South Asia Research – serie

Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, its duties, and its ultimate destiny. His songs also contain thinly veiled references to esoteric yogic practices (sadhana), including body-centered Hathayogic techniques that are related to those found in Buddhist, Kaula, Natha, and Sufi medieval tantric literature.Dr. Salomon's translation of the work is the first dedicated English translation of Lalan's songs to closely follow the Bangla text, with all of its dialectical variations, and is here produced alongside the original text. Although her untimely death left her work unpublished, the editors have worked diligently to reconstruct her translations from her surviving printed and handwritten manuscripts. The result is a finished product that can finally share her groundbreaking scholarship on Baul traditions with the world.

In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the work of the prolific Bengali poet Ālāol (fl. 1651-71), who translated five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Ālāol's works, paying special attention to his discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. D'Hubert focuses on courtly speech in Ālāol's poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of performing arts in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The foregrounding of this audacious theory of meaning in Ālāol's poetry is a crucial contribution of the book, both in terms of general conceptual analysis and for its significance in the history of Bengali poetry.This book shows how multilingual literacy fostered a variety of literary experiments in the remote kingdom of Arakan, which lay between present-day southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar, in the mid-17th century. D'Hubert also presents a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the major poetic styles in the regional courts of eastern South Asia. In the Shade of the Golden Palace therefore fulfills three functions: it is a unique guide for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.

Through the use of epigraphical evidence, Leslie C. Orr brings into focus the activities and identities of the temple women (devadasis) of medieval South India, and suggests new ways of understanding the character of the temple woman -- and of the role of women in Indian religion and society. This book shows how the temple woman's economic authonomy, independence and initiative allowed her to negotiate medieval temple politics and establish a role for herself with its own peculiar social and religious significance.

Salomon surveys all the inscriptional material - documents written in ink on various surfaces, or carved into stone and metal, as well as seals - in the Indo-Aryan languages. He presents the entire corpus of these inscriptions in a way accessible to specialists in the field as well as non-specialists. This book is intended for scholars of South Asia, Epigraphy.

This is the full edition of the early Upanisads, the central scriptures of Hinduism. Featuring Patrick Olivelle's acclaimed new English translation (Oxford, 1996), it also includes the complete Sanskrit text, as well as variant readings, scholarly emendations, and explanations of Olivelle's choices of particular readings. The volume also contains a concordance of the two recensions of the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, and an extensive bibliography.

This is a translation of a 12th-century Sanskrit legal text, with the original text. The Dayabhaga was one of the most important texts in the history of Indian law. The text, fairly late and inspiring little attention, is important because the British elevated it to such prominence in their new colony in the early 19th century. It was known as the authority on inheritance and significant aspects of family law for the eastern Indian region. The case law and scholarship that surround this text have shaped Indian personal law right up to the present day.

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.

Manu's Code of Law is one of the most important texts in the Sanskrit canon, indeed one of the most important surviving texts from any classical civilization. It paints an astoundingly detailed picture of ancient Indian life-covering everything from the constitution of the king's cabinet to the price of a ferry trip for a pregnant woman-and its doctrines have been central to Indian thought and practice for 2000 years. Despite its importance, however, until now no one has produced a critical edition of this text. As a result, for centuries scholars have been forced to accept clearly inferior editions of Sanskrit texts and to use those unreliable editions as the basis for constructing the history of classical India. In this volume, Patrick Olivelle has assembled the critical text of Manu, including a critical apparatus containing all the significant manuscript variants, along with a reliable and readable translation, copious explanatory notes, and a comprehensive introduction on the structure, content, and socio-political context of the treatise. The result is an outstanding scholarly achievement that will be an essential tool for any serious student of India.

This volume is the result of an international conference organized by the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas. Patrick Olivelle has collected and edited the best papers to emerge from the conference. Part I of the book looks at what can be construed from archeological evidence. Part II concerns itself with the textual evidence for the period. Taken together, these essays offer an unprecedented look at Indian culture and society in this distant epoch.

The paradigmatic Buddhist is the monk. It is well known that ideally Buddhist monks are expected to meditate and study-to engage in religious practice. The institutional structure which makes this concentration on spiritual cultivation possible is the monastery. But as a bureaucratic institution, the monastery requires administrators to organize and manage its functions, to prepare quiet spots for meditation, arrange audiences for sermons, or simply to make sure food is available, and rooms and bedding provided. The valuations placed on such organizational roles were, however, a subject of considerable controversy among Indian Buddhist writers, with some considering them significantly less praiseworthy than meditative concentration or teaching and study, while others more highly appreciated their importance. Managing Monks, as the first major study of the administrative offices of Indian Buddhist monasticism and of those who hold them, explores literary sources, inscriptions and other materials in Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan and Chinese in order to explore this tension and paint a picture of the internal workings of the Buddhist monastic institution in India, highlighting the ambivalent and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward administrators revealed in various sources.

