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Seeking to identify the plant origins of the early sacramental beverages Soma and Haoma, this study draws a connection between the psychoactive properties of these drinks and the widespread use of cannabis among Indo-Europeans during this time. Exploring the role of these libations as inspiration for the Indian Rig Veda and the Persian Avestan texts, this examination discusses the spread of cannabis use across Europe and Asia, the origins of the Soma and Haoma cults, and the shamanic origins of modern religion.
Anantadas is the first 'biographer' who, around 1600, wrote about the most popular bhakti poets of the 15th and 16th centuries in Northern India. This critical study of these manuscripts yields a broad spectrum of the linguistic and morphological variants. It also reveals the processes of oral and scribal transmission during this time when sectarian interests appropriated certain poets and changed their 'biographies' accordingly.
Carol Salomon dedicated over thirty years of her life to researching, translating, and annotating this compilation of songs by the Bengali poet and mystical philosopher Lalan Sai (popularly transliterated as Lalon) who lived in the village of Cheuriya in Bengal in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One major objective of his lyrical riddles was to challenge the restrictions of cultural, political, and sexual identity, and his songs accordingly express a longing to understand humanity, its duties, and its ultimate destiny. His songs also contain thinly veiled references to esoteric yogic practices (sadhana), including body-centered Hathayogic techniques that are related to those found...
Comprising more than twelve million people and renowned for their resistance to Brahminical values, the Virasaivas are a vibrant and unorthodox religious community with a provocative socio-political voice. The Virasaiva tradition has produced a vast and original body of literature, composed mostly in Kannada, a Dravidian language from south India. Siva's Saints introduces a previously unexplored and central primary work produced in the early thirteenth century, the Ragalegalu. This was the first narrative text written about the incipient devotional tradition dedicated to the god Siva in the Kannada-speaking regions; through stories of the saints, it images the life of this new religious comm...
This book explores the relationship between mainstream and marginal or subaltern religious practice in the Indian subcontinent, and its entanglement with ideas of nationhood, democracy and equality. With detailed readings of texts from Marathi and Hindi literature and criticism, the book brings together studies of Hindu devotionalism with issues of religious violence. Drawing on the arguments of Partha Chatterjee, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, the author demonstrates that Indian democracy, and indeed postcolonial democracies in general, do not always adhere to Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality, and that religion and secular life are inextricably enmeshed in the history of ...
Knowledge ahead, knowledge behind, knowledge to the left and right. The knowledge that knows what knowledge is: that’s the knowledge that’s mine. —Bijak, sakhi 188 One of India’s greatest mystics, Kabir (1398-1448) was also a satirist and philosopher, a poet of timeless wit and wisdom. Equally immersed in theology and social thought, music and politics, his songs have won devoted followers from every walk of life through the past five centuries. He was a Muslim by name, but his ideas stand at the intersection of Hinduism and Islam, Bhakti and Yoga, religion and secularism. And his words were always marked by rhetorical boldness and conceptual subtlety. This book offers Vinay Dharwadker’s sparkling new translations of one hundred poems, drawing for the first time on major sources in half a dozen literary languages. They closely mimic the structure, voice and style of the originals, revealing Kabir’s multiple facets in historical and cultural contexts. Finely balancing simplicity and complexity, this selection opens up new forms of imagination and experience for discerning readers around the world.
Culture and Circulation reflects an innovative approach to early modern Indian literature. The authors foreground the complex hybridity of literary genres and social milieus, capturing elements that have eluded traditional literary history. In this book, jointly edited by Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch, Hindi authors rub shoulders with their Persian counterparts in the courts of Mughal India; the fame of Mirabai, a poetess from Rajasthan, travels to Punjab; the sayings of Kabir are found to be as difficult to pin down as the holy men who transmitted them. Drawing on new archives in several Indian languages, Culture and Circulation presents fresh ideas that will be of interest to scholars of Indian literature, religious studies, and early modern history. Contributors include Stefano Pellò,Thibaut d'Hubert,Corinne Lefèvre, John Stratton Hawley, Gurinder Singh Mann, Thomas de Bruijn, Catharina Kiehnle, Allison Busch, Francesca Orsini, Heidi Pauwels, Robert van de Walle.
This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the field of Persian linguistics, discusses its development, and captures critical accounts of cutting edge research within its major subfields, as well as outlining current debates and suggesting productive lines of future research. Leading scholars in the major subfields of Persian linguistics examine a range of topics split into six thematic parts. Following a detailed introduction from the editors, the volume begins by placing Persian in its historical and typological context in Part I. Chapters in Part II examine topics relating to phonetics and phonology, while Part III looks at approaches to and features of Persian syntax. The fourth part of the volume explores morphology and lexicography, as well as the work of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Part V, language and people, covers topics such as language contact and teaching Persian as a foreign language, while the final part examines psycho- neuro-, and computational linguistics. The volume will be an essential resource for all scholars with an interest in Persian language and linguistics.
Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars' study of oral-performative ...
"This essay reveals how a global "New Drug History" has evolved over the past three decades, along with its latest thematic trends and possible next directions. Scholars have long studied drugs, but only in the 1990s did serious archival and global study of what are now illicit drugs emerge, largely from the influence of the anthropology of drugs on history. A series of key interdisciplinary influences are now in play beyond anthropology, among them, commodity and consumption studies, sociology, medical history, cultural studies, and transnational history. Scholars connect drugs and their changing political or cultural status to larger contexts and epochal events such as wars, empires, capitalism, modernization, or globalizing processes. As the field expands in scope, it may shift deeper into non-western perspectives, a fluid historical definition of drugs; environmental concerns; and research on cannabis and opiates sparked by their current transformations or crises"--