Religion and Rajput Women

Religion and Rajput Women
Author: Lindsey Harlan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2024-06-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520378415

What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices—chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

Religion and Rajput Women

Religion and Rajput Women
Author: Lindsey Harlan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 1992-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780520073395

What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices--chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book. What is the relationship between caste and gender in the narratives of Rajput woman? During a year and a half of fieldwork in Rajasthan, a parched land dominated by the great Indian Desert, Lindsey Harlan interviewed more than a hundred women from all levels of Rajput society. She wanted to understand why certain religious practices were so important to Rajput women, and how they justified these to themselves. During the course of her interviews, the women described their religious practices--chief among them the worship of the family kuldevi (the goddess who exemplifies the ideal wife by staving off sickness, poverty, and infertility) and the veneration of satimatas (women who have immolated themselves on their husband's funeral pyre). As the women discussed these rituals, many of them also told Harlan religious myths and stories, drawing parallels between their behavior and that of various Indian heroines. These narratives and the role they play in the women's self-perception are the fascinating and enlightening subject of this book.

The Goddesses' Henchmen

The Goddesses' Henchmen
Author: Lindsey Harlan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2003-06-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0195348346

The Rajputs ruled the vast majority of the kingdoms that were joined together after Indian independence to form the state of Rajasthan, "Land of Kings." An important part of Rajput religion is the worship of "heroes" who have died in battle. This practice has attained new significance in recent years, as right-wing Hindu activists have deployed narratives about heroism in Rajput wars with Muslim emperors. In this book, Lindsey Harlan explores the idea of the Rajput hero. She is particularly interested in the role played by gender in stories about heroes and in their worship. She looks at the differences between female and male storytellers, the relationships of the hero to the women in his tale, and the relationship of the hero to the goddess for whom he is both sacrifice and henchman. She obtains her materials from interviews with Rajput families and their servants, from songfests, from bystanders at shrines, from ritual specialists. Ultimately she shows how heroic traditions encapsulate and express ideals of perfection and masculinity, defined most visibly against the backdrop of domesticity and femininity. More broadly she argues that heroes reflect ever-changing valuations of history, and serve as sources of inspiration for facing contemporary challenges (domestic, communal, national) and concerns about the future.

Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India

Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Author: Sarbeswar Sahoo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1108553559

This book studies the politics of Pentecostal conversion and anti-Christian violence in India. It asks: why has India been experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since the 1990s? Why are the Bhil Adivasis increasingly converting to Pentecostalism? And, what are the implications of conversion for religion within indigenous communities on the one hand and broader issues of secularism, religious freedom and democratic rights on the other? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Bhils of Northern India since 2006, this book asserts that ideological incompatibility and antagonism between Christian missionaries and Hindu nationalists provide only a partial explanation for anti-Christian violence in India. It unravels the complex interactions between different actors/ agents in the production of anti-Christian violence and provides detailed ethnographic narratives on Pentecostal conversion, Hindu nationalist politics and anti-Christian violence in the largest state of India that has hitherto been dominated by upper caste Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology.

Women of India

Women of India
Author: Arun R. Kumbhare
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2009-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 144015600X

A systematic presentation of the status of women of India throughout the long history of about 6000 years has been presented starting from the Vedic times to the post-independence period. A detailed description of the status of women during the Vedic times, which is rarely available in any of the existing literature, and in the following periods is very significant to the study of this subject. The author has discussed how the political and religious conditions over the periods have affected the conditions of women. The age-old evils, which had got firmly entrenched in the Indian society, such as the tradition of Sati, illiteracy, child marriages, and deplorable treatment of widows and so on, still persist and some new ones have joined the list. These are: bride burning, dowry, female feticide, domestic violence, to name a few. Short biographies of some outstanding women have been included to illustrate that in spite of adversities some women had achieved eminence. To the credit of the Indian Government, legislative measures have been taken to protect and improve the status of women after independence and just prior to it. These have been outlined. Unfortunately, these measures have not been able to achieve their intended results on account of wide spread corruption and lack of education and awareness among women, especially in the rural areas. A snapshot of the present conditions is given along with concluding remarks and recommendations for improvement. Improvement of the status of women is extremely improvement for India if it wishes to become a developed and progressive country and a world leader in culture and ideology.

Handbook on Rajputs

Handbook on Rajputs
Author: A. H. Bingley
Publisher: Asian Educational Services
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1996-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9788120602045

The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen

The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen
Author: Ramya Sreenivasan
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-08-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295997850

Winner of the 2009 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies The medieval Rajput queen Padmini - believed to have been pursued by Alauddin Khalji, the Sultan of Delhi - has been the focus of numerous South Asian narratives, ranging from a Sufi mystical romance in the sixteenth century to nationalist histories in the late nineteenth century. The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen explores how early modern regional elites, caste groups, and mystical and monastic communities shaped their distinctive versions of the past through the repeated refashioning of the legend of Padmini. Ramya Sreenivasan investigates these legends and traces their subsequent appropriation by colonial administrators and nationalist intellectuals, for varying different political ends. Using Padmini as a means of illustrating the power of gender norms in constructing heroic memory, she shows how such narratives about virtuous women changed as they circulated across particular communities in South Asia between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book will interest historians of memory, gender, community, culture, and historywriting in South Asia. Illustrating how enduring legends emerged out of particular precolonial repositories of "tradition," the book also addresses the nature of colonial transitions and precolonial historical consciousness.

The Emergence of Modern Hinduism

The Emergence of Modern Hinduism
Author: Richard S. Weiss
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520973747

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.

Impersonations

Impersonations
Author: Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019-06-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520301668

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.