Many Mahābhāratas

Many Mahābhāratas PDF

Author: Nell Shapiro Hawley

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-05-01

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 1438482426

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Many Mahābhāratas is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mahābhārata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mahābhārata has been not to consume it but to create it anew. The many Mahābhāratas of this book come from the first century to the twenty-first. They are composed in nine different languages—Apabhramsha, Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. Early chapters illuminate themes of retelling within the Sanskrit Mahābhārata itself, demonstrating that the story's propensity for regeneration emerges from within. The majority of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Sanskrit epic. Readers dive into classical dramas, premodern vernacular poems, regional performance traditions, commentaries, graphic novels, political essays, novels, and contemporary theater productions—all of them Mahābhāratas. Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mahābhārata's long life in South Asia, Many Mahābhāratas constitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mahābhārata studies.

South Asian Texts in History

South Asian Texts in History PDF

Author: Yigal Bronner

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 9780924304637

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South Asian Texts in History charts the contours of a reenvisioned and revitalized field of Indology in the light of the groundbreaking research of Sheldon Pollock. One of the many exciting aspects of Pollock's work is its unprecedented combination of classical textual study with cutting edge theoretical and social scientific inquiry--a combination which this book sets out to emulate. Pollock has trained and inspired a new generation of scholars, many of whom have contributed to this volume. The essays are organized into five groups that reflect the major domains of Pollock's immense contributions to the field: the epic Ramayana, Sanskrit literature and literary theory, systematic thought in premodern South Asia, the birth of a new vernacular cultural order in the subcontinent during the second millennium CE, and India's early modernity. Most of the essays concentrate on materials in Sanskrit, but there are also considerable contributions to the history of Hindi, Tamil, and Persian literatures. The book presents for the first time an overview of the groundbreaking contributions of Sheldon Pollock to South Asia scholarship over the past three decades, while offering a set of critiques of key elements of his theories.

Cultural Landscapes of South Asia

Cultural Landscapes of South Asia PDF

Author: Kapila D. Silva

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-10-14

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1317365933

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Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Achievement Award The pluralism of South Asia belies any singular reading of its heritage. In spite of this diversity, its cultural traditions retain certain attributes that are at their core South Asian—in their capacity to self‐organize, enact and reinvent cultural memories, and in their ability to retain an intimate connection with nature and landscape. This volume focuses on the notion of cultural landscape as a medium integrating multiple forms of heritage and points to a new paradigm for conservation practices in the South Asian context. Even though the construct of cultural landscape has been accepted as a category of heritage, its potent use in heritage management in general and within the South Asian context in particular has not been widely studied. The volume challenges the prevalent views of heritage management in South Asia that are entrenched in colonial legacies and contemporary global policy frameworks.

South Asia in World History

South Asia in World History PDF

Author: Marc Jason Gilbert

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0199760349

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South Asia and the world to 1500 BCE -- The Vedic Age, 1500 to 500 BCE -- South Asia's classical age: 325 BCE to 711 CE -- Islam in South Asia, c. 711 to 1556 -- The great mughals: c. 1556-1757 -- From company state to crown rule, c. 1757-1877 -- From the rise of nationalism to independence, 1885-1948 -- Tryst with destiny: South Asia and the world, 1947 to the present

South Asian Digital Humanities

South Asian Digital Humanities PDF

Author: Roopika Risam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-10

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1000195392

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The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise. Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques. South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

Re-imagining Border Studies in South Asia

Re-imagining Border Studies in South Asia PDF

Author: Dhananjay Tripathi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-12-23

Total Pages: 22

ISBN-13: 1000333221

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This book presents a radical rethinking of Border Studies. Framing the discipline beyond conventional topics of spatiality and territoriality, it presents a distinctly South Asian perspective – a post-colonial and post-partition region where most borders were drawn with political motives, ignoring the socio-cultural realities of the region and economic necessities of the people. The authors argue that while securing borders is an essential function of the state, in this interconnected world, crossing borders and border cooperation is also necessary. The book examines contemporaneous and topical themes like disputes of identity and nationhood, the impact of social media on Border Studies, trans-border cooperation, water-sharing between countries, and resolution of border problems in the age of liberalisation and globalisation. It also suggests ways of enhancing cross-border economic cooperation and connectivity, and reviews security issues from a new perspective. Well supplemented with case studies, the book will serve as an indispensable text for scholars and researchers of Border Studies, military and strategic studies, international relations, geopolitics, and South Asian studies. It will also be of great interest to think tanks and government agencies, especially those dealing with foreign relations.

Teaching and Teacher Education

Teaching and Teacher Education PDF

Author: Rohit Setty

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 3030268799

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This edited volume brings together diverse thinkers and practitioners from the field of teaching and teacher education as it pertains to educational development in South Asia. In this volume, authors draw from their research, practice, and field experiences, showcasing how teaching and teacher education are currently being carried out, understood, theorized, debated, and implemented for the education of children and teachers alike in South Asia. The volume also includes practitioner voices, which are often marginalized in academic discourse. This book acts as a key reference text for academics and practitioners interested in the intersection of education and development in the region, and in particular what it takes to pull off ambitious teaching and teacher education in South Asia.

Making Kantha, Making Home

Making Kantha, Making Home PDF

Author: Pika Ghosh

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2020-07-15

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 0295747005

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In Bengal, mothers swaddle their infants and cover their beds in colorful textiles that are passed down through generations. They create these kantha from layers of soft, recycled fabric strengthened with running stitches and use them as shawls, covers, and seating mats. Making Kantha, Making Home explores the social worlds shaped by the Bengali kantha that survive from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first study of colonial-period women’s embroidery that situates these objects historically and socially, Pika Ghosh brings technique and aesthetic choices into discussion with iconography and regional culture. Ghosh uses ethnographic and archival research, inscriptions, and images to locate embroiderers’ work within domestic networks and to show how imagery from poetry, drama, prints, and watercolors expresses kantha artists’ visual literacy. Affinities with older textile practices include the region’s lucrative maritime trade in embroideries with Europe, Africa, and China. This appraisal of individual objects alongside the people and stories behind the objects’ creation elevates kantha beyond consideration as mere handcraft to recognition as art.

Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape

Mapping the Pāśupata Landscape PDF

Author: Elizabeth A. Cecil

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-09

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 9004424423

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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.