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Brought To Life By The Voice - Playback Singing And Cultural Politics In South India

by Amanda Weidman

14,56€ + 10% CARD

 To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers’ voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman’s historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.
Merchants Of Virtue - Hindus, Muslims, And Untouchables In Eighteenth-Century South Asia

by Divya Cherian

14,56€ + 10% CARD

 A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit <a href="https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.139" target="_blank">www.luminosoa.org</a> to learn more. Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of "Hindu," setting it in contrast to "Untouchable" in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.
ENGLISH

Monastery Rules - Buddhist Monastic Organization In Pre-Modern Tibet

by Berthe Jansen

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit <a href="http://www.luminosoa.org/" style="color: rgb(180, 84, 36); font-size: 13px; background-color: transparent; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none; font-family: "open sans", helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">www.luminosoa.org</a> to learn more. The Monastery Rules discusses the position of the monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies and how that position was informed by the far-reaching relationship of monastic Buddhism with Tibetan society, economy, law, and culture. Jansen focuses her study on monastic guidelines, or bca’ yig. The first study of its kind to examine the genre in detail, the book contains an exploration of its parallels in other Buddhist cultures, its connection to the Vinaya, and its value as socio-historical source-material. The guidelines are witness to certain socio-economic changes, while also containing rules that aim to change the monastery in order to preserve it. Jansen argues that the monastic institutions’ influence on society was maintained not merely due to prevailing power-relations, but also because of certain deep-rooted Buddhist beliefs.
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Polemics And Patronage In The City Of Victory - Vyasatirtha, Hindu Sectarianism, And The Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Court

by Valerie Stoker

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 How did the patronage activities of India's Vijayanagara Empire (c. 1346-1565) influence Hindu sectarian identities? The author argues that the Vijayanagara court was selective in its patronage of religious institutions. She focuses on the career of the Hindu intellectual and monastic leader Vyasatirtha.
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Hindu Pluralism - Religion And The Public Sphere In Early Modern South India

by Elaine M. Fisher

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 Drawing on sources in Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu, the author argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism.
ENGLISH

Modernizing Composition - Sinhala Song, Poetry, And Politics In Twentieth-Century Sri Lanka

by Garrett Field

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology; whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. This book examines the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka.
ENGLISH

Language Of The Snakes - Prakrit, Sanskrit, And The Language Order Of Premodern India

by Andrew Ollett

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit <a href="https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.37/" target="_blank">www.luminosoa.org</a> to learn more. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kavya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring "language order" in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions—between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular—and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.
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Hegemony Of Heritage - Ritual And The Record In Stone

by Deborah L. Stein

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit <a href="https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.46/" target="_blank">www.luminosoa.org</a> to learn more. The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambika Temple in Jagat and the Ékalingji Temple Complex in Kailaspuri—the author looks beyond their divergent sectarian affiliations and patronage structures to underscore many aspects of common practice. This book offers new and extremely valuable insights into these important monuments, illuminating the entangled politics of antiquity and revealing whether a monument’s ritual record is affirmed as continuous and hence hoary or dismissed as discontinuous or reinvented through various strategies. The Hegemony of Heritage enriches theoretical constructs with ethnographic description and asks us to reexamine notions such as archive and text through the filter of sculpture and mantra.
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Reading The Mahavamsa - The Literary Aims Of A Theravada Buddhist History

by Kristin Scheible

86,11€ + 10% CARD

 Reading the Mahavamsa advocates a new, literary approach to this text by revealing its embedded reading advice (to experience samvega and pasada) and affective work of metaphors (the Buddha's dharma as light) and salient characters (nagas).
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Negotiating Languages - Urdu, Hindi, And The Definition Of Modern South Asia

by Walter N. Hakala

99,36€ + 10% CARD

 Casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registersâ€"Urdu and Hindiâ€"and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals
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Culture Of Encounters - Sanskrit At The Mughal Court

by Audrey Truschke

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Culture of Encounters recasts the Mughal Empire as a polyglot polity that collaborated with its Indian subjects to envision its sovereignty. This study also reframes the development of Brahman and Jain communities under Mughal rule, which coalesced around carefully selected, politically salient memories of imperial interaction.
Place Of Devotion - Siting And Experiencing Divinity In Bengal-Vaishnavism

by Sukanya Sarbadhikary

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 Hindu devotional traditions have long been recognized for their sacred geographies and the sensuous aspects of their devotees' experiences. Largely overlooked, however, are the subtle links between these expressions. This book discusses the diverse and contrasting ways in which Bengal-Vaishnava devotees experience sacred geography and divinity.
ENGLISH

