Questioning Ramayanas

Questioning Ramayanas PDF Author: Paula Richman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520220744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
A wide-ranging examination of the many different versions of India's greatest epic, the Ramayana, focusing on versions that subvert the dominant readings of the work.

Questioning Ramayanas

Questioning Ramayanas PDF Author: Paula Richman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520220744
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Get Book Here

Book Description
A wide-ranging examination of the many different versions of India's greatest epic, the Ramayana, focusing on versions that subvert the dominant readings of the work.

Many Ramayanas

Many Ramayanas PDF Author: Paula Richman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052091175X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book 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.

World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India

World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India PDF Author: Kedar Arun Kulkarni
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354351816
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound, wide availability of print technology. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.

Ramayana Stories in Modern South India

Ramayana Stories in Modern South India PDF Author: Paula Richman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253219531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Fresh perspectives on the classic Indiana epic.

Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia

Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia PDF Author: Zoe C. Sherinian
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197566251
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Music and Dance as Everyday South Asia offers an inclusive lens through which to study the music, dance, and allied arts of South Asia, its diasporas, and the people who produce and use these cultural expressions. The authors in this collection--ethnomusicologists, dance scholars, anthropologists, and practitioners--understand music and dance as everyday lived experience. "The everyday" comprises practices of South Asians in multiple countries, whose identities include numerous castes, classes, tribes, genders, sexualities, religions, nationalities, more than twenty languages, and other affiliations. With the goal to de-emphasize an approach that fetishizes analysis of classical form and its technical virtuosity, this book instead contextualizes the understanding of aesthetic meaning within six themes: place and community; style, genre, and function; intersectional identities of caste, class, and tribe; gender and sexuality; technology, media, and transmission; and diaspora and globalization. The thirty chapters in this collection demonstrate how the arts are meaningful expressions of human identities and relationships for ordinary people as well as virtuosic performers. Each author ties their thesis to hands-on, participatory exercises that provide multiple entryways to understand and engage with cultural meaning. In so doing, they empower classroom dialogue that treats embodied experience as a vital mode of enquiry, supplementing critical textual analysis to cultivate attentive, responsive, and ethical dispositions toward the music and dance practices of other humans and their life experiences.

Performing the Ramayana Tradition

Performing the Ramayana Tradition PDF Author: Paula Richman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197552501
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
"Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, edited by Ramayana scholar Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha, scholar of Theater and Performance Studies, examines diverse retellings of the Ramayana narrative as interpreted and embodied through a spectrum of performances. Unlike previous publications, this book is neither a monograph on a single performance tradition nor a general overview of Indian theatre. Instead, it provides context-specific analyses of selected case studies that explore contemporary enactments of performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw: Kutiyattam, Nangyarkuttu and Kathakali from Kerala; Kattaikkuttu and a "mythological" drama from Tamilnadu; Talamaddale from Karnataka; avant-garde performances from Puducherry and New Delhi; a modern dance-drama from West Bengal; the monastic tradition of Sattriya from Assam; anti-caste plays from North India; and the Ramnagar Ramlila. Apart from the editors' two introductions, which orient readers to the history of Ramayana narratives by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban, Sankaradeva, and others, as well as the performance vocabulary of their enactments, the volume includes many voices, including those of directors, performers, scholars, connoisseurs, and the scholar-abbot of a monastery. It also contains two full scripts of plays, photographs of productions, interviews, conversations, and a glossary of Indian terms. Each essay in the volume, written by an expert in the field, is linked to several others, clustered around shared themes: the politics of caste and gender, the representation of the anti-hero, contemporary re-interpretations of traditional narratives, and the presence of Ramayana discourse in everyday life"--

The Ramayana Revisited

The Ramayana Revisited PDF Author: Mandakranta Bose
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195168321
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
14 leading 'Ramayana' scholars examine the epic in its myriad contexts throughout South and Southeast Asia. They explore the role the narrative plays in societies as varied as India Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. The essays also expand the understanding of the 'text' to include non-verbal renditions of the epic.

Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology

Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology PDF Author: Ajay K. Rao
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134077351
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki is considered by many contemporary Hindus to be a foundational religious text. But this understanding is in part the result of a transformation of the epic’s receptive history, a hermeneutic project which challenged one characterization of the genre of the text, as a work of literary culture, and replaced it with another, as a work of remembered tradition. This book examines Rāmāyana commentaries, poetic retellings, and praise-poems produced by intellectuals within the Śrīvaisnava order of South India from 1250 to 1600 and shows how these intellectuals reconceptualized Rāma’s story through the lens of their devotional metaphysics. Śrīvaisnavas applied innovative interpretive techniques to the Rāmāyana, including allegorical reading, ślesa reading (reading a verse as a double entendre), and the application of vernacular performance techniques such as word play, improvisation, repetition, and novel forms of citation. The book is of interest not only to Rāmāyana specialists but also to those engaged with Indian intellectual history, literary studies, and the history of religions.

The Goddess Re-discovered

The Goddess Re-discovered PDF Author: Saumitra Chakravarty
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000632873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
The book critically analyses questions of gender and sexuality in the medieval religious texts of Bengal. It analyses the emergence of religious cults in patriarchal contexts, the humanization of the goddess figure as a wife and mother who is subject to social and ethical codes, and demythologization of folk epics. This book discusses the folk genre of the Mangal Kavyas such as the Chandi Mangal and the Manasa Mangal, against the perspectives of Sanskrit texts like the Devi Mahatmya and the Devi Bhagavata Purana, and compares and contrasts the Kalika Purana against the texts and practices of the Tantric cult, to shed light on the paradoxes and parallels in the images of Kali found in the texts and practices dominant in the eastern region of India. The author also highlights the centrality of Chaitanya in the Gaudiya Vaishnava movement, the social and religious revolution he brought with the philosophy of raganuga bhakti along with the androgynous aspects in his relationships; explores the concept of mystical eroticism in the love of Radha and Krishna as seen in the song sequences of the Gaudiya Vaishnavas; and discusses women’s Rama-kathas found in a variety of languages across India. Rich in archival material, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, literature, medieval history, social history, cultural anthropology, religious studies, cultural studies, South Asia studies, and those interested in the history of medieval Bengal.

Authority and Meaning in Indian Religions

Authority and Meaning in Indian Religions PDF Author: Julia Leslie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351772996
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This title was first published in 2003. Can a text be used either to validate or to invalidate contemporary understandings? Texts may be deemed 'sacred', but sacred to whom? Do conflicting understandings matter? Is it appropriate to try to offer a resolution? For Hindus and non-Hindus, in India and beyond, Valmiki is the poet-saint who composed the epic Rà mà yaõa. Yet for a vocal community of dalits (once called 'untouchables'), within and outside India, Valmiki is God. How then does one explain the popular story that he started out as an ignorant and violent bandit, attacking and killing travellers for material gain? And what happens when these two accounts, Valmiki as God and Valmiki as villain, are held simultaneously by two different religious groups, both contemporary, and both vocal? This situation came to a head with controversial demonstrations by the Valmiki community in Britain in 2000, giving rise to some searching questions which Julia Leslie now seeks to address.