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An Unorthodox Pilgrimage Along India S Rivers Flowing By Himalayan Glaciers, Dusty Mofussil Towns, Impenetrable Forests And Hundreds Of Tiny Villages, India S Sacred Rivers Harbour Legend, Foster Myth And Exert A Powerful Spiritual Attraction. Drawn By Their Irresistible Mystique, Bill Aitkin Set Out To Discover The Seven River Goddesses For Himself. Not Wholly Prepared For The Range Of Moods He Found Them In-Rivers That Boiled Over With A Furious Metallic Hum Or Were Maternal And Languorous In Their Flow, Rivers That Were Cold And Aloof Or Were Gentle And Seductive In Their Jade Loveliness-He Nevertheless Soon Succumbed To Their Blandishments. Along The Way He Also Learned To Cling To The Footboard Of A Bus, Grappled With Vedantic Unconcern, Failed To Comprehend Krishnamurti, Walked Through Tribal Villages With An Oleaginous Politician In Gold-Embroidered Slippers, Toyed With The Idea Of Becoming Sadhu, Changed His Mind When He Fell In Love, And Questioned The Myth Of Indian Spirituality& Spanning Thirty Years Of Journeying, Seven Sacred Rivers Is An Absorbing, Witty And Informative Travelogue Which Also Serves As A Survival Guide To An Undiscovered India.
Hindu theology views rivers as goddesses who confer blessings and spiritual purification and their release from the grip of the demon of drought is a recurring theme in the mythology. India is a country blessed with many rivers, but of these, seven are considered to be particularly important. Known collectively as Saptaganga, Sapta Sindhu or Saptapunyanadi, the Ganges, Yamuna, Sindhu, Sarasvati, Godavari, Narmada and Kaveri rivers are invoked at the start of every ritual. They weave through sacred narratives about gods, sages and heroes and define the physical, spiritual and cultural landscape of Bharatavarsha.
An Unorthodox Pilgrimage Along India S Rivers Flowing By Himalayan Glaciers, Dusty Mofussil Towns, Impenetrable Forests And Hundreds Of Tiny Villages, India S Sacred Rivers Harbour Legend, Foster Myth And Exert A Powerful Spiritual Attraction. Drawn By Their Irresistible Mystique, Bill Aitkin Set Out To Discover The Seven River Goddesses For Himself. Not Wholly Prepared For The Range Of Moods He Found Them In-Rivers That Boiled Over With A Furious Metallic Hum Or Were Maternal And Languorous In Their Flow, Rivers That Were Cold And Aloof Or Were Gentle And Seductive In Their Jade Loveliness-He Nevertheless Soon Succumbed To Their Blandishments. Along The Way He Also Learned To Cling To The Footboard Of A Bus, Grappled With Vedantic Unconcern, Failed To Comprehend Krishnamurti, Walked Through Tribal Villages With An Oleaginous Politician In Gold-Embroidered Slippers, Toyed With The Idea Of Becoming Sadhu, Changed His Mind When He Fell In Love, And Questioned The Myth Of Indian Spirituality& Spanning Thirty Years Of Journeying, Seven Sacred Rivers Is An Absorbing, Witty And Informative Travelogue Which Also Serves As A Survival Guide To An Undiscovered India.
Dirty, Sacred Rivers explores South Asia's increasingly urgent water crisis, taking readers on a journey through North India, Nepal and Bangladesh, from the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal. The book shows how rivers, traditionally revered by the people of the Indian subcontinent, have in recent decades deteriorated dramatically due to economic progress and gross mismanagement. Dams and ill-advised embankments strangle the Ganges and its sacred tributaries. Rivers have become sewage channels for a burgeoning population. To tell the story of this enormous river basin, environmental journalist Cheryl Colopy treks to high mountain glaciers with hydrologists; bumps around the rough embankments of India's poorest state in a jeep with social workers; and takes a boat excursion through the Sundarbans, the mangrove forests at the end of the Ganges watershed. She lingers in key places and hot spots in the debate over water: the megacity Delhi, a paradigm of water mismanagement; Bihar, India's poorest, most crime-ridden state, thanks largely to the blunders of engineers who tried to tame powerful Himalayan rivers with embankments but instead created annual floods; and Kathmandu, the home of one of the most elegant and ancient traditional water systems on the subcontinent, now the site of a water-development boondoggle. Colopy's vivid first-person narrative brings exotic places and complex issues to life, introducing the reader to a memorable cast of characters, ranging from the most humble members of South Asian society to engineers and former ministers. Here we find real-life heroes, bucking current trends, trying to find rational ways to manage rivers and water. They are reviving ingenious methods of water management that thrived for centuries in South Asia and may point the way to water sustainability and healthy rivers.
