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For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from those born at the outset of the twentieth century down to their great-grandsons who are just beginning, at the age of seven, the task of memorizing their Veda, the Taittiriya Samhita, a feat that will require eight to twelve years of daily recitations. After successful examinations these young men will reside with the Veda family girls they married as children years before, take their places in the oral transmission of a three-thousand-year Vedic heritage, teach the Taittiriya collection of texts to their own sons, and undertake with their wives the major and minor sacrifices performed by their ancestors for some three millennia. Coastal Andhra, famed for bountiful rice and coconut plantations, has received scant attention from historians of religion and anthropologists despite a wealth of cultural traditions. Vedic Voices describes in captivating prose the geography, cultural history, pilgrimage traditions, and celebrated persons of the region. Here unfolds a remarkable story of Vedic pandits and their wives, one scarcely known in India and not at all to the outside world.
"Four generations of ten families speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, choices as pandits, wives, and children, ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. They are virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition"--
Clear, accessible, and meticulously annotated, Tracing the Path of Yoga offers a comprehensive survey of the history and philosophy of yoga that will be invaluable to both specialists and to nonspecialists seeking a deeper understanding of this fascinating subject. Stuart Ray Sarbacker argues that yoga can be understood first and foremost as a discipline of mind and body that is represented in its narrative and philosophical literature as resulting in both numinous and cessative accomplishments that correspond, respectively, to the attainment of this-worldly power and otherworldly liberation. Sarbacker demonstrates how the yogic quest for perfection as such is situated within the concrete realities of human life, intersecting with issues of politics, economics, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as reflecting larger Indic religious and philosophical ideals.
Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: The South Asian country of India immediately evokes an array of preconceptions in the Western mind: be it the land of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, of colours, fragrances and spices, of the holy cow and its connected cultural and spiritual richness, or of Bollywood. Nowadays, however, the media focuses more and more on one issue: India’s ill treatment of women. This master's thesis by the title of ‘Struggling to Find a Voice’ will be composed of two major pillars: women’s position in Hindu tradition and the study of two novels of Shashi Deshpande. The first part will focus on the changing role of Hindu women throughout Indian history, from its beginnings in the Vedic times until today. The paper intends to address the most important stages in what could be called a rollercoaster of prohibitions, submission and rights: from a quasi-equal position in ancient India, to a slave-like existence in the Middle Ages, a dawn of hope during the British Raj and the post-Independence period, up until recent events and struggles. As Deshpande’s protagonists, Saru and Jaya, both belong to the Hindu middle-class, the historical overview will concentrate first and foremost on Hindu women. The insights gained in the first part will then provide the backbone for the analysis of the novels to follow. The second part will be an in-depth analysis of Shashi Dehpande’s novels The Dark Holds No Terrors (1980) and That Long Silence (1988). Both of the two novels’ protagonists, Saru and Jaya, form part of the educated, Indian middle-class and are – because of their sex – caught between the traditional, orthodox image of a Hindu housewife and the modern, ‘Western’, concepts of emancipation and equality. The paper intends to examine how they struggle to come to terms with this fragmentation of their selves and how they find a balance between their traditional roles as a housewife and mother and their own ‘modern’ expectations. The relationship of being silent to oppressing one’s own identity will be looked at more closely, as well as the factors which help them to raise their voices in the end. Finally, the conclusion will not only summarise the findings, but also link the first part of this Masterarbeit with the second part under the heading ‘Struggling to Find a Voice’.