Receptacle Of The Sacred - Illustrated Manuscripts And The Buddhist Book Cult In South Asia

by Jinah Kim

104,94€ + 10% CARD

 In considering medieval illustrated Buddhist manuscripts as sacred objects of cultic innovation, this book explores how and why South Asian Buddhist book-cult has survived for almost two millennia to present. It also shows how human agency was critical in perpetuating and intensifying the potency of a manuscript as a sacred object throughout time.
Body Of Victim, Body Of Warrior - Refugee Families And The Making Of Kashmiri Jihadists

by Cabeiri Debergh Robinson

39,75€ + 10% CARD

 Looks at the creation of contemporary Muslim jihadists. Interweaving historical and ethnographic evidence, this book explains how refuge-seeking has become a socially and politically debased practice in the Kashmir region and why this devaluation has turned refugee men into potential militants.
ENGLISH

Yogin And The Madman - Reading The Biographical Corpus Of Tibet''S Great Saint Milarepa

by Andrew Quintman

50,34€ + 10% CARD

 Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa''s (1052-1135) life story shortly after his death, initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world. Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre''s most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the "Madman of Western Tibet." Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin''s corporeal relics.
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Islam Translated - Literature, Conversion, And The Arabic Cosmopolis Of South And Southeast Asia

by Ronit Ricci

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 The spread of Islam eastward into South and Southeast Asia was one of the most significant cultural shifts in world history. As it expanded into these regions, Islam was received by cultures vastly different from those in the Middle East, incorporating them into a diverse global community that stretched from India to the Philippines. In Islam Translated, Ronit Ricci uses the Book of One Thousand Questions-from its Arabic original to its adaptations into the Javanese, Malay, and Tamil languages between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries-as a means to consider connections that linked Muslims across divides of distance and culture. Examining the circulation of this Islamic text and its varied literary forms, Ricci explores how processes of literary translation and religious conversion were historically interconnected forms of globalization, mutually dependent, and creatively reformulated within societies making the transition to Islam.
ENGLISH

Secularizing Islamists? - Jama''At-E-Islami And Jama''At-Ud-Da''Wa In Urban Pakistan

by Humeira Iqtidar

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Provides an analysis of two Islamist political parties in Pakistan, the highly influential Jama'at-e-Islami and the more militant Jama'at-ud-Da'wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. This title offers an account of the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization.
ENGLISH

Wombs In Labor - Transnational Commercial Surrogacy In India

by Amrita Pande

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Clients from all over the world hire Indian women to bear their children for a fraction of the cost of surrogacy elsewhere with little to no government oversight or regulation. In the first detailed ethnography of India's surrogacy industry, Amrita Pande visits clinics, lives in surrogacy hostels, and speaks with surrogates, their families, clients, doctors, brokers, and hostel matrons to capture the full mechanics of this burgeoning business and the experiences of the laborers within it. From recruitment to training to delivery, Pande's research focuses on the intersection of production and reproduction and its reflection of India's larger labor regime. Yet her work also showcases the strategies surrogates deploy to retain control over their bodies and reproductive futures. Pande ultimately advocates for a better understanding of this complex labor market, envisioning an international model of fair-trade surrogacy founded on openness and transparency in all business, medical, and emotional exchanges.
ENGLISH

