Loka Parampara: Life-Style Study Series

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  IN THE COMPANY OF GODS:ESSAYS IN MEMORY OF GUNTHER-DIETZ SONTHEIMER

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  ISBN : 81-7304-591-7

  Edited By :ADITYA MALIK, ANNE FELDHAUS, HEIDRUN BRUCKNER

  
  (2005, 409pp.)
  Rs.995.00

  When Gunther Sontheimer passed away at the early age of fifty-eight on 1June 1992, he had done a good thirty years of research and teaching on a variety of subjects including traditional Indian law and ethics, contemporary literature in Marathi, Hinduism and folk religion in Maharasthra…Read More

  He guided a generation of students at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg and a “Sontheimer School” had begun to take shape there.

  This volume contains twenty essays written by Indologists, anthropologists, historians, experts on Indian law, art historians, a filmmaker and a poet from all over the globe – India, Germany, USA, Canada, Israel and Russia are testimony to the shoreless reach of Sontheimer’s work. The authors and the editors of this volume have been irrevocably influenced by his original ideas, and his intensely shy yet extraordinarily inspiring personality.

  The essays in this volume are divided into four sections: folk religion, bhakti, history and law, and an epilogue that reflects on Sontheimer’s thoughts on Hindu law, the constituents of Hinduism, his interest in folk bronzes, documentary film-making, and a poem by Dilip Chitre on Sontheimer. The chapters on folk religion reflect his deep understanding of this aspect as being boundary crossing, incorporating the trans-local and the local, the high and the low – a simultaneous networks of traditions. The chapters on bhakti show how devotion, in the Vārkarī tradition in Maharashtra and in Kabīr’s poetry, transcends the categories of folk, tribal and Brāhmanical. The chapters on history and law deal with the application of the forest (vana) and settlement (kṣetra) spatial and symbolical categories used by him in his analysis and customary law during the early colonial period in Maharashtra. The contributions in the fourth section are biographical and trace his thoughts on law, his analysis of Hinduism, his fascination with “folk bronzes” and his discovery of the film.

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  KING OF HUNTERS, WARRIORS AND SHEPHERDS :ESSAYS ON KHANDOBA BY GUNTHER-DIETZ SONTHEIMER

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  ISBN : 81-7304-018-4

  Edited By :Anne Feldhaus, Aditya Malik, Heidrun Bruckner

  
  (1997, 353pp. b&w illus., bibl. index)
  Rs.600.00

  The volume brings together Sontheimer’s English-language articles on Khaṇḍobā, the Maharashtrian deity and the equivalent gods Mallaṇṇa in Andhra Pradesh and Mailāra in Karnataka. The articles take into account the differing traditions of the wide variety of castes and tribes for whose members Khal).qoba…Read More

  (or Mallaṇṇa or Mailāra) is an important God, and make use of the various kinds of source materials that Sontheimer gathered -oral epics of the Dhangar shepherds; narratives, comments and statements made by people belonging to various groups; the songs (padem) of the Vāghyās and Muraḷīs, Khaṇḍobā’s “bards” and “courtesans”; the Sanskrit and Marāṭhī Māhātmyas composed by brāhmaṇas; descriptions and remarks searched out in the literature of Mahānubhāvas, the Vārkarīs, and other medieval saints; and stray reference culled from published and unpublished historical documents.
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  LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY : The Writings of Delhi Prasanna Pattanayak Vol. I

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  ISBN : 978-81-250-5394-1

  Edited By :Debi Prasanna Pattanayak

  
  (2014, pp. xxix+881 )
  Rs.1,875.00
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  Maukhik Mahakavya

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  ISBN : 81-246-0176-3

  Edited By :Manoj Kumar Misra

  
  (2001, ix+145pp)
  Rs.260.00

  यह प्रकाशन क्षेत्रीय मौखिक महाकाव्य से संबन्धित 6 लेखों का संग्रह है जो कथावाचन एवं कथावाचक – एक्सप्लेनिंग इंडियाज चैन्टेड नैरेटिव्य विषय पर आधारित एक अंतर्राष्ट्रीय संगोष्ठी में प्रस्तुत किए गए थे। इन महाकाव्यों के अंतर्गत मौखिक परम्परा में क्षेत्र व जाति विशेष से जुड़ी ऐतिहासिक व अनैतिहासिक कथाओं का एक विशाल सागर है जिसमें महान् चरित्र,…Read More

  महान् मूल्य एवं महान् आदर्श को प्रतिबिम्बित करने वाले विभिन्न चरित्रों की परिकल्पना है। लोक-ज्ञान से पूरित इन प्रचलित लोक कथाओं का बदलता स्वरूप निश्चित रूप से समाज में हो रहे परिवर्तन से संबंधित है। मौखिक और लिखित साहित्य तथा इनके संबंध के विषय में हमारे मन में उठने वाले विभिन्न प्रश्नों का मंथन और उससे निकलने वाले रत्नों से युक्त इन लेखों के अध्ययन के पश्चात् यह ज्ञात होता है कि विभिन्न लोक-ज्ञान, लोक परम्पराओं व लोकानुरंजन से जुड़े ये महाकाव्य समाज को कैसी दिशा देते हैं? एक सामान्य व्यक्ति में किस प्रकार की अद्भुत शक्ति होती है? और ये वीरता, भक्ति से किस प्रकार जोड़ते हैं? देश के विभिन्न अंचलों से संग्रहीत इन मौखिक व गेय महाकाव्यों में वहाँ की संस्कृति स्पष्ट रूप से दृष्टिगोचर होती है। इन सबसे बढ़कर इनमें कहीं न कहीं एक अद्भुत समानता है जो आंतरिक रूप से इन्हें परस्पर जोड़ती है।
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  MURALS FOR GODDESSES AND GODS:THE TRADITION OF OSAKOTHI RITUAL PAINTING IN ORISSA

