Kāvya in South India

Kāvya in South India PDF Author: Herman Tieken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004486097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Old Tamil Caṅkam poetry consists of eight anthologies of short poems on love and war, and a treatise on grammar and poetics. The main part of this corpus has generally been dated to the first centuries AD and is believed to be the product of a native Tamil culture. The present study argues that the poems do not describe a contemporary society but a society from the past or one not yet affected by North-Indian Sanskrit culture. Consequently the main argument for the current early dating of Caṅkam poetry is no longer valid. Furthermore, on the basis of a study of the historical setting of the heroic poems and of the role of Tamil as a literary language in the Caṅkam corpus, it is argued that the poetic tradition was developed by the Pāṇṭiyas in the ninth or tenth century. This volume deals with the identification of the various genres of Caṅkam poetry with literary types from the Sanskrit Kāvya tradition. Counterparts have been found exclusively among Prākrit and Apabhraṁśa texts, which indicate that in Caṅkam poetry Tamil has been specifically assigned the role of a Prākrit. As such, the present study reveals the processes and attitudes involved in the development of a vernacular language into a literary idiom.

Kāvya in South India

Kāvya in South India PDF Author: Herman Tieken
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004486097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
Old Tamil Caṅkam poetry consists of eight anthologies of short poems on love and war, and a treatise on grammar and poetics. The main part of this corpus has generally been dated to the first centuries AD and is believed to be the product of a native Tamil culture. The present study argues that the poems do not describe a contemporary society but a society from the past or one not yet affected by North-Indian Sanskrit culture. Consequently the main argument for the current early dating of Caṅkam poetry is no longer valid. Furthermore, on the basis of a study of the historical setting of the heroic poems and of the role of Tamil as a literary language in the Caṅkam corpus, it is argued that the poetic tradition was developed by the Pāṇṭiyas in the ninth or tenth century. This volume deals with the identification of the various genres of Caṅkam poetry with literary types from the Sanskrit Kāvya tradition. Counterparts have been found exclusively among Prākrit and Apabhraṁśa texts, which indicate that in Caṅkam poetry Tamil has been specifically assigned the role of a Prākrit. As such, the present study reveals the processes and attitudes involved in the development of a vernacular language into a literary idiom.

Indian Kāvya Literature

Indian Kāvya Literature PDF Author: A. K. Warder
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120820289
Category : Indic literature
Languages : en
Pages : 632

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries starts with Vidyakara`s retrospect over anonymous poets (named ones having mostly found their places in earlier volumes). After some smaller anthologies a few novels and Mankhaka`s mythological epic we come to a historical epic. History is the most substantial source of matter for literature in the volume. That might seem to contrast with Vol. Vi, but as literature its aim is always are, not facts which narrows the gap.

Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India

Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India PDF Author: Saraju Rath
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004219005
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume deals with South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts, predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries, and their role in a manuscript culture that had a significant impact on Indian intellectual history for around two millennia.

Historical Dictionary of Ancient India

Historical Dictionary of Ancient India PDF Author: Kumkum Roy
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810853663
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 490

Get Book Here

Book Description
India's history and culture is ancient and dynamic, spanning back to the beginning of human civilization. Beginning with a mysterious culture along the Indus River and in farming communities in the southern lands of India, the history of India is punctuated by constant integration with migrating peoples and with the diverse cultures that surround the country. Placed in the center of Asia, history in India is a crossroads of cultures from China to Europe, as well as the most significant Asian connection with the cultures of Africa. The Historical Dictionary of Ancient India provides information ranging from the earliest Paleolithic cultures in the Indian subcontinent to 1000 CE. The ancient history of this country is related in this book through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on rulers, bureaucrats, ancient societies, religion, gods, and philosophical ideas.

Innovations and Turning Points

Innovations and Turning Points PDF Author: Yigal Bronner
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199453559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 805

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume is the first attempt to offer a panoramic historical overview of South Asian classical poetry, especially in Sanskrit. Many of the essays in this volume are the first serious studies of the great masterpieces of South Asian literature. Moreover, the book as a whole captures the millennium-long developmental logic of kavya literature by identifying a series of critical moments of breakthrough and innovation-that is, moments when the basic rules of composition and the aesthetic and poetic goals underwent dramatic change, allowing the tradition to reinvent itself. Individual sections thus focus on the beginnings of kavya literature and Kalidasa's creation of what came to be its classical form; the new poetic model that emerged from the intense competition and conversation of Bharavi and Magha in the middle of the first millennium; the extended revolutionary period in Kanauj, where Bana and his successors reconceived the meaning and practice of Sanskrit poetry; and the no less transformative period at the beginning of the second millennium, when poets of genius such as Sriharsa were active in the context of India's nascent vernacularization. The scope of the volume extends beyond Sanskrit to early modern Hindi, and beyond the subcontinent and the Himalayas to Java and Tibet, where kavya found a new home and continued to evolve. A general introduction proposes a theoretical framework for the study of this immense literary tradition in terms of its continuous self-reinvention.

How Literatures Begin

How Literatures Begin PDF Author: Joel B. Lande
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186529
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The emergence of a literature in any language is an improbable and complex historical achievement. In fact, many known languages throughout history did not develop writing, let alone a literature. This book, a collectively written early history of different literary traditions across the globe and through time, presents a global, comparative account of literary origins spanning the Mediterranean, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Seventeen chapters, each written by a scholar with expertise in a particular language and literature, trace the creation of writing and its interaction with oral practices, the rise of print circulation, the passage from sacred to secular writing and reading practices, the use of cultural models, the role of translation, and related issues as they apply to the emergence of literature. The contributions explore the historical context as well as the practices, technologies, and institutions that encouraged the emergence of distinct literatures, from classical Chinese and the resultant establishment of Japanese and Korean traditions, to the advent of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other literatures of the Mediterranean; the birth of European vernaculars against the cosmopolitan backdrop of post-classical Latin; and the later development of African American and Latin American literatures under conditions of colonial expansion and racial oppression. The volume is designed to enable readers to better understand the similarities as well as the differences in the origins of major and enduring literatures across time"--

Story of Buddhism with Special Reference to South India

Story of Buddhism with Special Reference to South India PDF Author: A. Aiyappan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Buddhism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description


Language of the Snakes

Language of the Snakes PDF Author: Andrew Ollett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520968816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kavya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring “language order” in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.

Indian Poetics

Indian Poetics PDF Author: Ganesh Tryambak Deshpande
Publisher: Popular Prakashan
ISBN: 9788179912850
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description


The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity

The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Nathanael J. Andrade
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108321518
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
How did Christianity make its remarkable voyage from the Roman Mediterranean to the Indian subcontinent? By examining the social networks that connected the ancient and late antique Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, central Asia, and Iran, this book contemplates the social relations that made such movement possible. It also analyzes how the narrative tradition regarding the apostle Judas Thomas, which originated in Upper Mesopotamia and accredited him with evangelizing India, traveled among the social networks of an interconnected late antique world. In this way, the book probes how the Thomas narrative shaped Mediterranean Christian beliefs regarding co-religionists in central Asia and India, impacted local Christian cultures, took shape in a variety of languages, and experienced transformation as it traveled from the Mediterranean to India, and back again.