Sanskrit belles lettres. Grateful former students, joined by other experts influenced by his scholarship, here offer papers that make significant contributions to our understanding of the cultural, religious, political, and intellectual histories of premodern South and Southeast Asia.Contributors are: Peter Bisschop, Judit Törzsök, Alex Watson, Isabelle Ratié, Christopher Wallis, Péter-Dániel Szántó, Srilata Raman, Csaba Dezső, Gergely Hidas, Nina Mirnig, John Nemec, Bihani Sarkar, Jürgen Hanneder, Diwakar Acharya, James Mallinson, Csaba Kiss, Jason Birch, Elizabeth Mills, Ryugen Tanemura, Anthony Tribe, and Parul Dave-Mukherji.

What is Dance? What is Theatre? What is the boundary between enacting a character and narrating a story? When does movement become tinted with meaning? And when does beauty shine alone as if with no object? These universal aesthetic questions find a theoretically vibrant and historically informed set of replies in the oeuvre of the eleventh-century Kashmirian author Abhinavagupta. The present book offers the first critical edition, translation, and study of a crucial and lesser known passage of his commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra, the seminal work of Sanskrit dramaturgy. The nature of dramatic acting and the mimetic power of dance, emotions, and beauty all play a role in Abhinavagupta’s thorough investigation of performance aesthetics, now presented to the modern reader.

Volume 1 of 2. This two-volume work highlights the central importance of the Āndhra region in the political, cultural, and religious history of early South Asia. It results from a decade-long project undertaking to document, inventory, and edit anew a body of over a thousand inscriptions, many of which never duly assessed as historical documents, and many unpublished to this day. The first volume presents the first ever attempt at a systematic inventory of this tragically dispersed corpus. The eleven essays gathered in the second volume, written by prominent philologists, epigraphists, art historians, and ancient historians of India, make elaborate use of the presently available evidence and put forward new perspectives on a great variety of sources, shedding fundamental new light on issues of power, patronage, and religious pluralism in the early historic and early medieval Deccan.Contributors are: Stefan Baums, Shailendra Bhandare, Christine Chojnacki, Max Deeg, Emmanuel Francis, Valérie Gillet, Mekhola Gomes, Arlo Griffiths, Petra Kieffer-Pülz, Andrew Ollett, Akira Shimada, Upinder Singh, Ingo Strauch, Vincent Tournier, and Peter Zieme

Volume 2 of 2. This two-volume work highlights the central importance of the Āndhra region in the political, cultural, and religious history of early South Asia. It results from a decade-long project undertaking to document, inventory, and edit anew a body of over a thousand inscriptions, many of which never duly assessed as historical documents, and many unpublished to this day. The first volume presents the first ever attempt at a systematic inventory of this tragically dispersed corpus. The eleven essays gathered in the second volume, written by prominent philologists, epigraphists, art historians, and ancient historians of India, make elaborate use of the presently available evidence and put forward new perspectives on a great variety of sources, shedding fundamental new light on issues of power, patronage, and religious pluralism in the early historic and early medieval Deccan.Contributors are: Stefan Baums, Shailendra Bhandare, Christine Chojnacki, Max Deeg, Emmanuel Francis, Valérie Gillet, Mekhola Gomes, Arlo Griffiths, Petra Kieffer-Pülz, Andrew Ollett, Akira Shimada, Upinder Singh, Ingo Strauch, Vincent Tournier, and Peter Zieme

Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrative tradition. This book studies one such narrative, known as the Dharmaparīkṣā ('Examination of Religion'), which has intrigued audiences for its ridiculing critique of Brahmanical beliefs and authority. This book is the first to examine six versions of the story in classical and vernacular languages and from different periods together as a tradition of adaptations. Revealing the adaptive practices Jain authors applied as literary and socio-historical contexts evolved, the book offers a diachronic perspective on Jain polemics, and on the conceptualization of adaptation and translation in South Asia.

Based on an extensive and successful hunt for previously unknown manuscripts containing the Jaiminīya-Upaniṣad-Brāhmaṇa, the late Professor Masato Fujii offers a critical edition of this text which provides many significant improvements to the two principal previous editions. This text is the earliest Upaniṣad (datable to c. 500 BCE), which in a unique way forms a transition from the Brāhmaṇas to the Upaniṣads. It is also an important text because of its Sāmavedic affinity, known for its arcane topics.The central theme is the “bodiless immortal gāyatra sāman”, developed by Śāṭyāyani, the original eponym of the Jaiminīya school of Sāmaveda.