This is the first volume of a projected three-volume work on the little-known South Indian folk cult of the goddess Draupadi and on the classical epic, the Mahabharata, that the cult brings to life in mythic, ritual, and dramatic forms. Draupadi, the chief heroine of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, takes on many unexpected guises in her Tamil cult, but her dimensions as a folk goddess remain rooted in a rich interpretive vision of the great epic. By examining the ways that the cult of Draupadi commingles traditions about the goddess and the epic, Alf Hiltebeitel shows the cult to be singularly representative of the inner tensions and working dynamics of popular devotional Hinduism.

This is the first volume of a projected three-volume work on the little known South Indian folk cult of the goddess Draupadi and on the classical epic, the Mahabharata, that the cult brings to life in mythic, ritual and dramatic forms. It focuses on the Draupadi cult's own double mythology, moving from its storieis about Draupadi's 'primal temple' near the capital of the medieval South Indian Kingdom of Gingee to its version of the Mahabharata war on the North Indian plain of Kuruksetra. Throughout, Hiltebeitel intertwines 'regional' data, gathered from both oral and written sources, with the 'epic', drawn from the cult's own performative traditions as well as from classical versions of the Mahabharata in both Tamil and Sanskrit. He re-examines many issues critical to Indological studies and takes up them while breaking new ground in investigating the further rapport between the Hindu goddess and the Indian epic. Future volumes will treat the rituals of the Draupadi cult and the Mahabharata as seen through a Draupadi cult retrospective. Contents List of Maps, List of Plates, List of Tables, Preface, Acknowledgements, Conventions, PART I: From Gingee: Introduction: Invocatory Songs to Draupadi, 'The Lady Who Resides in Gingee', The Draupadi Cult: Its Historical and Regional Settings, Social Background, Diffusion, Variation, and Change, The Sources of the Gingee Kingdom: The Living River and the Tree of Gold, Myths of the Melacceri Draupadi Temple, Muttal Ravuttan: Draupadi's Muslim Devotee, PART II: To Kuruksetra: The Draupadi Cult's Mahabharata: An Introduction, The Death of Baka: Prelude to the Drama Cycle, Additional Marriages, The two Sabhas: 'The Rajasuya Sacrifice' and 'Dice Match and Disrobing' , Arjuna's Tapas, Draupadi's Forest Exile and the Period in Disguise: Virapancali, Puvalicci, and Kuravanci, Krsna the Messenger, Aravan's Sacrifice, Pormannan's Fight: Pottu Raja at Kuruksetra, Pormannan's Flight: The War Kings Weapons and Their Mythical Sources, Kuruksetra: The Mahabharata War, When Draupadi Walked on fire, Appendix 1: The Lunar Dynasty from its origins to draupadi's Second Advent at Gingee, Appendix 2. An outline History of Gingee, Abbreviations, Bibliography, Index.

Bringing together Hiltebeitel's major essays on the the Mah?bh?rata, the R?m?ya?a, and the south Indian cults of Draupad? and K?tt???avar along with new articles written especially for this collection, this two volume work offers a comprehensive re-reading of the Indian epic tradition by the foremost scholar in Indian epic studies today.

In various ways, the essays presented in this volume explore the structures and aesthetic possibilities of music, dance and dramatic representation in ritual and theatrical situations in a diversity of ethnographic contexts in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Each essay enters into a discussion of the "logic" of aesthetic processes exploring their social and political and symbolic import. The aim is above all to explore the way artistic and aesthetic practices in performance produce and structure experience.

A Journey through Story to Poṉṉivaḷa Nāḍu: An Ancient Tamil Kingdom This remarkable epic-length legend presents a rich and well-rounded view of local South Asian folk history, masterfully interwoven with many social themes and multiple layers of religious tradition. The text provides a lively read and can be enjoyed by students of all backgrounds and levels. This richly decorated oral telling combines numerous poetic songs with direct conversations and detailed narrative passages. The descriptive segments help to advance a broader story trajectory, leading the reader towards a long-foretold, yet still surprising, conclusion. In 1965 a highly respected troubadour duo, C. Rāmacāmi of Erucaṇampāḷayam, and his nephew Paḷaṇicāmi, sang this magnificent legend in front of a live South Indian village audience. It took them eighteen nights to complete this tale! Weeks later the senior performer, Rāmacāmi, patiently dictated this same story to a local assistant who was working for the translator at the time. The text was meticulously written down by hand, phrase-by-phrase, over many days. Both bards wanted to preserve a story they knew in their hearts was truly unique and sacred. Each gave the present collector permission to share the words of this tale. They wanted the whole world to learn about a great legend they had themselves spent years learning. This story is about the potential for social renewal and those two singers believed it could better the lives of all who listened to it. Fifty-five years later, following in in the footsteps of these two men, their enthusiasm has now born fruit in a book they had both hoped for but could never have written themselves.

