Rocher Indology – serie

During British colonial rule in India, the treatment of high-caste Hindu widows became the subject of great controversy. Such women were not permitted to remarry and were offered two options: a life of seclusion and rigorous asceticism or death on the funeral pyre of a deceased husband. Was this a modern development, or did it date from the classical period? In this book, David Brick offers an exhaustive history of the treatment and status of widows under classical Hindu law, or Dharmasastra as it is called in Sanskrit, which spanned approximately the third century BCE to the eighteenth-century CE.Under Dharmasastra, Hindu jurists treated at length and at times hotly debated four widow-related issues: widow remarriage and levirate, a widow's right to inherit her husband's estate, widow-asceticism, and sati. Each of the book's chapters examine these issues in depth, concluding with an appendix that addresses a widow's right to adopt a son-a fifth widow-related issue that became the topic of discussion in late Dharmasastra works and was a significant point of legal contentions during the colonial period. When read critically and historically, works of Dharmasastra provide a long and detailed record of the prevailing legal and social norms of high-caste Hindu society. Widows Under Hindu Law uses lengthy English translations of important passages from Hindu legal texts to present a largescale narrative of the treatment of widows under the Hindu legal tradition.This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

In Indian philosophical traditions, a reflection in a mirror frequently serves as a metaphor, suggesting that just as a face in a mirror appears where it is not, so does consciousness. Mirror of Nature, Mirror of Self utilizes this metaphor to address metaphysical, epistemological, and theological problems within non-reductionist approaches to consciousness. Author Dimitry Shevchenko contends that consciousness and its properties--such as the sense of self, subjectivity, and experience of qualia--stand in falsely perceived relations to cognitive and perceptive processes. This book explores models of interaction between consciousness, the mind-body complex, and the world in the philosophical schools of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Advaita-Vedant. In a dialogue with psychoanalytical theory and analytic philosophy of mind, Shevchenko defends a new model of consciousness, integrating consciousness-mind dualism, mind naturalism, and representationalism about consciousness. Despite the overwhelming presence of pratibimbavadas, or "theories of reflection", in major philosophical traditions in India, they have received little scholarly attention. Mirror of Nature, Mirror of Self is the first systematic exploration of mirror models of consciousness across traditions. By grounding these theories in their historical intellectual context, Shevchenko contributes to an intense philosophical conversation between Indian reductionists and non-reductionists about consciousness. The book explores the impact of Indian mirror models on theories of mental representation, theories of knowledge, philosophy of language, debates on illusory causality and the relationship between noumena and phenomena, as well as soteriological and theological theories. Finally, by comparing mirror models of consciousness in Indian philosophy with Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and by engaging with theories of consciousness in analytic philosophy, this study contributes to contemporary debates across philosophical disciplines. This is an open access title. It is available to read and download as a free PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship, author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual history of a popular Hindu scripture, the Bhagavata Purana, spanning the precolonial period of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries in India. He shows that Brahmin intellectuals writing in Sanskrit were neither impervious to the quotidian religious practices of bhakti, nor uninterested in its politics of language and caste. They supported, contested, and repurposed the social commentary of bhakti even in highly technical works of Sanskrit knowledge, and their personal religious commitments featured in a language and genre of writing that deliberately isolated itself from worldly matters. The religion of bhakti bound together the transregional discourse of Sanskrit learning and the local devotional practices of everyday people, though not in a top-down manner. Rather, vernacular ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world could and did reshape the contours of Sanskrit intellectuality.Venkatkrishnan revisits the historiography of the Bhagavata Purana to expand our knowledge of the many different religious and philosophical communities that interpreted and laid claim to the themes of the text. While most associated with the traditions of Vaisnavism, Love in the Time of Scholarship brings to light how the Bhagavata was also studied by Saivas, Saktas, and others on the periphery of the text's history.This is an open access title available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International licence.

This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a CC BY- NC- ND 4.0 licence.Why do individuals obey commands? The Mīmāṃsā school of Sanskrit philosophy has debated this question for millennia, oscillating among three central positions held by philosophers such as Kuṃārila, Maṇḍana, Bhartṛhari, and Prabhākara. Maṇḍana interpreted commands as descriptive statements, suggesting a correlation between enjoined action and expected output. He argued that knowledge of this means-end relationship accounts for command adherence. Conversely, Prabhākara posited that one obeys a command because one feels enjoined, and only later does one analyze what is being asked and why. Bhartṛhari introduced an 'intuition' theory, or a unified account for both commands and descriptive sentences which asserts that the listener's innate inclinations explain command adherence. In A Philosophy of Commands: On Maṇḍana Miśra's Vidhiviveka, contributors discuss these competing models through the lens of Maṇḍana's Discernment about Commands. The book offers the first English translation of a key chapter detailing Maṇḍana's position in the Discernment about Commands, in addition to the original edition of the same text.

An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.How did languages relate to one another and to intellectual agendas in a highly multilingual milieu like premodern India? Surrender to God Across Languages explores this question through the intellectual history of self-surrender, a main soteriological doctrine of the Śrīvaisnavas, a South Indian religious community that worshiped Visnu-Nārāyana as the Supreme God. Author Manasicha Akepiyapornchai studies six theological treatises from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries composed in Sanskrit and Manipravalam. Each is written by one of five key intellectuals of the community: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācārya, and Vedāntadeśika. Akepiyapornchai argues that there was a complex interplay between interlinguistic changes and doctrinal developments, in such a way that it is impossible to fully account for one without the other: languages shaped self-surrender by providing distinctive conditioning factors both scripturally and theologically at each point in time. However, the intellectuals also navigated differently through the multilingual terrain, making choices that responded to their social circumstances and transformed the linguistic spheres in which they operated. Focusing on the Śrīvaisnavas' self-surrender, this book presents one of the most dynamic moments of premodern Indian multilingual and intellectual history. Drawing on theories of language politics and translation, it also proposes the new theoretical framework of "language sphere" to better capture the linguistic and intellectual interaction from a micro perspective. Despite being formulated with the present case study in mind, this framework has broader implications that can help readers understand multilingual cultures beyond premodern India.