Title: Some trouble with cows: making sense of social conflict 
Author: Roy, Beth
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Sociology | South Asia | Politics | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Fascinating in its combination of personal stories and analytical insights, Some Trouble with Cows will help students of conflict understand how a seemingly irrational and archaic riot becomes a means for renegotiating the distribution of power and rights in a small community.Using first-person accounts of Hindus and Muslims in a remote Bangladeshi village, Beth Roy evocatively describes and analyzes a large-scale riot that profoundly altered life in the area in the 1950s. She provides a rare glimpse into the hearts and minds of the participants and their families, while touching on a range of broader issues that are vital to the sociology of communities in conflict: the changing meaning of community ; the impact of the state on local society; the nature of memory ; and the force of neighborly enmity in reshaping power relationships during periods of change.Roy's findings illustrate important theoretical issues in psychology and sociology, and her conclusions will greatly interest students of ethnic/race relations, conflict resolution, the sociology of violence, agrarian society, and South Asia.   [brief]
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Title: Religion and Rajput women: the ethic of protection in contemporary narratives 
Author: Harlan, Lindsey
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices - chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book.   [brief]
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Title: Mesocosm: Hinduism and the organization of a traditional Newar city in Nepal 
Author: Levy, Robert I. (Robert Isaac) 1924-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Tibet | Hinduism | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Mesocosm is a study of Hinduism in its most fully realized form as a symbolic system for organizing the life of a particular kind of city - what the author terms an "archaic" city. The work is a detailed description and analysis of the symbolic world of Bhaktapur, a unicultural city in the Kathmandu Valley, a city which is perhaps the last surviving example of a type of organization once widespread in the ancient world.Robert Levy views Bhaktapur as a structured "mesocosm," mediating between the microcosm of individual self-conception and the macrocosm of the culturally conceived larger universe. The city is a bounded entity, grounded on a minutely divided and interrelated sacrilized space. It uses that space, roles assigned by an elaborate caste system, a semantically differentiated pantheon, and the tempos and forms of the festival year and rites of passage to construct a "civic dance," a web of communication and instruction which deeply affects the experience of Bhaktapur's citizens. Levy investigates the meaning of the community to the people who live there and suggests how the religious forms that have challenged Hinduism in South Asia - Christianity and, above all, Islam - are profoundly antithetical to Hinduism as the organizing principle for cities such as Bhaktapur. Mesocosm is a groundbreaking contribution to anthropology, social and religious history, and Indian and Nepalese studies.   [brief]
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Title: Peasants and monks in British India 
Author: Pinch, William R 1960-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Asian History | South Asia | Postcolonial Studies | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: In this compelling social history, William R. Pinch tackles one of the most important but most neglected fields of the colonial history of India: the relation between monasticism and caste. The highly original inquiry yields rich insights into the central structure and dynamics of Hindu society - insights that are not only of scholarly but also of great political significance.Perhaps no two images are more associated with rural India than the peasant who labors in an oppressive, inflexible social structure and the ascetic monk who denounces worldly concerns. Pinch argues that, contrary to these stereotypes, North India's monks and peasants have not been passive observers of history; they have often been engaged with questions of identity, status, and hierarchy - particularly during the British period. Pinch's work is especially concerned with the ways each group manipulated the rhetoric of religious devotion and caste to further its own agenda for social reform. Although their aims may have been quite different - Ramanandi monastics worked for social equity, while peasants agitated for higher social status - the strategies employed by these two communities shaped the popular political culture of Gangetic north India during and after the struggle for independence from the British.   [brief]
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Title: Hindu places of pilgrimage in India ; a study in cultural geography
Author: Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan
Published: University of California Press,  1983
Subjects: Asian Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Geography
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Title: Religious nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India
Author: Veer, Peter van der
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Religious nationalism is a subject of critical importance in much of the world today. Peter van der Veer's timely study on the relationship between religion and politics in India goes well beyond other books on this subject. He brings together several disciplines - anthropology, history, social theory, literary studies - to show how Indian religious identities have been shaped by pilgrimage, migration, language development, and more recently, print and visual media.Van der Veer's central focus is the lengthy dispute over the Babari mosque in Ayodhya, site of a bloody confrontation between Hindus and Muslims in December 1992. A thought-provoking range of other examples describes the historical construction of religious identities: cow protection societies and Sufi tombs, purdah and the political appropriation of images of the female body, Salman Rushdie and the role of the novel in nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, the Khalsa movement among Sikhs, and nationalist archaeology and the televised Ramayana .Van der Veer offers a new perspective on the importance of religious organization and the role of ritual in the formation of nationalism. His work advances our understanding of contemporary India while also offering significant theoretical insights into one of the most troubling issues of this century.   [brief]