Illustrated throughout with over 80 full colour images, Empowering Visions explores the role of images and mass media in Hindutva, the cultural-nationalist movement that moved to the forefront of politics in India in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The author investigates when, why and in what way the moving image, and videos in particular, came to play a central role in the process of self-representation and self-constitution of Hindu nationalist groups and organizations in the overlapping domains of politics, religion and economics.The videos analysed here have been included in massive public political spectacles such as election rallies and patriotic pilgrimages. They have also been employed for in-house indoctrination and emotive mobilization of militant cadres for temporary, often violent, agitation. With the help of these media, different political and cultural-religious organizations, subsumed under the umbrella of Hindutva, have attempted to constitute notions of 'Indianness' as 'Hinduness', to challenge and provoke both the government in power and specific minority groups such as the Muslims in India. How this was done, who stood behind the making of the videos and how they were made up and distributed, are questions that lie at the heart of this study. At a time when public attention is focused on transnational, and mostly Islamicist movements, "Empowering Visions" argues that both transnationalism and nationalism have to be treated with equal attention, and to some extent ought to be seen as intertwined processes. This book is unique in its presentation and discussion of profound ethnographic data through interviews with a variety of spokesmen for the Hindutva movement. It also offers an in-depth analysis of visual and audio-visual material that has so far been unrecognized and unexplored in scholarly works.

Indira Viswanathan Peterson provides an introduction to the Sanskrit court epic (mahākāvya), an important genre in classical Indian poetry, and the first study of a celebrated sixth-century poem, the Kirātārjunīya (Arjuna and the Hunter) of Bhāravi. Sanskrit court epics are shown to be characterized both by formalism and a deep engagement with enduring Indian values. The Kirātārjunīya is the earliest literary treatment of the narrative of the Pandava hero Arjuna's combat with the great god Śiva, a seminal episode in the war epic Mahābhārata. Through a close analysis of the structural strategies of Bhāravi's poem, the author illuminates the aesthetic of the mahākāvya genre. Peterson demonstrates that the classical poet uses figurative language, rhetorical devices, and structural design as the primary instruments for advancing his argument, the reconciliation of heroic action, ascetic self-control, social duty, and devotion to God. Her discussion of the Kirātārjunīya in relation to its historical setting and to renderings of this epic episode in literary texts and temple sculpture of later periods reveals the existence of complex transactions in Indian civilization between the discourses of heroic epic and court poetry, political ideologies and devotional religion, Sanskrit and the regional languages, and classical and folk traditions. Selections from the Kirātārjunīya are presented in poetic translation.

The Mahabharata, one of the most popular epics, has had a remarkable impact on literary and cultural thought in India through the centuries. It is also of immense religious and philosophical importance and is considered itihasa, literally 'that which happened', or sacred history. Though the setting of the Mahabharata is distant in time, something of its indefatigable, insistent formulation of the pivotal dilemmas of our shared human moral imagination remains insistent and inextinguishable even today. The Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata closely reads the conceptual and narrative intricacies of the epic through the four foundational terms of dharma (law), artha (worldliness), kama (desire) and moksha (freedom), offering riveting insights on the moral psychology of Indic civilization. Drawing from scholarly forays in philology, history, religious studies and pre-modern Asian traditions, this critical attention by a literary scholar to the Mahabharata's narrative impulses and the internal vigour of select episodes brings to fore the gripping dilemmas that animate the epic. The book travels through an atmospheric and exuberant pre-modern milieu to provoke prescient metaphysical and ethical questions that are only accumulating in relevance in the contemporary world.

The Hindu sacred order is guarded by the very gods who violate it and the demons who oppose it. This book is a who's who of such transgressive figures, both familiar and unfamiliar, showing their place within the Hindu order that they violate. It is also a reflection of the serious scholarly debate over the nature and composition of this Hindu order. The chapters range from pan-Hindu deities such as Bhairava and Virabhadra to guardian gods of specific regions and lineages and of different goddess cults. Chapters cover violent themes in SAaivite hagiography, the position of Brahmans in relation to cultic carnivorism, guardian heroes in folk epic, the deified dead, the royal mythology of a "criminal caste," and a wide-ranging overview of transgressive sacrality.

Often spoken of as the 'Fifth Veda', i.e., as a text in continuity with the four Vedas and outweighing them all in size and import, the Mahābhārata presents a complex mythological and narrative landscape, incorporating fundamental ethical, social, philosophic, and pedagogic issues. In a series of position pieces and essays written over a span of 30 years, Alf Hiltebeitel, Columbian Professor of Religion, History, and Human Sciences at The George Washington University, articulates a compelling new approach to the epic: as a literary work of fundamental theological and philosophical significance rich in metaphor and meaning. In this three-part volume, the editors gather some of Hiltebeitel’s seminal writings on the epic along with new pieces written especially for the volume. This two volume edition collects nearly three decades of Alf Hiltebeitel’s researches into the Indian epic and religious tradition. The two volumes document Hiltebeitel’s longstanding fascination with the Sanskrit epics: volume 1 presents a series of appreciative readings of the Mahābhārata (and to a lesser extent, the Rāmāyaṇa), while volume 2 focuses on what Hiltebeitel has called “the underground Mahābhārata,” i.e., the Mahābhārata as it is still alive in folk and vernacular traditions. Recently re-edited and with a new set of articles completing a trajectory Hiltebeitel established over 30 years ago, this work constitutes a definitive statement from this major scholar. Comprehensive indices, cross-referencing, and an exhaustive bibliography make it an essential reference work. For more information on the second volume please click here.