The town of Deopatan, three kilometers northeast of Kathmandu, is above all famous for its main sanctum, the temple of Paśupati, the 'lord of the animals,' a form of Śiva and the tutelary deity of the kings of Nepal since ancient times. By its name alone, the temple attracts thousands of pilgrims each year and has made itself known far beyond the Kathamndu Valley. However, for the dominant Newar population the town is by no means merely the seat of Śiva or Paśupati. It is also a city of wild goddesses and other deities. Due to this tension between two strands of Hinduism - the pure, vegetarian Smarta Hinduism and the Newar Hinduism which implies alcohol and blood sacrifices - Śiva/Paśupati has more than once been in trouble, as the many festivals and rituals descripbed and analyzed in this book reveal. Deopatan is a contested field. Different deities, agents social groups, ritual specialists, and institutions are constantly seeking dominance, challenging and even fighting each other, thus contributing to social and political dynamics and tensions that are indeed distinct in South Asia. It is these aspects on which Axel Michaels concentrates in this book.

The Mahotsavavidhi, a twelfth-century Sanskrit text, provides detailed guidelines for a Saiva temple priest in performing a nine-day "great festival" for the god Siva. The author, Aghorasiva, is one of the most esteemed and influential authors in the Saiva Siddhanta school, and his lengthy work on ritual procedures, Kriyakramadyotika, (of which the Mahotsavavidhi is a part), is by all accounts the Agama work most employed by modern temple priests and pious Saivas in their practice of worship. Richard Davis's translation of this important text is the first translation into a European language of any medieval work on temple festivals. Because the text was intended for an expert audience of working twelfth-century priests, Aghorasiva employs a highly technical idiom. For that reason, Davis annotates his translation extensively with explanations and expansions drawn from other Agama works. There have been numerous studies of temple festivals and processions based on ethnographic observations and on recent historical data, but the historical study of this dramatic religious practice during earlier periods has relied on speculation. Davis's groundbreaking volume will provide a new foundation for the study of the history of South Indian temple festivals as a cultural practice.

Between 300 BCE and 200 CE, concepts and practices of dharma attained literary prominence throughout India. Both Buddhist and Brahmanical authors sought to clarify and classify their central concerns, and dharma proved a means of thinking through and articulating those concerns. Alf Hiltebeitel shows the different ways in which dharma was interpreted during that formative period: from the grand cosmic chronometries of kalpas and yugas to narratives about divine plans, gendered nuances of genealogical time, royal biography (even autobiography, in the case of the emperor Asoka), and guidelines for daily life, including meditation. He reveals the vital role dharma has played across political, religious, legal, literary, ethical, and philosophical domains and discourses about what holds life together. Through dharma, these traditions have articulated their distinct visions of the good and well-rewarded life. This insightful study explores the diverse and changing significance of dharma in classical India in nine major dharma texts, as well some shorter ones. Dharma proves to be a term by which to make a fresh cut through these texts, and to reconsider their own chronology, their import, and their relation to each other.

Medieval Kashmir in its golden age saw the development of some of the most sophisticated theories of language, literature, and emotion articulated in the pre-modern world. These theories, enormously influential on the later intellectual history of South Asia, were written at a time when religious education was ubiquitous among intellectuals, and when religious philosophies were hotly and publicly debated. It was also a time of deep interreligious influence and borrowing, when traditions intermixed and intellectuals pushed the boundaries of their own inheritance by borrowing ideas from many different places-even from their rivals. To Savor the Meaning examines the overlap of literary theory and religious philosophy in this period by looking at debates about how poetry communicates emotions to its readers, what it is readers do when they savor these emotions, and why this might be valuable. Focusing on the work of three influential figures-Anandavardhana [ca. 850 AD], Abhinavagupta [ca. 1000 AD], and the somewhat lesser known theorist Mahimabhatta [ca. 1050 AD]-this book gives a broad introduction to their ideas and reveals new, important, and previously overlooked aspects of their work and their debates. James D. Reich places these pre-modern intellectuals within the wider context of the religious philosophies current in Kashmir at the time, and shows that their ideas cannot be fully understood in isolation from this broader context.