Author's travel impressions of Uttar Khand Region and Hindu shrines in the region.
In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.
"In 2016, thousands of people travelled to North Dakota to camp out near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to protest the construction of an oil pipeline that is projected to cross underneath the Missouri River a half mile upstream from the Reservation. The Standing Rock Sioux consider the pipeline a threat to the region's clean water and to the Sioux's sacred sites (such as its ancient burial grounds). The encamped protests garnered front-page headlines and international attention, and the resolve of the protesters was made clear in a red banner that flew above the camp: "Defend the Sacred". What does it mean when Native communities and their allies make such claims? What is the history of such claim-making, and why has this rhetorical and legal strategy - based on appeals to religious freedom - failed to gain much traction in American courts? As Michael McNally recounts in this book, Native Americans have repeatedly been inspired to assert claims to sacred places, practices, objects, knowledge, and ancestral remains by appealing to the discourse of religious freedom. But such claims based on alleged violations of the First Amendment "free exercise of religion" clause of the US Constitution have met with little success in US courts, largely because Native American communal traditions have been difficult to capture by the modern Western category of "religion." In light of this poor track record Native communities have gone beyond religious freedom-based legal strategies in articulating their sacred claims: in (e.g.) the technocratic language of "cultural resource" under American environmental and historic preservation law; in terms of the limited sovereignty accorded to Native tribes under federal Indian law; and (increasingly) in the political language of "indigenous rights" according to international human rights law (especially in light of the 2007 U.N. Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). And yet the language of religious freedom, which resonates powerfully in the US, continues to be deployed, propelling some remarkably useful legislative and administrative accommodations such as the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Reparation Act. As McNally's book shows, native communities draw on the continued rhetorical power of religious freedom language to attain legislative and regulatory victories beyond the First Amendment"--
Ganga’s cleansing waters were urgently needed on earth. But, the spirited daughter of the mountain god was not to be easily subdued as her waters darted about uncontrollably. Only Shiva could tame her by entangling her in the coils of his hair. When her waters could finally wend their way out, they were calmer and purer. They turned arid wastes into fertile land and filled up the oceans. Since those ancient times when King Bhagiratha sought her help, Ganga, whether roaring or placid, dancing or sombre, continues to enchant one and all with her life-giving beauty.
An interdisciplinary dialogue with Shūsaku Endō’s last novel offering new perspectives on Japanese culture, Christian doctrine, Hindu spiritualities, and Buddhist worldviews. In Navigating Deep River, Mark W. Dennis and Darren J. N. Middleton have curated a wide-ranging discussion of Shūsaku Endō’s final novel, Deep River, in which four careworn Japanese tourists journey to India’s holy Ganges in search of spiritual as well as existential renewal. Navigating Deep River evaluates and probes Endō’s decades-long search to find the words to explain Transcendent Mystery, the difficult tension between faith and doubt, the purpose of spiritual journeys, and the challenges posed by the reality of religious pluralism in an increasingly diverse world. The contributors, including Van C. Gessel who translated Deep River into English in 1994, offer an engaged and patient exploration of this major text in world fiction, and this anthology promises to deepen academic appreciation for Endō, within and beyond the West. “This volume contextualizes, delineates, and articulates the complex religious/theological/spiritual dimensions of Deep River and its rich intertextual, interpersonal, psychosocial, and literary aspects. There are few edited volumes in which so many experts focus on a single Japanese text in this sustained manner, and this stands as a model of how to do so deftly and productively.” — David C. Stahl, author of Social Trauma, Narrative Memory and Recovery in Japanese Literature and Film
In The Sacred Headwaters, a collection of photographs by Carr Clifton and members of the International League of Conservation Photographers - including Claudio Contreras, Paul Colangelo, and Wade Davis - portray the splendour of the region. These photographs are supplemented by images from other professionals who have worked here, including Sarah Leen of the National Geographic.