This book is a significant contribution to studies in the Indian folklore, textual criticism and history of religion. The Varaha-katha has been chosen as a case study and the enquiry has been limited to its early phases so that the problems it poses may be studied intensively with attention to methodological question. The present study investigates how the Varaha-katha, which was a cosmogonical myth in the beginning, gets associated with Visnu in course of time and it transformed under the influence of the Avatara doctrine. It throws a welcome light on the interrelationship and relative chronology of the relevant parts of the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the cosmogonical sections of the Puranas. The successive stages of the Varaha-katha present a clear-cut stratigraphy of the history of religion, viz. the growth of Vaisnavism, the vicissitudes in the worship of Brahma and the growing revival of the Vedic tradition.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Maheshwari Prasad
Dr. Maheshwari Prasad earned his B. A. and M. A. degrees from the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi and Ph. D. from the Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen (F. R. G.). He was awarded Rai Bahadur Dayara Sahni Gold Medal for securing first position at M. A. examination in Ancient Indian History, Culture & Archaeology in 1959 and had the distinction of earning the predicate magna cum laude at the viva voce for the Ph. D. degree in 1973. Dr. Prasad is a widely travelled person. He was in West Germany as a German Academic Exchange Service Scholar from 1968 to 1973. He visited G. D. R. and U. S. S. R. under Cultural Exchange Programmes in 1981. Besides, he also paid brief visits to several academic centres in Europe including Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Holland, Italy, U. K. and Switzerland. Dr. Prasad joined the Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture & Archaeology, Banaras Hindu University as teacher in 1960 and has been running courses mainly in History of Indian Religion and Epigraphy. Dr. Prasad has the credit of organizing the department of History, Culture & Archaeology at the Avadh University, Faizabad, where, on leave from B. H. U., he served as Professor and Departmental Head for about three years (1985-88). He presided over the Archaeology Section at the 34th Session of the All Indian Oriental Conference held at Visakhapatnam in 1989 and has been elected President of he History Section of 35th Session of the same Conference. Besides some very important contributions in learned Journals, Dr. Prasad has published Vaisnava Saiva aru anya Dharmika Mat (1967; Hindi translation of R. G. Bhandarkar's Vaisnavism, Saivism and Minor Religious Systems) and a concordance of the birch bark manuscript of the Bhagavata Purana (Ed. H. Bechert, 1976).
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