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This book stands at the crossroads between Jerusalem and Benares and opens a long awaited conversation between two ancient religious traditions. It represents the first serious attempt by a group of eminent scholars of Judaic and Indian studies to take seriously the cross-cultural resonances among the Judaic and Hindu traditions. The essays in the first part of the volume explore the historical connections and influences between the two traditions, including evidence of borrowed elements and the adaptation of Jewish Indian communities to Hindu culture. The essays in the second part focus primarily on resonances between particular conceptual complexes and practices in the two traditions, including comparative analyses of representations of Veda and Torah, legal formulations of dharma and halakhah, and conceptions of union with the Divine in Hindu Tantra and Kabbalah.
Rituals are back on stage today. Until recently, they were regarded as an obsolete and even incomprehensible part of religions, relegated to the background while ethics and spirituality attracted more focus. However, the realisation is growing that rituals represent the treasure of religious memory. They connect the human being to the past and to the community that surrounds her or him. However, what happens to rituals when different religions meet? This book shows that a great deal can be learned by taking rituals seriously. This holds good for the rich treasure of rituals within religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Christianity. Only by recognizing these treasures can new possibilities for rituals in interreligious encounters be explored.
This book is a fascinating investigation into how communalism plays out in everyday India. Using the metaphor of tana-bana – the warp and the weft of the Banarasi sari – the author reproduces the interwoven life of Hindu-Muslim relations in the Banarasi sari industry. As the city of Banaras in Uttar Pradesh takes the centre stage as the site of this ethnographic study, the author documents the dissonance in representations of Banaras as a sacred Hindu city and its essential plural character. The volume • examines in-depth the lives of Banaras Muslims in the social and economic matrix of the sari industry; • highlights how women negotiate between home, family and their place in the artisanal industry; and • sheds light on their fast-changing world of the Banaras weavers and their responses to it. With a new introduction and fresh data, the second edition looks at the subsequent developments in the weaving industry over the last decade. This volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of social anthropology, gender studies, development studies, sociology and South Asian studies.
Hinduism has become a vital 'other' for Judaism over the past decades. The book surveys the history of the relationship from historical to contemporary times, from travellers to religious leadership. It explores the potential enrichment for Jewish theology and spirituality, as well as the challenges for Jewish identity.
This book explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Each chapter focuses on a specific author or text and examines the literary context as well as the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that provided images and ideas about India and its religions. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and intellectual history.
This collection analyzes the affinities and interactions between Indic and Judaic civilizations from ancient to contemporary times. The contributors propose a new, global understanding of commerce and culture, to reconfigure how we understand the way great cultures interact, and present a new constellation of diplomacy, literature, and geopolitics.
The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies provides fifty thought-provoking chapters on the field’s unique history, priorities, challenges, pedagogies, and practical applications, written by an international roster of experts and practitioners across religious traditions. This will serve as a valuable reference to students in the field.
This volume brings together important and original perspectives from South Asia on the relationship between violence---an increasingly important issue in multicultural societies---and the process of othering. The contributors state that societies create 'others' through deliberate acts of selection over a period of time. The objective of the process of othering is to deny rights and privileges that one sets for one's own group. This volume affirms that central to the understanding of violence in any society is the understanding of othering processes. Violence and nonviolence are influenced by the nature of othering processes as well as the kinds of others in a society. Groups engaged in mutual othering are also the ones that are often involved in violent relationships. Renowned scholars from diverse fields provide multidisciplinary perspectives on violence and othering, discussing the concepts of violence and nonviolence in multicultural societies, communal harmony, constructions of the other, truth commissions, state censorship of 'sensitive' issues, fundamentalism and secularism in multifaith societies, and specific cases from recent violence-prone areas. This volume focuses on the South Asian, and more specifically, the Indian context, but is relevant for researchers seeking to understand these issues anywhere in the world.
The city of Banaras is widely known as a unique, impressive and particularly ancient historical place. But for many it is above all a universal, cosmic, and in a sense timeless sacred space. Both of these seemingly contrasting depictions contribute to how the city is experienced by its inhabitants or visitors, and there is a great variety of sometimes competing views: Kasi the Luminous, the ancient Crossing, the city of Death, the place of Hindu-Muslim encounter and syncretism, the cosmopolitan centre of learning, etc. The present volume deals with the multiple ways this urban site is visualized, imagined, and culturally represented by different actors and groups. The forms of visualizations are manifold and include buildings, paintings, drawings, panoramas, photographs, traditional and modern maps, as well as verbal and mental images. The major focus will thus be on visual media, which are of special significance for the representation of space. But this cannot be divorced from other forms of expressions which are part of the local life-world ("Lebenswelt"). The contributions look at local as well as exogenous constructions of the rich topography of Kasi and show that these imaginations and constructions are not static but always embedded in social and cultural practices of representation, often contested and never complete.
In 1974, when John Dominelli was twenty years old, he left his home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, on what he originally thought would be a six-month “working holiday” in New Zealand. However, not long into his journey, feeling the seductive pull of the vast and mysterious world, what started as a planned sojourn eventually turned into an epic three-year spiritual odyssey, taking him from New Zealand to Australia, Asia, India, Europe, and many points between. John’s journey was interrupted and enriched by a psycho-emotional “meltdown,” two serious illnesses, a powerful psychedelic interlude with psilocybin mushrooms, and a mystical encounter with Nisargadatta Maharaj, the now well-known sage from Bombay. An epic coming-of-age memoir that is part love letter to a bygone age and part inspirational text, stirring a desire in readers to seek out a life less ordinary.