Text and Tradition in South India

Text and Tradition in South India PDF Author: Velcheru Narayana Rao
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143846777X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Essays on Telugu and South Indian literature and culture by distinguished Telugu scholar Narayana Rao. Velcheru Narayana Rao’s contribution to understanding Indian cultural history, literary production, and intellectual life—specifically from the vantage of the Andhra region—has few parallels. He is one of the very rare scholars to be able to reflect magisterially on the precolonial and colonial periods. He moves easily between Sanskrit and the vernacular traditions, and between the worlds of orality and script. This is because of his mastery of the “classical” Telugu tradition. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam puts it in his Introduction, “To command nearly a thousand years of a literary tradition is no small feat, but more important still is VNR’s ability constantly to offer fresh readings and provocative frameworks for interpretation.” The essays and reflections in Text and Tradition in South India bring together the diverse and foundational contributions made by Narayana Rao to the rewriting of India’s cultural and literary history. The book is for anyone interested in the history of Indian ideas, the social and cultural history of South India, and the massive intellectual traditions of the subcontinent. Velcheru Narayana Rao is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History at Emory University. His many books include a translation (with David Shulman) of Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s The Demon’s Daughter: A Love Story from South India, also published by SUNY Press, and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (coauthored with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam).

Text and Tradition in South India

Text and Tradition in South India PDF Author: Velcheru Narayana Rao
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143846777X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

Get Book

Book Description
Essays on Telugu and South Indian literature and culture by distinguished Telugu scholar Narayana Rao. Velcheru Narayana Rao’s contribution to understanding Indian cultural history, literary production, and intellectual life—specifically from the vantage of the Andhra region—has few parallels. He is one of the very rare scholars to be able to reflect magisterially on the precolonial and colonial periods. He moves easily between Sanskrit and the vernacular traditions, and between the worlds of orality and script. This is because of his mastery of the “classical” Telugu tradition. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam puts it in his Introduction, “To command nearly a thousand years of a literary tradition is no small feat, but more important still is VNR’s ability constantly to offer fresh readings and provocative frameworks for interpretation.” The essays and reflections in Text and Tradition in South India bring together the diverse and foundational contributions made by Narayana Rao to the rewriting of India’s cultural and literary history. The book is for anyone interested in the history of Indian ideas, the social and cultural history of South India, and the massive intellectual traditions of the subcontinent. Velcheru Narayana Rao is Visweswara Rao and Sita Koppaka Professor in Telugu Culture, Literature, and History at Emory University. His many books include a translation (with David Shulman) of Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s The Demon’s Daughter: A Love Story from South India, also published by SUNY Press, and Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (coauthored with David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam).

Text and Tradition in South India

Text and Tradition in South India PDF Author: Velcheru Narayana Rao
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438467753
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
Essays on Telugu and South Indian literature and culture by distinguished Telugu scholar Narayana Rao. Velcheru Narayana Rao’s contribution to understanding Indian cultural history, literary production, and intellectual life—specifically from the vantage of the Andhra region—has few parallels. He is one of the very rare scholars to be able to reflect magisterially on the precolonial and colonial periods. He moves easily between Sanskrit and the vernacular traditions, and between the worlds of orality and script. This is because of his mastery of the “classical” Telugu tradition. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam puts it in his Introduction, “To command nearly a thousand years of a literary tradition is no small feat, but more important still is VNR’s ability constantly to offer fresh readings and provocative frameworks for interpretation.” The essays and reflections in Text and Tradition in South India bring together the diverse and foundational contributions made by Narayana Rao to the rewriting of India’s cultural and literary history. The book is for anyone interested in the history of Indian ideas, the social and cultural history of South India, and the massive intellectual traditions of the subcontinent.

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India

Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India PDF Author: Tyler Williams
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199091676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
Early modern India—a period extending from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century—saw dramatic cultural, religious, and political changes as it went from Sultanate to Mughal to early colonial rule. Witness to the rise of multiple literary and devotional traditions, this period was characterized by immense political energy and cultural vibrancy. Text and Tradition in Early Modern North India brings together recent scholarship on the languages, literatures, and religious traditions of northern India. It focuses on the rise of vernacular languages as vehicles for literary expression and historical and religious self-assertion, and particularly attends to ways in which these regional spoken languages connect with each other and their cosmopolitan counterparts. Hindu, Muslim, and Jain idioms emerge in new ways, and the effect of the volume as a whole is to show that they belong to a single complex cultural conversation.

Word, Sound, Image

Word, Sound, Image PDF Author: Saskia Kersenboom
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000324877
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This original and radical book challenges dominant parameters of literacy by comparing the oral tradition of the Tamils in South India with the Western culture of printed text. In India, traditional texts are always performed; as a result, form and meaning can change depending on the occasion. This is the opposite of Western communication through publication which is a static representation of knowledge. The author examines the reasons for the differences between the Indian and Western textual traditions, and describes how text lives through the performing arts of words, sound and imagery. She argues that interactive multimedia is the first Western communication form to represent oral traditions effectively.

Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India

Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004223479
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
This volume, the outcome of a seminar organized at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, marks an important advancement in the study of South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts which are predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries. Nevertheless, they continued a manuscript culture for around two millennia and had a profound impact on traditions of knowledge and culture. After an introductory essay (by J.E.M. Houben and S. Rath) addressing theoretical and historical issues of text transmission in manuscripts and in India’s remarkably strong oral memory culture, it contains twelve contributions dealing with South Indian manuscript collections in India and Europe (mainly of Vedic and Sanskrit texts) and with problems related to the scripts, the dating of manuscripts and India's literary and intellectual history. Contributors include: G. Colas, A.A. Esposito, M. Fujii, C. Galewicz, J.E.M. Houben, H. Moser, P. Perumal, K. Plofker, S. Rath, S.R. Sarma, D. Wujastyk, K.G. Zysk

Texts in Context

Texts in Context PDF Author: Jeffrey R. Timm
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791407967
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The major religious traditions of South Asia are ‘religions of the book’. All accept basic arrays of texts of scriptures, often seen as sacred reservoirs of meaning and power. The West has viewed these texts as ‘bibles’ of their respective traditions, projecting onto them Western values and concerns. This book challenges such misconceptions by revealing the complex character of scripture and its interpretation in South Asian religions. Texts in Context explores the hermeneutical traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, and Sikhism. The question of how we should understand the diversity of text-traditions is approached by asking “How have traditional thinkers — the exegetes within these traditions —understood and utilized scripture?” The answers, though remarkably diverse, do reveal important similarities and take the discussion of scripture in India to a deeper level. This book makes accessible to the non-specialist sensibilities and approaches that have previously received little attention in the West, but have formed the basis for traditional efforts to understand and utilize scripture. It is a collaboration between contemporary thinkers and their traditional counterparts, whose voices emerge as they consider the sacred words of the religious traditions of South Asia.

Many Mahābhāratas

Many Mahābhāratas PDF Author: Nell Shapiro Hawley
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438482426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Many Mahābhāratas is an introduction to the spectacular and long-lived diversity of Mahābhārata literature in South Asia. This diversity begins with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, an early epic poem that narrates the events of a catastrophic fratricidal war. Along the way, it draws in nearly everything else in Hindu mythology, philosophy, and story literature. The magnitude of its scope and the relentless complexity of its worldview primed the Mahābhārata for uncountable tellings in South Asia and beyond. For two thousand years, the instinctive approach to the Mahābhārata has been not to consume it but to create it anew. The many Mahābhāratas of this book come from the first century to the twenty-first. They are composed in nine different languages—Apabhramsha, Bengali, English, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu. Early chapters illuminate themes of retelling within the Sanskrit Mahābhārata itself, demonstrating that the story's propensity for regeneration emerges from within. The majority of the book, however, reaches far beyond the Sanskrit epic. Readers dive into classical dramas, premodern vernacular poems, regional performance traditions, commentaries, graphic novels, political essays, novels, and contemporary theater productions—all of them Mahābhāratas. Because of its historical and linguistic breadth, its commitment to primary sources, and its exploration of multiplicity and diversity as essential features of the Mahābhārata's long life in South Asia, Many Mahābhāratas constitutes a major contribution to the study of South Asian literature and offers a landmark view of the field of Mahābhārata studies.

Oral Traditions in South India

Oral Traditions in South India PDF Author: Heidrun Brückner
Publisher: Harrassowitz
ISBN: 9783447108737
Category : Epic poetry, Tulu
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The present volume studies three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language (a Dravidian language). They have been living performance traditions in the Tulu speaking coastal districts of Karnataka up to the present day. For the first time, Indian, European and American scholars working on Tulu oral epics, folklorists, anthropologists as well as Indologists are brought together. All texts discussed belong to the indigenous Tulu genre called paddana, which ranges from shorter invocations of local deities to texts of epic dimensions. Because paddanas had been transmitted exclusively orally until the 19th century, it is very difficult to assign their composition to a particular historical period. The social universe described in some of them may reflect a late medieval setting. Texts of one of the epic traditions have been collected over a period of almost 150 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s. Two papers (H. Bruckner / V. Rai and V. Nandavara) deal with this tradition which is part of the oldest collections. In contrast, the popular epic of the Bant heroine, Siri, only attracted the attention of scholars from the 1970s onwards. In this book, the Siri tradition is studied by C. Gowda, A. Alva, and P. Schuster-Lohlau. Peter J. Claus' important paper introduces Koddabbu, the champion of a Dalit community. The wealth of texts and versions reflected in this volume allows, for the first time, to make systematic comparisons between different texts of the same tradition as well as between narrative elements and cultural concepts found in different traditions. Linguistic analysis, too, is just beginning to reveal possibly unique textual and narrative features.

South India

South India PDF Author: Inukonda Thirumali
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India, South
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Explores The Richness Of South Indian Culture And Civilization Which Is Reflected In All Aspects Of Socio-Religious, Economic And Cultural Life. The Essays In The Volume Examine The Specificity And Commonality Of The South With The Rest Of India. 4 Parts - Region And Texts - Politics And Society - Literary Representations - Gender Cultures - 16 Papers.

The Practice of Texts

The Practice of Texts PDF Author: Anthony Cerulli
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520383540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Introduction : Gurukulas and tradition-making in modern Ayurveda -- Situating Sanskrit (texts) in ayurvedic education -- Practicing texts -- Knowledge that heals, freely -- From healing texts to ritualized practice -- Texts in practice : wellbeing, healing, and the ayurvedic patient.