Advaita Vedanta is one of the best-known schools of Indian philosophy, but much of its history--a history closely interwoven with that of medieval and modern Hinduism--remains surprisingly unexplored. This book focuses on a single remarkable work and its place within that history: The Ocean of Inquiry, a vernacular compendium of Advaita Vedanta by the North Indian monk Niscaldas (ca. 1791 - 1863). Though not well known today, Niscaldas's work was once referred to by Vivekananda (himself a key figure in the shaping of modern Hinduism) as the most influential book in India.The present book situates The Ocean of Inquiry as representative of both a neglected genre (vernacular Vedanta) and a neglected period (ca. 17th-19th centuries) in the history of Indian philosophy. It argues that the rise of Advaita Vedanta to a position of prestige began well before the period of British rule in India, and that vernacular texts like The Ocean of Inquiry played an important role in popularizing Vedantic teachings. It also offers a new appraisal of the period of late Advaita Vedanta, arguing that it should not be seen as one of barren scholasticism. For thinkers like Niscaldas, intellectual “inquiry” (vicara) was not an academic exercise but a spiritual practice-indeed, it was the central practice on the path to liberation. The book concludes by arguing that without understanding both vernacular Vedanta and the scholasticism of the period, one cannot fully understand the emergence of modern Hinduism.

Like many societies across the world, the region of Awadh in North India has been bilingual throughout its history. But literary histories of the region often indicate otherwise. In the early twentieth century, colonists recodified literary histories separately according to language, detached written literature from oral literature, and reimagined the entangled literary past according to their own ideas about language, literature, and Indian history. At the same time, multilingualism remained resilient and acquired new uses. East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genres-courtly, devotional, and popular-composed in the main languages of the region: Hindavi, Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu. Individual chapters focus on narratives, devotional song-poems and didactic works, local courtly literary practices, and multilingual education as recorded in biographical dictionaries-anthologies. Author Francesca Orsini suggests that this multilingual and multi-genre approach is better suited to capturing the texture, complexity, and dynamics of literature in the world, and of literary history, than approaches that focus only on global circulation or models that draw centers and peripheries on a single global map.

Minor Majesties studies the small ancient kingdom of Paluvūr, a town located on the northern bank of the Kāvēri river, about 30 kilometers north of Tanjavur. Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries C.E., Paluvūr was the capital of the dynasty of the Paluvēṭṭaraiyars, a minor dynasty of "little kings" who swore allegiance to the Cōla dynasty. Today, Paluvūr is divided in two distinct villages, Kīlappaluvūr and Mēlappaluvūr, and four temples dedicated to the god Śiva built during the reign of the little kings remain standing. In Minor Majesties, author Valérie Gillet surveys, translates, and analyzes 136 Tamil transcriptions spread across these temples, scrutinizing in depth each one's materiality, location, and epigraphy for the first time. Through these analyses, Gillet brings forth a better understanding of the functioning of the minor dynasty of the Paluvēṭṭaraiyars whose little kings often appear in the inscriptions of the temples, as well as the interactions between the temples and their patronizing communities. The small size of Paluvūr with its hub of still-standing monuments permits an exceptionally clear overview of the possible relations between distinct temples, allowing readers to unpick complexities related to temple sponsorship, organisation, and functioning. The study of Paluvūr also reveals how these religious monuments-accruing wealth but, in exchange, enabling donors to accrue merit and power-became a place for the fabrication of political discourses and powers, specific social configurations, and religious practices.

Drawing on a selection of the most important Sanskrit alchemical works from the ninth to sixteenth centuries, Indian Alchemy: Sources and Contexts provides an introduction to South Asian alchemy, tracing and explaining alchemical thought as it developed on the Indian subcontinent. Carefully edited by Dagmar Wujastyk, the collected essays offer deep insight into the motivations and goals of Indian alchemists and illuminate the theories and methods they developed over time. The collection provides an overview of the genre of Sanskrit alchemical literature, examining how Indian alchemists portrayed and defined their discipline. Translations of excerpts from important Sanskrit alchemical works showcase the most common themes found in the literature--such as the framing of alchemy as a knowledge system originating from &Sacuteiva, a focus on mercury, and technical descriptions of making elixirs--and reveal the characteristic style of each work.Indian Alchemy serves to expand readers' understanding of what it meant to practice alchemy on the Indian subcontinent. With its broad selection of examined themes, this collection offers a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the Indian alchemical idiom and the beliefs and practices of its practitioners.

