Lives of Indian Images

Lives of Indian Images PDF Author: Richard H. Davis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844428
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

Lives of Indian Images

Lives of Indian Images PDF Author: Richard H. Davis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400844428
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book Here

Book Description
For many centuries, Hindus have taken it for granted that the religious images they place in temples and home shrines for purposes of worship are alive. Hindu priests bring them to life through a complex ritual "establishment" that invokes the god or goddess into material support. Priests and devotees then maintain the enlivened image as a divine person through ongoing liturgical activity: they must awaken it in the morning, bathe it, dress it, feed it, entertain it, praise it, and eventually put it to bed at night. In this linked series of case studies of Hindu religious objects, Richard Davis argues that in some sense these believers are correct: through ongoing interactions with humans, religious objects are brought to life. Davis draws largely on reader-response literary theory and anthropological approaches to the study of objects in society in order to trace the biographies of Indian religious images over many centuries. He shows that Hindu priests and worshipers are not the only ones to enliven images. Bringing with them differing religious assumptions, political agendas, and economic motivations, others may animate the very same objects as icons of sovereignty, as polytheistic "idols," as "devils," as potentially lucrative commodities, as objects of sculptural art, or as symbols for a whole range of new meanings never foreseen by the images' makers or original worshipers.

Lives of the Indian Princes

Lives of the Indian Princes PDF Author: Charles Allen
Publisher: BPI Publishing
ISBN: 8186982051
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book on the picturesque lifestyle of the erstwhile Indian princes and maharajas is now available in a revised Indian edition. The princes may have become mere citizens but the enchantment remains

History and the Present

History and the Present PDF Author: Partha Chatterjee
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in this volume bring together historians and anthropologists to reflect on the place of history within present-day conditions. The central focus here is on aspects of the popular, on the ways in which the popular relates to the scientific, the professional, the aesthetic, the religious, the legal and the political. These essays represent a critique of the disciplinary practices of history. They examine the historian's practices and assumptions, being mainly concerned with finding a set of practices of history-writing that are both truthful and ethical. They are united by the desire to find a way out of the self-constructed cage of scientific history that has made historians wary of the popular. In his introduction, Partha Chatterjee spells out some of the requirements for this new analysis of the popular. He stresses the fact that in contemporary industrializing societies the popular should not be taken to be a homogeneous mass. On the contrary, he states, an awareness of the variety and innovativeness of the contemporary popular could rejuvenate academic historiography.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner) PDF Author: Sherman Alexie
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316219304
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Times bestseller—over one million copies sold! A National Book Award winner A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black-and-white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

Subject Lessons

Subject Lessons PDF Author: Sanjay Seth
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822341055
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
DIVA study of how modern, Western knowledge came to be disseminated in India and came to assume its current status as the obvious, and almost the only, mode of knowing about India; further, and more dubiously, the work examines whether this knowledge is in f/div

Objects of Translation

Objects of Translation PDF Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691125947
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

Get Book Here

Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.

Incarnations

Incarnations PDF Author: Sunil Khilnani
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 9385990950
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 551

Get Book Here

Book Description
For all of India’s myths, stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world’s largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars and corporate titans—some famous, some unjustly forgotten—bring feeling, wry humour and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.

What's the Use of Art?

What's the Use of Art? PDF Author: Jan Mrazek
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824830636
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Post-Enlightenment notions of culture, which have been naturalized in the West for centuries, require that art be autonomously beautiful, universal, and devoid of any practical purpose. The authors of this multidisciplinary volume seek to complicate this understanding of art by examining art objects from across Asia with attention to their functional, ritual, and everyday contexts. From tea bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony to television broadcasts of Javanese puppet theater; from Indian wedding chamber paintings to art looted by the British army from the Chinese emperor’s palace; from the adventures of a Balinese magical dagger to the political functions of classical Khmer images—the authors challenge prevailing notions of artistic value by introducing new ways of thinking about culture. The chapters consider art objects as they are involved in the world: how they operate and are experienced in specific sites, collections, rituals, performances, political and religious events and imagination, and in individual peoples’ lives; how they move from one context to another and change meaning and value in the process (for example, when they are collected, traded, and looted or when their images appear in art history textbooks); how their memories and pasts are or are not part of their meaning and experience. Rather than lead to a single universalizing definition of art, the essays offer multiple, divergent, and case-specific answers to the question "What is the use of art?" and argue for the need to study art as it is used and experienced. Contributors: Cynthea J. Bogel, Louise Cort, Richard H. Davis, Robert DeCaroli, James L. Hevia, Janet Hoskins, Kaja McGowan, Jan Mrázek, Lene Pedersen, Morgan Pitelka, Ashley Thompson.

Maharanis

Maharanis PDF Author: Lucy Moore
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014190514X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Maharnis Lucy Moore brilliantly recreates the lives of four princesses - two grandmothers, a mother and a daughter - of the Royal courts of India. Their extraordinary story takes in tiger hunts, exotic palaces and lavish ceremonies in India, as well as the glamorous international scene of the Edwardian and interwar era. It is also an intimate portrait of four remarkable women - Chimnabai, Sunity, Indira and Ayesha - who changed the world they lived in. Through their lives Lucy Moore tells the history of a nation during an era of great change: the rise and fall of the Raj from the Indian Mutiny to Independence and beyond.

Against Dharma

Against Dharma PDF Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030021619X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Note on the Translations and Transliterations -- Timeline: Relevant Events and Historical Developments -- ONE. The Three Human Aims -- TWO. The Influence of the Arthashastra on the Kamasutra -- THREE. Dharma and Adharma in the Arthashastra -- FOUR. Adharma and Dharma in the Kamasutra -- FIVE. Glossing Adharma with Dharma -- SIX. Skepticism and Materialism in Ancient India -- SEVEN. Epilogue: Dhairma and the Subversion of Science -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y