Male Dýgula (The Hill Temple) Is Long Poem Of 53 Verses Each Reflecting Upon The Meaning And Significance Of The Temple On The Hill Of Melukote In The Life Of Author Of This Book. It Is Deeply Philosophical And Religious. Here One Can Find Extensive Use Of Imagery, Which Are Taken From Modern Sciences, Which Gives Author A Unique Position Among Modern Kannada Poets.

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. Annamayya effectively created and popularized a new genre, the short padam song, which spread throughout the Telugu and Tamil regions and would become an important vehicle for the composition of Carnatic music - the classical music of South India. In this book, Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman offer translations of nearly 100 of Annamayya's poems. All of them are addressed to the god associated with the famous temple city of Tirupati -- Annamayya's home. This deity is sometimes referred to as "god on the hill" or "lord of the seven hills." The poems are couched in a simple and approachable language invented by Annamayya for this purpose and fall into two major categories, the erotic and the metaphysical. The erotic poems, usually in the female voice, sing of the complexities of the god's love life. The metaphysical poems are sung in the poet's own voice and explore the relationship between the poet and his god. Though a small sample of Annamayya's surviving corpus, the selection in this volume suggests the scope of both genres. Rao and Shulman's elegant and lyrical modern translations of these beautiful and moving verses are wonderfully readable as poetry in their own right. The Afterword enriches the reader's understanding, providing historical context and returning us to the poems themselves with a deeper appreciation.

Being blessed to wander in some of the most fascinating hills and valleys of nature, I have been endeavoring for long to put these stories together. I offer here the elements that appeal most to me during my wanderings in the jungles, meadows, villages and towns, especially in the abode of gods and goddesses the Himalaya. I pick up one of the tales as a title of the book 'Nanda's Neelkanth'. Neelkanth is one of the several names of the Lord Shiva, the Hindu god. Many snow-clad peaks of the Himalaya are named after the gods and goddesses and Neelkanth is one of the most magnificent peaks. It attracts every human soul not only to its brilliant hues and majestic snowy peak but Neelkanth, as the Mahadev, also remains the source of spirituality for billions. Likewise, His consort, Nanda who is adorned with innumerable names including the Gaura, has been venerated in the form of beautiful mountains of the Himalaya. The quiet and unquiet woods, the elusive and elegant wildlife, the people and their culture and their struggle for living are the other elements in this bouquet of experiences.

With Wayne Bennett From the silky wax qualities of the surfaces of some quartz menhirs to the wood-grain textures of others, to the golden honeycombed limestones of Malta, to the icy frozen waves of the Cambrian sandstone of south-east Sweden, this book investigates the sensuous material qualities of stone. Tactile sensations, sonorous qualities, colour, and visual impressions are all shown to play a vital part in our understanding of the power and significance of prehistoric monuments in relation to their landscapes. In The Materiality of Stone, Christopher Tilley presents a radically new way of analyzing the significance of both 'cultural' and 'natural' stone in prehistoric European landscapes. Tilley's groundbreaking approach is to interpret human experience in a multidimensional and sensuous human way, rather than through an abstract analytical gaze. The studies range widely from the menhirs of prehistoric Brittany to Maltese Neolithic temples to Bronze Age rock carvings and cairns in southern Sweden. Tilley leaves no stone unturned as he also considers how the internal spaces and landscape settings are interpreted in relation to artifacts, substances, and related places that were deeply meaningful to the people who inhabited them and remain no less evocative today. In its innovative approach to understanding human experience through the tangible rocks and stone of our past, The Materiality of Stone is both a major theoretical and substantive contribution to the field of material culture studies and the study of European prehistory.