Author: Velcheru Narayana Rao
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143846777X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508
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Book Description
Velcheru Narayana Rao's contribution to understanding Indian cultural history, literary production, and intellectual life—specifically from the vantage of the Andhra region—has few parallels. He is one of the very rare scholars to be able to reflect magisterially on the precolonial and colonial periods. He moves easily between Sanskrit and the vernacular traditions, and between the worlds of orality and script. This is because of his mastery of the "classical" Telugu tradition. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam puts it in his Introduction, "To command nearly a thousand years of a literary tradition is no small feat, but more important still is VNR's ability constantly to offer fresh readings and provocative frameworks for interpretation." The essays and reflections in Text and Tradition in South India bring together the diverse and foundational contributions made by Narayana Rao to the rewriting of India's cultural and literary history. The book is for anyone interested in the history of Indian ideas, the social and cultural history of South India, and the massive intellectual traditions of the subcontinent.
Author: Surajit Sarkar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000335585
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Northeast India is home to many distinct communities and is an area of incredible ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. This book explores the shared cultural heritage among the highland and river valley communities of Northeast India and mainland South East Asia, including South China, through oral traditions. It looks at these shared cultural traditions and suggests new ways of understanding and interpreting the heritage of Northeast India. Oral traditions often bring forward an unexpected twist in understanding historical and cultural links, and this volume explores this using local knowledge and innovative engagements with oral traditions in multiple ways, from folklore and language to performative traditions. The essays in this volume examine how communities build new meanings from old traditions, often as a recognition of the tension between conservation and creation, between individual interpretation and social consensus. They offer interesting parallels on how oral traditions behave in different socio-economic contexts, and also examine how oral traditions and memory interact with the digital world’s penetration in the remote areas. This volume will be useful for scholars and researchers of Northeast India, sociology, sociology of culture, cultural studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, folkloristics, and political sociology.
Author: Stuart H. Blackburn
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
ISBN: 9788178241494
Category : Folklore and nationalism
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Author: Alf Hiltebeitel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226340554
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 575
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Book Description
Throughout India and Southeast Asia, ancient classical epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—continue to exert considerable cultural influence. Rethinking India's Oral and Classical Epics offers an unprecedented exploration into South Asia's regional epic traditions. Using his own fieldwork as a starting point, Alf Hiltebeitel analyzes how the oral tradition of the south Indian cult of the goddess Draupadi and five regional martial oral epics compare with one another and tie in with the Sanskrit epics. Drawing on literary theory and cultural studies, he reveals the shared subtexts of the Draupadi cult Mahabharata and the five oral epics, and shows how the traditional plots are twisted and classical characters reshaped to reflect local history and religion. In doing so, Hiltebeitel sheds new light on the intertwining oral traditions of medieval Rajput military culture, Dalits ("former Untouchables"), and Muslims. Breathtaking in scope, this work is indispensable for those seeking a deeper understanding of South Asia's Hindu and Muslim traditions. This work is the third volume in Hiltebeitel's study of the Draupadi cult. Other volumes include Mythologies: From Gingee to Kuruksetra (Volume One), On Hindu Ritual and the Goddess (Volume Two), and Rethinking the Mahabharata (Volume Four).
Author: David Dean Shulman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400856922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 487
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Book Description
South India is a land of many temples and shrines, each of which has preserved a local tradition of myth, folklore, and ritual. As one of the first Western scholars to explore this tradition in detail, David Shulman brings together the stories associated with these sacred sites and places them in the context of the greater Hindu religious tradition. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Heidrun Brückner
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447108737
Category : Epic poetry, Tulu
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
The present volume studies three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language (a Dravidian language). They have been living performance traditions in the Tulu speaking coastal districts of Karnataka up to the present day. For the first time, Indian, European and American scholars working on Tulu oral epics, folklorists, anthropologists as well as Indologists are brought together. All texts discussed belong to the indigenous Tulu genre called paddana, which ranges from shorter invocations of local deities to texts of epic dimensions. Because paddanas had been transmitted exclusively orally until the 19th century, it is very difficult to assign their composition to a particular historical period. The social universe described in some of them may reflect a late medieval setting. Texts of one of the epic traditions have been collected over a period of almost 150 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s. Two papers (H. Bruckner / V. Rai and V. Nandavara) deal with this tradition which is part of the oldest collections. In contrast, the popular epic of the Bant heroine, Siri, only attracted the attention of scholars from the 1970s onwards. In this book, the Siri tradition is studied by C. Gowda, A. Alva, and P. Schuster-Lohlau. Peter J. Claus' important paper introduces Koddabbu, the champion of a Dalit community. The wealth of texts and versions reflected in this volume allows, for the first time, to make systematic comparisons between different texts of the same tradition as well as between narrative elements and cultural concepts found in different traditions. Linguistic analysis, too, is just beginning to reveal possibly unique textual and narrative features.
Author: Saraju Rath
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004219005
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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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.
Author: Stuart H. Blackburn
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004171339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
This study of an oral tradition in northeast India is the first of its kind in this part of the eastern Himalayas. A comparative analysis reveals parallel stories in an area stretching from central Arunachal Pradesh into upland Southeast Asia and southwest China. The subject of the volume, the Apatanis, are a small population of Tibeto-Burman speakers who live in a narrow valley halfway between Tibet and Assam. Their origin myths, migration legends, oral histories, trickster tales and ritual chants, as well as performance contexts and genre system, reveal key cultural ideas and social practices, shifts in tribal identity and the reinvention of religion.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004223479
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
This volume, the outcome of a seminar organized at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, marks an important advancement in the study of South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts which are predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries. Nevertheless, they continued a manuscript culture for around two millennia and had a profound impact on traditions of knowledge and culture. After an introductory essay (by J.E.M. Houben and S. Rath) addressing theoretical and historical issues of text transmission in manuscripts and in India’s remarkably strong oral memory culture, it contains twelve contributions dealing with South Indian manuscript collections in India and Europe (mainly of Vedic and Sanskrit texts) and with problems related to the scripts, the dating of manuscripts and India's literary and intellectual history. Contributors include: G. Colas, A.A. Esposito, M. Fujii, C. Galewicz, J.E.M. Houben, H. Moser, P. Perumal, K. Plofker, S. Rath, S.R. Sarma, D. Wujastyk, K.G. Zysk
Author: A. K. Ramanujan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520203990
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
This book of oral tales from the south Indian region of Kannada represents the culmination of a lifetime of research by A. K. Ramanujan, one of the most revered scholars and writers of his time. The result of over three decades' labor, this long-awaited collection makes available for the first time a wealth of folktales from a region that has not yet been adequately represented in world literature. Ramanujan's skill as a translator, his graceful writing style, and his profound love and understanding of the subject enrich the tales that he collected, translated, and interpreted. With a written literature recorded from about 800 A.D., Kannada is rich in mythology, devotional and secular poetry, and more recently novels and plays. Ramanujan, born in Mysore in 1929, had an intimate knowledge of the language. In the 1950s, when working as a college lecturer, he began collecting these tales from everyone he could--servants, aunts, schoolteachers, children, carpenters, tailors. In 1970 he began translating and interpreting the tales, a project that absorbed him for the next three decades. When Ramanujan died in 1993, the translations were complete and he had written notes for about half of the tales. With its unsentimental sympathies, its laughter, and its delightfully vivid sense of detail, the collection stands as a significant and moving monument to Ramanujan's memory as a scholar and writer.