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Title: Many Rāmāyaṇas: the diversity of a narrative tradition in South Asia 
Author: Richman, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Cultural Anthropology | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Throughout Indian history, many authors and performers have produced, and many patrons have supported, diverse tellings of the story of the exiled prince Rama, who rescues his abducted wife by battling the demon king who has imprisoned her. The contributors to this volume focus on these "many" Ramayanas .While most scholars continue to rely on Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana as the authoritative version of the tale, the contributors to this volume do not. Their essays demonstrate the multivocal nature of the Ramayana by highlighting its variations according to historical period, political context, regional literary tradition, religious affiliation, intended audience, and genre. Socially marginal groups in Indian society - Telugu women, for example, or Untouchables from Madhya Pradesh - have recast the Rama story to reflect their own views of the world, while in other hands the epic has become the basis for teachings about spiritual liberation or the demand for political separatism. Historians of religion, scholars of South Asia, folklorists, cultural anthropologists - all will find here refreshing perspectives on this tale.   [brief]
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Title: Devī: goddesses of India
Author: Hawley, John Stratton 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | Women's Studies | South Asia
Publisher's Description: The monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have severely limited the portrayal of the divine as feminine. But in Hinduism "God" very often means "Goddess." This extraordinary collection explores twelve different Hindu goddesses, all of whom are in some way related to Devi, the Great Goddess. They range from the liquid goddess-energy of the River Ganges to the possessing, entrancing heat of Bhagavati and Seranvali. They are local, like Vindhyavasini, and global, like Kali; ancient, like Saranyu, and modern, like "Mother India." The collection combines analysis of texts with intensive fieldwork, allowing the reader to see how goddesses are worshiped in everyday life. In these compelling essays, the divine feminine in Hinduism is revealed as never before - fascinating, contradictory, powerful.   [brief]
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Title: The life of a text: performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas 
Author: Lutgendorf, Philip
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | South Asia | Cultural Anthropology
Publisher's Description: The Life of a Text offers a vivid portrait of one community's interaction with its favorite text - the epic Ramcaritmanas - and the way in which performances of the epic function as a flexible and evolving medium for cultural expression. Anthropologists, historians of religion, and readers interested in the culture of North India and the performance arts will find breadth of subject, careful scholarship, and engaging presentation in this unique and beautifully illustrated examination of Hindi culture.The most popular and influential text of Hindi-speaking North India, the epic Ramcaritmanas is a sixteenth century retelling of the Ramayana story by the poet Tulsidas. This masterpiece of pre-modern Hindi literature has always reached its largely illiterate audiences primarily through oral performance including ceremonial recitation, folksinging, oral exegesis, and theatrical representation. Drawing on fieldwork in Banaras, Lutgendorf breaks new ground by capturing the range of performance techniques in vivid detail and tracing the impact of the epic in its contemporary cultural context.   [brief]
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Title: Encountering Kali ; in the margins, at the center, in the West
Author: McDermott, Rachel Fell
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | Hinduism | South Asia | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: Encountering Kal¾ explores one of the most remarkable divinities the world has seen - the Hindu goddess Kal¾. She is simultaneously understood as a blood-thirsty warrior, a goddess of ritual possession, a Tantric sexual partner, and an all-loving, compassionate Mother. Popular and scholarly interest in her has been on the rise in the West in recent years. Responding to this phenomenon, this volume focuses on the complexities involved in interpreting Kal¾ in both her indigenous South Asian settings and her more recent Western incarnations. Using scriptural history, temple architecture, political violence, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism, autobiographical reflection, and the goddess's recent guises on the Internet, the contributors pose questions relevant to our understanding of Kal¾, as they illuminate the problems and promises inherent in every act of cross-cultural interpretation.   [brief]
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Title: Inside the drama-house: Rama stories and shadow puppets in South India 
Author: Blackburn, Stuart H
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | South Asia | Cinema and Performance Arts | Hinduism
