Hinduism

The Gaudiya Vaisnava movement is one of the most vibrant religious groups in all of South Asia.

When the colonial slave trade, and then slavery itself, were abolished early in the 19th century, the British empire brazenly set up a new system of trade using Indian rather than African laborers.

A celebrated Hindu pilgrimage site, Hardwar lies on the river Ganges at the edge of the Himalayas.

This is the second in a trilogy of works by the famed Bengali novelist Bankimcandra Chatterji (1838-1894), and the second to be translated by Julius Lipner.

Originally published under the title Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva, this book traces the development of an Indian approach to an enduring human dilemma: the conflict between spiritual aspirations and human desires.

A distinctive aspect of Hindu devotion is the veneration of a human guru, who is not only an exemplar and a teacher but is also understood to be an embodiment of the divine.

In the West Krishna is primarily known as the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita.

Books about Hinduism often begin by noting the immense size and complexity of the subject.

Despite the global spread of Western medical practice, traditional doctors still thrive in the modern world.

Today the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, India, is a major Hindu religious pilgrimage and the largest religious gathering in the world.

The town of Deopatan, three kilometers northeast of Kathmandu, is above all famous for its main sanctum, the temple of Pasupati, the "e;lord of the animals,"e; a form of Siva and the tutelary deity of the kings of Nepal since ancient times.

Although Buddhism is often depicted as a religion of meditators and philosophers, some of the earliest writings extant in India offer a very different portrait of the Buddhist practitioner.

In God of Justice, anthropologist William S.

This book is the crowning achievement of the remarkable scholar D.

This book seeks to understand the major mythological role models that mark the moral landscape navigated by young Hindu women.

No Hindu god is closer to the soul of poetry than Krishna, and in North India no poet ever sang of Krishna more famously than SurdD^=as-or Sur, for short.

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.

Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values?

Wendy Doniger and Martha Nussbaum bring together leading scholars from a wide array of disciplines to address a crucial question: How does the world's most populous democracy survive repeated assaults on its pluralistic values?

The first comprehensive book on alcohol in pre-modern India, An Unholy Brew: Alcohol in Indian History and Religions uses a wide range of sources from the Vedas to the Kamasutra to explore drinks and styles of drinking, as well as rationales for abstinence from the earliest Sanskrit written records through the second millennium CE.

Within most pre-modern, Indian traditions of yoga, the role of the guru is absolutely central.

Kabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song.

Ma Anandamayi is generally regarded as the most important Hindu woman saint of the twentieth century.

In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century.

In this magisterial volume of essays, Wendy Doniger enhances our understanding of the ancient and complex religion to which she has devoted herself for half a century.

Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of western India.

Found in many different religious cultures, the practice of making votive offerings into fire dates back to the earliest periods of human history.

Reciting the Goddess presents the first critical study of the Svasthanivratakatha (SVK), a sixteenth-century Hindu narrative textual tradition.

What does it mean to be a Brahmin, and what could it mean to become one?

In Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth, Corinne Dempsey offers a comparative study of Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euro/American earthbound religious expressions.

Singing a Hindu Nation explores how the political becomes devotional through musical performance.

This book provides a detailed history of Hindu goddess traditions with a special focus on the local goddesses of Andhra Pradesh, past and present.

Tantra is a family of rituals modeled on those of the Vedas and their attendant texts and lineages.

In this companion volume to Singing the Body of God (Oxford 2002), Steven P.

In 1839 a diverse group of Hindu leaders began gathering in Calcutta to share and propagate their faith in a non-idolatrous form of worship.

Hanuman, the devoted monkey helper of Rama and Sita, has long been recognized as a popular character in India's ancient Ramayana epic.

Based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the Indian state of Rajasthan, Casting Kings explores the manner in which semi-nomadic performers known as Bhats understand, and also subvert, caste hierarchies.

In Divine Mother, Blessed Mother, Francis X.

The Ramayana is one of India's foundational epics, and it demonstrates a continuing power to influence social, religious, cultural, and political life.

"e;The poem is rising into splendid popularity.

The devotional poems of Annamayya (15th century) are perhaps the most accessible and universal achievement of classical Telugu literature, one of the major literatures of pre-modern India.

Winner of the A.

The Goddess Lives in Upstate New York is a profile of a flourishing Hindu temple in the town of Rush, New York.

In this book, Tracy Pintchman has assembled ten leading scholars of Hinduism to explore the complex relationship between Hindu women's rituals and their lives beyond ritual.

Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, Brian Pennington offers a fascinating portrait of the process by which "e;Hinduism"e; came into being.

The mythic figure Satya Pir has a wide following among Hindus and Muslims alike in the Bangla-speaking regions of South Asia.

Many Hindus today are urban middle-class people with religious values similar to those of their professional counterparts in America and Europe.

In his pathbreaking Israel in Egypt James K.

The annual festivals that are central to the south Indian religious tradition are among the largest religious gatherings found anywhere in the world.

For ten years, William Sax studied the inhabitants of the former kingdom of Garhwal in northern India.