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  ISBN : 81-7305-095-3

  Edited By :Eberhard Fischer and Dinanath Pathy

  
  (1996, 224pp., col. and b&w plates)
  Rs.2,250.00

  This monograph is a magnificent document of India’s ritual painting based on systematic study of the osakoṭhī ( osa: penance, koṭhī: sacred space) murals of Orissa. It explores the rare rich and meaningful and fast disappearing ritual art of mural painting…Read More

  The antiquity of this art can be traced to the prehistoric rock-cave paintings of Mirzapur, Singhapurī, Bhīmbeṭka, Jhīrī and elsewhere in India. A close parallel is seen in the contemporary ritual relating to Rathwa mural paintings in Gujarat. In both the cases there is transformation and re-enlivenment of the visual image.
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  PROVERBS AND FOLKLORE OF KUMAUN AND GARHWAL

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  ISBN : 81-7022-894-8

  Edited By :GANGA DATT UPRETI

  
  (2003, xxviii+400pp.)
  Rs.600.00

  Proverbs and folklore of Kumaun and Garhwal is the first of its kind. The book is gifted with a rich collection of proverbs, axioms, sayings and phrases for particular occasions as well as the customs and manners out of which they arise. Clustering more…Read More

  than 200 themes arranged in alphabetical order, it is written in Devanagari, followed by English translation with due regard to the hill accentuation. Apart from classified themes, an appendix with 114 new proverbs has been suitably provided at the end.
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  THE CULTURAL HERITAGE OF THE TRANS-HIMALAYA (KINNAUR)

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  ISBN : 13: 978-81-246-0811-1

  Edited By : P.S. NEGI LOKTUS

  
  (2015, VII + 409 pp., map, glossary, bib., index, plates: 20.10)
  Rs.3,200.00
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  UNDERSTANDING KUCHIPUDI

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  ISBN :

  Edited By :Guru C. R. Acharya and Mallika Sarabhai

  
  (1992, 212pp., line drawings, b&w illus., gloss., bibl., index)
  Rs.200.00

  Kuchipuḍī’s codified language of gestures and the techniques of human movement are known to different regions of lndia. No one treatise can be considered as the base for the grammar of the dance style. Nevertheless, there is great relevance of the texts, such as the Nṛtta Ratnāvalī for Kuchipuḍī…Read More

  The history and the textual sources provide the link of continuity for the contemporary, almost modern reinterpretation of Kuchipuḍī through the female form during the last two or three decades. The problem of transferring a technique which was evolved for the male body to impersonate female, to be articulated again through the female, presents complex kinesthetical problems. These are the challenges which a Kuchipuḍī dancer faces, meets and overcomes in a successful performance.

  This volume puts together the corpus of the codified text, supplemented with a brief history. It, no doubt, gives guidance to those pursuing Kuchipuḍī as practitioners and performers of this style.
  Foreword
  Glimpses of Content
  

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  WRITING IDENTITIES:FOLKLORE AND PERFORMATIVE ARTS OF PURULIA, BENGAL

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  ISBN : 978-81-7305-378-8

  Edited By :ROMA CHATTERJI

  
  (2009, xxii+125pp., biblo., index, appen.)
  Rs.450.00

  This work attempts a historiographic exploration of Bengali folkloristics through some of the performative traditions of Purulia. Positioned outside the mainstream of Bengal’s culture and society, Purulia has traditionally been characterized as her “primitive” alter…Read More

  Folklorists have played no small part in reinforcing this image by selecting precisely those genres for analysis that best conform to this image. An unintended consequence of such selective representation is that the forms come to mirror scholarly descriptions about them over time. Thus the Chh6 dance, described as a “tribal war dance” by Ashutosh Bhattacharya, the doyen of Bengali folkloristics, has come to acquire this image losing some of its subtlety and local nuance in the process. But as a “tribal dance” it has also acquired greater visibility than some of the other dance forms in this region. Folklorists are sensitive to the changes that the introduction of new media bring to traditional forms of performance. However, they are less conscious about the changes wrought by their own writings. By describing the different representations of community and society in the writings on folk culture and in tracking some of the trajectories of their circulation in the public sphere the author shows how Purulia is re­ constituted as a folkloric region.
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  YAKSAGANA

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  ISBN : 81-7017-357-4

  Edited By :K. Shivarama Karanth

  
  (1997, 252pp., line drawings, col. illus., appen., index)
  Rs.450.00

  One of the theatre forms of Karnataka generally described as folk but processing a strong classical connection, is the Yaksagana. Although the name signifies the music of celestial beings, Yaksagana is an amalgam of the sky with the earth…Read More

  There is both mystery and robustness about this form in which singing and drumming merge with dancing, and words with gestural interpretation, and players clad in costumes of striking colour and contours.

  The author was the foremost authority on Yaksagana and had been working on all its aspects, namely dance, music, and literature, since 1930. He has spent decades travelling to remote villages within Karnataka to inspect and study every Yaksagana manuscript, the earliest going back to 1651A.D. With his fine literary judgement and aesthetic sensibility, he has traced the changing trends in the performance of Yaksagana. He has put together his findings in this work in English. The present volume is a revised edition of his earlier book, with additional material and illustrations.

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