The Teachings of the Master-Hearts examines the formation, development, and intellectual significance of Ilme K^ṣ^num, an esoteric interpretation of Zoroastrianism that emerged among Parsis in modern India. By situating Ilme K^ṣ^num within the broader historical context of British colonialism, scientific modernity, revivalist nationalism, and the interconnected Persianate world, Mariano Errichiello presents Parsis as active agents who navigated and reconfigured multiple religious and intellectual currents.The book combines historical and textual approaches to explore how modern Zoroastrians constructed and contested religious authenticity through diverse interpretive practices. Central to the study is the figure of Behramshah Naoroji Shroff and the esoteric teachings attributed to the "master-hearts" (s^ā^heb del^ā^n). Rather than treating Ilme K^ṣ^num as a marginal or derivative phenomenon, Errichiello frames it as a distinctive voice within a broader hermeneutical polyphony that characterizes modern Parsi religious thought.The work is structured in three main parts. The first develops a theoretical framework for the study of the socio-intellectual landscape of colonial India, examining how imperial power, scientific modernity, and revivalist nationalism shaped Parsi religious life. It also advances a conceptual model grounded in relational ontology and hermeneutics to interpret the plurality of religious expressions within the community through an analysis of the spaces and modes in which they are constituted. The second part anchors the study in textual scholarship through an English translation of a key Gujarati text of Ilme K^ṣ^num. The third part offers a glossary of technical K^ṣ^numic terms (logato), tracing their linguistic and conceptual genealogies across multiple languages and traditions. Taken together, the book's three sections position Ilme K^ṣ^num as a significant site of religious interpretation, challenging binary models and contributing to broader debates on esotericism, modernity, and the dynamics of religious change in South Asia.

The path of practice as taught in ancient India by Gotama Buddha was open to both women and men. The texts of early Indian Buddhism show that women were lay followers of the Buddha and were also granted the right to ordain and become nuns. Certain women were known as influential teachers of men and women alike and considered experts in certain aspects of Gotama's dhamma. For this to occur in an ancient religion practiced within traditional societies is really quite extraordinary. This is apparent especially in light of the continued problems experienced by practitioners of many religions today involved in challenging instilled norms and practices and conferring the status of any high office upon women. In this collection, Alice Collett brings together a sampling of the plethora of Buddhist texts from early Indian Buddhism in which women figure centrally. It is true that there are negative conceptualizations of and attitudes towards women expressed in early Buddhist texts, but for so many texts concerning women to have been composed, collated and preserved is worthy of note. The simple fact that the Buddhist textual record names so many nuns and laywomen, and preserves biographies of them, attests to a relatively positive situation for women at that time. With the possible exception of the reverence accorded Egyptian queens, there is no textual record of named women from an ancient civilization that comes close to that of early Indian Buddhism. This volume offers comparative study of texts in five different languages - Gandhari, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Sinhala. Each chapter is a study and translation, with some chapters focusing more on translation and some more on comparisons between parallel and similar texts, whilst others are more discursive and thematic.

Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of western India. The Marathi-language oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds is not only one of the most important elements of the traditional cultural life of its region, but also a treasure of world literature. This volume presents translations of two lively and well-crafted examples of the ov?, a genre typical of the oral literature of Dhangars. The two ov?s in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba and Dhu?oba, two of these shepherds most important gods. Each of the ov?s tells an elaborate story of the birth of the goda miraculous and complicated process in both casesand of the struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride. The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ov?s and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography, society, and political arrangements of their performers world, as well as about the performers views of pastoralists and women.

The Rigveda is the oldest Sanskrit text, consisting of over one thousand hymns dedicated to various divinities of the Vedic tradition. Orally composed and orally transmitted for several millennia, the hymns display remarkable poetic complexity and religious sophistication. As the culmination of the long tradition of Indo-Iranian oral-formulaic praise poetry and the first monument of specifically Indian religiousity and literature, the Rigveda is crucial to the understanding both of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian intellectual and aesthetic prehistory and of the rich flowering of Indic religious expression and Indic high literature that were to follow.This new translation represents the first complete scholarly translation into English in over a century and utilizes the results of the intense research of the last century on the language and the ritual system of the text. The focus of this translation is on the poetic techniques and structures utilized by the bards and on the ways that the poetry intersects with and dynamically expresses the ritual underpinnings of the text.

This in-depth study of the classical Hindi tradition brings the world of Mughal-era poetry and court culture alive for an English readership. Allison Busch draws on the perspectives of literary, social, and intellectual history to elucidate one of premodern India's most significant textual traditions, documenting the dramatic rise of a new type of professional Hindi writer while providing critical insight into the motives that animated this literary community and its patrons. Busch examines how riti literature served as an important aesthetic and political resource in the richly multicultural world of Mughal India, and provides, for the first time in a Western language, a detailed study of the fascinating oeuvre of Keshavdas, whose seminal Rasikpriya (Handbook for poetry connoisseurs, 1591) was the catalyst for a new Hindi classicism that attracted a spectacular following in the leading courts of early modern India. The circulation of Hindi literature among diverse communities during this period is testament to a remarkable pluralism that cannot be understood in terms of the nationalist logic that has constrained modern Hindi and Urdu to be "Hindu" and "Muslim" languages since the nineteenth century. With the cultural reforms ushered in by colonialism, north Indians repudiated the classical traditions of the courtly past, a complex process given extended treatment in the final chapter. Busch provides valuable insight into more than two centuries of Hindi courtly culture. Poetry of Kings also showcases the importance of bringing precolonial archives into dialogue with current debates of postcolonial theory.