The present volume contains fourteen selected papers in English by the late G.-D. Sontheimer and follows up on his earlier volume King of Hunters, Warriors, and Shepherds: Essays on Khandoba (Delhi 1997). The articles chosen for publication here span a wide thematic and temporal range and will be of interest to students of Hinduism . The volume contains essays on the juristic personality of Hindu deities, the history and religion of pastoral groups in the Deccan and the interdependence of folk and scriptural religion. The articles reflect Sontheimer’s multidisciplinary approach, combining the methodologies of philology, anthropology, history, archaeology, epigraphy and iconography. Three other articles, illustrated by over a hundred photographs, focus on hero-and sati-stones of the Deccan and Western India. Sontheimer identified the worship of heroes and satis as an important element of folk religions. He analyses the memorial stones in the context of other historical, social and religious references, physical ecology and literary sources. Yet another set of articles deals with aspects of oral literature. Two papers can be considered building blocks for a model of Hinduism that was finally worked out in ‘Hinduism – The Five Components and their Interaction’ (1989), the article which concludes the present volume. The two volumes of Sontheimer’s collected papers are complemented by a memorial volume entitled In the Company of Gods which is being published simultaneously by the same editors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Aditya Malik
Aditya Malik received his PhD in the History of Religions of South Asia from the University of Heidelberg in 1990. He has taught at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bamberg and was awarded his another PhD in Habilitation in Modern Indian Studies from Heidelberg in 1998. His interests cover pilgrimage, oral traditions, multimedia and cultural studies, as well as post-colonial and post-modern issues relating to the study of Hinduism. He has held fellowships of the German Research Council, been the Representative in India of the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg between 1999-2001, and is a UNESCO International Consultant. His publications include a monograph on the pilgrimage of Pushkar and a forthcoming study and translation of the narrative of Sri Devnarayan (Oxford University Press, New York, in press). Currently he is Senior Lecturer in Indian Religions in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Anne Feldhaus
Anne Feldhaus is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She has published several books on religious traditions in Maharashtra and translated Professor Sontheimer’s and translated Professor Sontheimer’s Pastoral Deities in Western India into English (1989).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Heidrun Bruckner
Heidrun Bruckner (b.1949) is Professor of Indology and South Asian Studies at the university of Wurzburg, Germany. She is the Author of a monograph on texts and rituals of Tulu folk religion (Furstliche Feste, Wiesbaden 1995) and co-editor of Gunther-Dietz Sontheimer's Essays on Khandoba (Delhi 1997), his Essays on Religion, Literature and Law (Delhi 2004), and a volume of essays in his memory In the Company of Gods (Delhi 2005).
There are no reviews yet.