Writing Resistance - The Rhetorical Imagination Of Hindi Dalit Literature

by Laura R. Brueck

45,04€ + 10% CARD

 Laura R. Brueck emphasizes the sociopolitical perspectives and literary strategies of a range of contemporary Dalit (low caste) writers working in Hindi, exploring what makes Dalit literature "Dalit," why it is important, and where it opposes or intersects with other bodies of Indian literature. She follows the debate among Dalit writers as they establish a specific literary critical approach, underscoring the significance of the Dalit literary sphere as a "counterpublic" generating contemporary Dalit social and political identities. Brueck then performs close readings of contemporary Hindi Dalit short stories, focusing on the aesthetic and stylistic strategies deployed by writers whose class, gender, and geographic backgrounds shape their distinct voices. By reading Dalit literature as literature, this study unravels its aesthetic innovations as well as the complexities of its sociopolitical and identity-based origins.
ENGLISH

Text To Tradition - The Naisadhiyacarita And Literary Community In South Asia

by Deven M. Patel

86,11€ + 10% CARD

 Written in the twelfth century, the Naisadhiyacarita (The Adventures of Nala, King of Nisadha) is a seminal Sanskrit poem beloved by South Asian literary communities for nearly a millennium. This volume introduces readers to the poem''s author, his reading communities, the modes through which the poem has been read and used, the contexts through which it became canonical, its literary offspring, and the emotional power it still holds for the culture that values it. Text to Tradition privileges the intellectual, affective, and social forms of cultural practice that inform a region''s people and institutions. It also proposes a new way to conduct literary historiography, understanding literary texts as "traditions" in their own right and emphasizing the various players and critical genres involved in their reception. The book underscores the importance of the close study of individual works to building a history of literary cultures. In addition, it creates a groundbreaking model for approaching the study of other venerated South Asian texts.
ENGLISH

Cut-Pieces - Celluloid Obscenity And Popular Cinema In Bangladesh

by Lotte Hoek

45,04€ + 10% CARD

 Imagine watching an action film in a small-town cinema hall in Bangladesh, and in between the gun battles and fistfights, a short pornographic clip appears. This is a cut-piece, a strip of locally made celluloid pornography spliced into the reels of action films in Bangladesh.
ENGLISH

Unifying Hinduism - Philosophy And Identity In Indian Intellectual History

by Andrew (Assistant Professor, State University Of New York At Stony Brook) Nicholson

37,85€ + 10% CARD

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 Drawing on the writings of philosophers from late medieval and early modern traditions--including Vijnanabhiksu, Madhava, and Madhusudana Sarasvati--Andrew J. Nicholson shows how influential thinkers portrayed Vedanta philosophy as the ultimate unifier of diverse belief systems. This project paved the way for the work of later Hindu reformers, such as Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and Gandhi, whose teachings promoted the notion that all world religions belong to a single spiritual unity. In his study, Nicholson also critiques the way in which Eurocentric concepts--like monism and dualism, idealism and realism, theism and atheism, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy--have come to dominate modern discourses on Indian philosophy.
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Making Sense Of Tantric Buddhism - History, Semiology, And Transgression In The Indian Traditions

by Christian K. Wedemeyer

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism challenges the notion that Buddhist Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situates them instead--both ideologically and institutionally--within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Through close analysis of primary sources, Christian K. Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative readings of the Guhyasamaja Tantra underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights illustrate how these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism.
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Millennial Sovereign - Sacred Kingship And Sainthood In Islam

by A. Azfar Moin

47,69€ + 10% CARD

 A work of history richly informed by the anthropology of religion and art, The Millennial Sovereign traces how royal dynastic cults and shrine-centered Sufism came together in the imperial cultures of Timurid Central Asia, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India. By juxtaposing imperial chronicles, paintings, and architecture with theories of sainthood, apocalyptic treatises, and manuals on astrology and magic, Moin uncovers a pattern of Islamic politics shaped by Sufi and millennial motifs from the end of the sixteenth century to the turn of the first Islamic millennium. He also shows how alchemical symbols and astrological rituals enveloped the body of the monarch, casting him as both spiritual guide and material lord. These findings offer a striking new perspective on the history of Islam and the religious and political developments linking South Asia and Iran in early-modern times.
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