Playing Host to Deity

Playing Host to Deity PDF

Author: Paul Younger

Publisher: Oxford : Oxford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0195140443

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The annual festivals that are central to the south Indian religious tradition are among the largest religious gatherings in the world. This text offers a fieldwork-based study of 14 different religious festivals.

Popular Christianity in India

Popular Christianity in India PDF

Author: Selva J. Raj

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0791487814

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Popular Christianity in India explores Indian Christianity as crafted and expressed through lived experience, providing an important balance to currently available, typically theological, studies. Drawing from many disciplines, this volume unearths the multifaceted terrain of festivals, rituals, saints, miracle workers, missionaries, and visionaries in Christian India, providing a wonderful glimpse of its richness and complexities. The contributors reveal the ways in which local Christian traditions deftly challenge assumed divisions and power imbalances between East and West, Hindu and Christian, foreign and indigenous, and elite and local expressions. Whether forging complicated religious, caste, and national identities, employing religious hybridity to promote well-being, or asserting autonomy within oppressive social and religious structures, local Christianity provides a crucial means for its participants to manage their earthly needs and desires.

The Study of Hinduism

The Study of Hinduism PDF

Author: Arvind Sharma

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9781570034497

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In this text, leading scholars from around the world take stock of two centuries of international intellectual investment in Hinduism. Since the early 19th century, when the scholarly investigation of Hinduism began to take shape as a modern academic discipline, Hindu studies has evolved from its concentration on description and analysis to an emphasis on understanding Hindu traditions in the context of the religion's own values, concepts and history. Offering an assessment of the current state of Hindu studies, the contributors to this volume identify past achievements and chart the course for what remains to be accomplished in the field.

Hayagrīva in South India

Hayagrīva in South India PDF

Author: Kamala Elizabeth Nayar

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2004-03-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9047413040

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This book is about how mythology may be purposively adapted in the service of theology. It does so at the hand of Hayagrīva, since the 14th century C.E. revered as a full form of the Supreme Lord Viṣṇu in the local Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition of South India, but originally a relatively minor pan-Indian deity. Convincingly laying bare the complexity in respect of the pan-Indian images of Hayagrīva, it makes clear that there is no single unilinear history of this deity. It subsequently reconstructs the ‘Śrīnivaiṣṇava History’ of Hayagrīva, and brings out the selectivity involved in borrowing materials from the pan-Indian and local levels. Amidst the incredible complexity encountered here, this study exposes, however, that the emblems and functions of different images show continuity, although a god’s status may change according to the sect.

A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival

A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival PDF

Author: Aghoraśivācārya

Publisher: South Asia Research

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0195378520

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The Mahotsavavidhi of the Saiva preceptor Aghorasiva, completed in 1157 c.e., provides step-by-step guidance for a Hindu priest conducting a nine-day festival in medieval India. This annotated rendering of Aghorasiva's 12th-century work is the first extensive translation of a medieval work on Hindu temple festivals into a European language.

The Domain of Constant Excess

The Domain of Constant Excess PDF

Author: Rohan Bastin

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2002-12-01

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1789203678

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The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that has occurred largely between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus is marked by a degree of religious tolerance that sees both communities worshiping together. This study describes one important site of such worship, the ancient Hindu temple complex of Munnesvaram. Standing adjacent to one of Sri Lanka's historical western ports, the fortunes of the Munnesvaram temples have waxed and waned through the years of turbulence, violence and social change that have been the country's lot since the advent of European colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Bastin recounts the story of these temples and analyses how the Hindu temple is reproduced as a center of worship amidst conflict and competition.

The Courts of Pre-Colonial South India

The Courts of Pre-Colonial South India PDF

Author: Jennifer Howes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1135789967

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This book investigates how the material culture of South Indian courts was perceived by those who lived there in the pre-colonial period. Howes peels away the standard categories used to study Indian palace space, such as public/private and male/female, and replaces them with indigenous descriptions of space found in court poetry, vastu shastra and painted representations of courtly life. Set against the historical background of the events which led to the formation of the Ramnad Kingdom, the Kingdom's material circumstances are examined, beginning with the innermost region of the palace and moving out to the Kingdom via the palace compound itself and the walled town which surrounded it. An important study for both art historians and South India specialists. The volume is richly illustrated in colour.