A literary and historical investigation into an ancient Indian religious thinker, tracing his rise in importance in the Hindu tradition.

Details the textual and performative history of the South Asian festival of Indra and its role in the development of classical Hinduism.

Explores the rich diversity of narratives, rituals, and participants connected with one of the most important celebrations for Hindus in South Asia and in the diaspora.

Explores how a folk ballad in southern India transforms the landscape and embeds the deities that are its subject within the social worlds of their devotees.

A major contribution to the study of South Asian literature, offering a landmark view of Mahābhārata studies.

A systematic analysis of the myth cycle of Paraśurāma (“Rāma with the Axe”), an avatára of Viṣṇu with a much darker reputation.

Investigates the professional practices of astrologers in urban India and their popularity among the educated middle and upper classes.

The first in-depth study of the All World Gayatri Pariwar, a modern Indian religious movement.

Broadens the parameters of religious studies by accounting for material acts that help shape religious worlds.

A rare look at the history of Himalayan peasant society and the relationship between culture and environment in the Himalayas.

A wide-ranging consideration of early modern Muslim and Christian empires, covering the Iberian, Ottoman and Mughal worlds, including questions of political economy, images and representations, and historiography.

A distillation of the historian’s finest writings on modern Indian historical themes.

This exploration of key terms related to social and political order, found in early Indian texts, challenges the idea of a unified ancient India and a unified national identity at that time.

Explores the contemporary nature and the diverse narratives, rituals, and performances of the Navarātri Festival.

Essays on Telugu and South Indian literature and culture by distinguished Telugu scholar Narayana Rao.

Offers a fresh perspective on the Mahābhārata based on an exploration of its ending, the Svargārohaṇa parvan.

Explores the activities and political personas of women activists in Shiv Sena, a militant Indian political party.

Looks at narrative in the history of ayurvedic medical literature and the perspectives on illness and patienthood that emerge.

Explores the transformation of Hindi poetry as it reflects a changing society during the period from 1885 to 1925.

Looks at Western understandings of South Asian religions and indigenous responses from pre-colonial to contemporary times.

Details the transformation of Tamil literary culture that came with colonialism and the encounter with Western modernity.

A study and translation of a tantric contemplative manual and the commentary on it.

The oldest surviving anthology of lyric poems from India, the Sattasai presents the many aspects of love and provides a realistic counterpart to the Kāmasūtra.

How perceptions of land and space influence social and aesthetic conditions in the Tamil region of India.

A reconsideration of the relationship between fieldwork and anthropological knowledge.

Explores the narratives and dialogues of the Upanisads and shows that these literary elements are central to an understanding of Upanishadic philosophy.

Indian women scholars present and discuss tales about women, bringing new insights about gender and the moral universe of the folk narrative.

Presents Kamadeva, the Hindu god of desire, in tales, art, and ritual. Also covers Kamadeva's appearance in Buddhist lore.

This sixteenth-century work has a modern sensibility, presenting characters' inner worlds and understanding love as the fullest realization of the individual.

A fascinating look at Hindu gurus with significant followings in the United States.

Provides both a first-hand look at and an insightful analysis of a little-known world—that of female ascetics in India.

Focuses on the lives of female Hindu ascetics and the significance of gender to the tradition of renunciation.

Explores the social treatment of death in South Asian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and other traditions. Includes material on women and marginalized groups.

Explores death and dying in the Bhagavata-Purana and in the Indian religious imagination using insights from myth, semiotics, and depth psychology as well as the Indian commentarial tradition.

Explores the lived experience of Christianity in India.

An introduction to the Ram bhakti tradition and a fascinating account of its practice among a group of Central Indian Untouchables.

Explores the experience of yoga in the Yogasutra of Patanjali.

Enlarges our understanding of Jainism, one of the oldest yet least-studied of the world's living religions, by challenging the standard scholarly portraits of both Jains and South Asian religion and culture.

Constructs a history of an untouchable and heretical community, the Satnamis of Central India.

Examines the legendary life and poetic works of Ramprasad, the eighteenth-century Bengali devotee of the Goddess, whose songs were influential in his own time and remain popular today.

Provides an accessible introduction to the Vedic religious world by focusing on the role of divine and human imagination in sacred texts.

This book analyzes a variety of materials from the Indian literary tradition. examining both its indigenous development and its relation to the West, and developing ideas from cultural criticism, literary theory, linguistics, and Indology.

Elizarenkova, perhaps the greatest living scholar of the Rand certainly its greatest linguist, explains here the relationships between a very complicated grammatical system and the peculiarities of style ...

Authority, Anxiety, and Canon elucidates a principle fundamental to Hinduism's self-understanding—the Veda—while at the same time examining the methodological issues of the role of canon in religious ...

By focusing on contemporary popular religious traditions, the book represents a substantial contribution to the study of modern religious practices in Banaras, holy city of India. This book offers in-depth, ...

The interdisciplinary approaches presented here investigate food in India and Sri Lanka for its wide ranging cultural meaning and uses. The authors examine food in religious and literary contexts, where ...

The Sanskrit Puranas and epics are replete with stories of the avatars, incarnations of the god Visnu in various forms to rid the universe of malevolent forces and to restore the proper cosmic balance. ...

Among the most ancient deities of South Asia, the yaksha straddle the boundaries between popular and textual traditions in both Hinduism and Buddhism and both benevolent and malevolent facets. As a figure ...

This book represents the first systematic collection and analysis of the principal legends about Kabir Das, a fifteenth-century poet-saint. It focuses on the ways in which the legends embody and reflect ...

Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devī-Māhātmya ...

This book examines the emplotment of India in the Western literary imagination. Basing her discussion on the reception of an emblematic Sanskrit text, Kālidāsa's Śākuntala, Figueira studies how and ...

The authors of the Devī-Bhāgavata Purāna endeavored to demonstrate the superiority of the Devī over competing masculine deities, and to articulate in new ways the manifold nature of the Goddess. Brown's ...

This book is a translation and study of the poems of a ninth-century woman saint and mystic. The Introduction is designed to make the translations accessible to a non-specialist audience, while the Notes ...

This book is a study of India's great epic, the Mahābhārata, against the background of Indo-European myth, epic, and ritual. It builds upon the pioneering studies in these areas by Georges Dumezil and ...

In this book, the author seeks access to Karma's origins by following several clues suggested by the doctrine's earliest formulation in the Upanistexts (circa 600-500 B.C.) These clues lead back to the ...