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This book is a study of India’s great epic, the Mahabharrata, against the background of Indo-European myth, epic, and ritual. It builds upon the pioneering studies in these areas by Georges Dumezil and Stig Wikander to work toward the goal of understanding how this epic’s Indo-European heritage is interpreted and reshaped within the setting of bhakti or devotion-al Hinduism.
The book begins with a comparative typology of traditional classical ep-ics, ...
Between 300 BCE and 200 CE, concepts and practices of dharma attained literary prominence throughout India. Both Buddhist and Brahmanical authors sought to clarify and classify their central concerns, and dharma proved a means of thinking through and articulating those concerns.
Alf Hiltebeitel shows the different ways in which dharma was interpreted during that formative period: from the grand cosmic chronometries of kalpas and yugas to narratives about divine ...
The Goddesses of Hinduism and Buddhism represent the largest extant collection of living female divinities anywhere in the world. These South Asian Goddesses, interestingly, are also products of predominantly patriarchal and male supremacist societies. The fifteen interdisciplinary essays in this book engage with the impact of powerful female deities—their images, projections, textuality and history—on the social standing and psychological health of women. Do ...
The ancient Indian Sanskrit tradition produced no text more intriguing, or more persistently misunderstood or underappreciated, than the Mahabharata. Its intricacies have waylaid generations of scholars and ignited countless unresolved debates. In Rethinking the Mahabharata, Alf Hiltebeitel offers a unique model for understanding the great epic. Employing a wide range of literary and narrative theory, Hiltebeitel draws on historical and comparative research in an ...
Throughout India and Southeast Asia, ancient classical epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—continue to exert considerable cultural influence. Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits offers an unprecedented exploration into South Asia’s regional epic traditions. Using his own fieldwork as a starting point, Alf Hiltebeitel analyses how the oral tradition of the South Indian cult of the Goddess Draupadi and five regional martial oral epics compare with ...
