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. ...