Mirabai

Mirabai
Author: Nancy M. Martin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2023-07-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0197694942

Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts regarding her life are few, her fame spread across social, linguistic, and religious boundaries, and stories about her multiplied across the subcontinent and the centuries. In Mirabai, Nancy M. Martin traces the story of this immensely popular Indian saint from the earliest manuscript references to her through colonial and nationalist developments to scholarly and popular portrayals in the decades leading up to Indian independence. This book examines Mirabai's place as both insider and outsider to the developing strands of devotional Hinduism and her role in contested terrain of debates around the education and independence of women and the crafting of Indian and Hindu identities. Mirabai offers a comprehensive and multi-layered portrait of this remarkable and still controversial woman, who continues to be a source of inspiration and catalyst for self-actualization for spiritual seekers, artists, activists, and so many others in India and around the world today.

A Dictionary of Indian Literature: Beginnings-1850

A Dictionary of Indian Literature: Beginnings-1850
Author: Sujit Mukherjee
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 464
Release: 1998
Genre: Indic literature
ISBN: 9788125014539

This Volume Aspires To Be A Handy Reference Work For Users Whose Interest Is Not Limited To One Or Two Indian Language Literatures But Spreads Over Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali And The Prakrit As Well As To Asimiya, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Telugu And Urdu. Starting With The Vedas And The Upanishads, The Coverage Spans Several Centuries Up To The Year 1850.

Loving Stones

Loving Stones
Author: David L. Haberman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2020-03-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190086742

Loving Stones is a study of devotees' conceptions of and worshipful interactions with Mount Govardhan, a sacred mountain located in the Braj region of north-central India that has for centuries been considered an embodied form of Krishna. It is often said that worship of Mount Govardhan "makes the impossible possible." In this book, David L. Haberman examines the perplexing paradox of an infinite god embodied in finite form, wherein each particular form is non-different from the unlimited. He takes on the task of interpreting the worship of a mountain and its stones for a culture in which this practice is quite alien. This challenge involves exploring the interpretive strategies that may explain what seems un-understandable, and calls for theoretical considerations of incongruity, inconceivability, and other realms of the impossible. This aspect of the book includes critical consideration of the place and history of the pejorative concept of idolatry (and its twin, anthropomorphism) in the comparative study of religions. Loving Stones uses the worship of Mount Govardhan as a site to explore ways in which scholars engaged in the difficult work of representing other cultures struggle to make "the impossible possible."

Krishna

Krishna
Author: Edwin Francis Bryant
Publisher:
Total Pages: 591
Release: 2007
Genre: Devotional literature, Indic
ISBN: 9780198034001

In the West, Krishna is primarily known as the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita. But it is the stories of Krishna's childhood and his later exploits that have provided some of the most important and widespread sources of religious narrative in the Hindu religious landscape. This volume brings together new translations of representative samples of Krishna religious literature from a variety of genres - classical, popular, sectarian, poetic, literary, and philosophical.

Hindu Pasts

Hindu Pasts
Author: Vasudha Dalmia
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 392
Release: 2017-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438468075

In her introduction to Hindu Pasts—which showcases her work as a scholar of social, literary, and religious history—Vasudha Dalmia outlines the central ideas which thread her writings: first, to understand in greater historical depth the relationship between body language, religion, and society in India, as well as the ever-changing role of its religious and social institutions; second, to recognize that the Hindu tradition, which colonials and nationalists tend to see as monolithic, is in fact a multiplicity of distinct and semi-autonomous strands.

Vallabhacharya

Vallabhacharya
Author: B. K. Bhatt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1980
Genre: Ballabhachars
ISBN:

Life and works of Vallabhācārya, 1479-1531?, leader of the Vallabhachars, Vaishnava sect., and exponent of the Śuddhādvaita school in Hindu philosophy.

Gates of the Lord

Gates of the Lord
Author: Amit Ambalal
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2015-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300214723

The Pushtimarg, a Hindu sect established in India in the fifteenth century, possesses a unique culture--reaching back centuries and still vital today--in which art and devotion are deeply intertwined. This important volume, illustrated with more than one hundred vivid images, offers a new, in-depth look at the Pushtimarg and its rich aesthetic traditions, which are largely unknown outside of South Asia. Original essays by eminent scholars of Indian art focus on the style of worship, patterns of patronage, and artistic heritage that generated pichvais, large paintings on cloth designed to hang in temples, as well as other paintings for the Pushtimarg. In this expansive study, the authors deftly examine how pichvais were and still are used in the seasonal and daily veneration of Shrinathji, an aspect of Krishna as a child who is the chief deity of the temple town of Nathdwara in Rajasthan. Gates of the Lord introduces readers not only to the visual world of the Pushtimarg, but also to the spirit of Nathdwara.

Hindi Literature

Hindi Literature
Author: Indu Prakash Pandey
Publisher: Calcutta : Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1975
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Seeing Krishna in America

Seeing Krishna in America
Author: E. Allen Richardson
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2014-08-12
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0786459735

The Hindu sect the Vallabha Sampradaya was founded in India in the 15th century by a devotional saint, Vallabhacharya. Their bhakti tradition worships a variety of forms of Krishna as a seven-year-old child. Following U.S. immigration reforms in 1965, members of the sect established a spiritual headquarters for the faith in Pennsylvania and began to construct temples across the United States. Since then, the growth has continued as this 500-year-old faith becomes an American religion, as this work demonstrates.