Publisher's Description: Stuart Blackburn takes the reader inside a little-known form of shadow puppetry in this captivating work about performing the Tamil version of the Ramayana epic. Blackburn describes the skill and physical stamina of the puppeteers in Kerala state in South India as they perform all night for as many as ten weeks during the festival season. The fact that these performances often take place without an audience forms the starting point for Blackburn's discussion - one which explores not only this important epic tale and its performance, but also the broader theoretical issues of text, interpretation, and audience.Blackburn demonstrates how the performers adapt the narrative and add their own commentary to re-create the story from a folk perspective. At a time when the Rama story is used to mobilize political movements in India, the puppeteers' elaborate recitation and commentary presents this controversial tale from another ethical perspective, one that advocates moral reciprocity and balance.While the study of folk narrative has until now focused on tales, tellers, and tellings, this work explores the importance of audience - absent or otherwise. Blackburn's elegant translations of the most dramatic and pivotal sequences of the story enhance our appreciation of this unique example of performance art.   [brief]
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Title: A carnival of parting: the tales of King Bharthari and King Gopi Chand as sung and told by Madhu Natisar Nath of Ghatiyali, Rajasthan 
Author: Nath, Madhu Natisar
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Folklore and Mythology | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician, and a storyteller. At the center of A Carnival of Parting are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods, and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance.Three introductory chapters and an interpretive afterword, together with an appendix on the bard's language by linguist David Magier, supply A Carnival of Parting with a full range of ethnographic, historical, and cultural backgrounds. Gold gives a frank and engaging portrayal of the bard Madhu Nath and her work with him.The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In a compelling afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love, and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting."   [brief]
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Title: When God is a customer: Telugu courtesan songs 
Author: Kṣētrayya 17th cent
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Literature in Translation | Poetry | Hinduism | South Asia
Publisher's Description: How is it that this woman's breastsglimmer so clearly through her saree?Can't you guess, my friends?What are they but rays from the crescentsleft by the nails of her loverpressing her in his passion,rays now luminous as the moonlightof a summer night?These South Indian devotional poems show the dramatic use of erotic language to express a religious vision. Written by men during the fifteenth to eighteenth century, the poems adopt a female voice, the voice of a courtesan addressing her customer. That customer, it turns out, is the deity, whom the courtesan teases for his infidelities and cajoles into paying her more money. Brazen, autonomous, fully at home in her body, she merges her worldly knowledge with the deity's transcendent power in the act of making love.This volume is the first substantial collection in English of these Telugu writings, which are still part of the standard repertoire of songs used by classical South Indian dancers. A foreword provides context for the poems, investigating their religious, cultural, and historical significance. Explored, too, are the attempts to contain their explicit eroticism by various apologetic and rationalizing devices.The translators, who are poets as well as highly respected scholars, render the poems with intelligence and tenderness. Unusual for their combination of overt eroticism and devotion to God, these poems are a delight to read.   [brief]
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Title: Classical Telugu poetry: an anthology 
Author: Nārāyaṇarāvu, Vēlcēru 1932-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Asian Studies | Hinduism | Poetry | Folklore and Mythology | South Asia | Social Theory | Asian Literature
Publisher's Description: This groundbreaking anthology opens a window on a thousand years of classical poetry in Telugu, the mellifluous language of Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The classical tradition in Telugu is one of the richest yet least explored of all South Asian literatures. This authoritative volume, the first anthology of classical Telugu poetry in English, gives an overview of one of the world's most creative poetic traditions. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have brought together mythological, religious, and secular texts by twenty major poets who wrote between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. The beautifully translated selections are often dramatic and unexpected in tone and effect, and sometimes highly personal. The authors have provided an informative, engaging introduction, fleshing out the history of Telugu literature, situating its poets in relation to significant literary themes and historical developments, and discussing the relationship between Telugu and the classical literature and poetry of Sanskrit.   [brief]
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Title: Birth on the threshold: childbirth and modernity in South India
Author: Van Hollen, Cecilia Coale
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Gender Studies | Hinduism | South Asia | Asian Studies | South Asia | South Asia
Publisher's Description: Even childbirth is affected by globalization - and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of "modern birth." Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Birth on the Threshold reveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender - especially maternity - reconfigured as birth is transformed?   [brief]
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