Literary Studies
Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental …
The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes’s famous Don Quijote. In this book the Kashmiri translation and the corresponding parts of Jarvis’s English version are presented on facing pages. The Kashmiri text is reproduced as a facsimile of the autograph prepared by Pandit …
Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network. Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is …
The life and works of the mysterious Indian yogin, Saraha, who has inspired Buddhist practitioners for over a thousand years. Saraha, “the Archer,” was a mysterious but influential tenth-century Indian Buddhist tantric adept who expressed his spiritual realization in mystic songs (dohās) that are enlightening, shocking, and confounding by turns.
In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with …
The Embassy, the Ambush, and the Ogre: Greco-Roman Influence in Sanskrit Theater (Open Book, 2024) presents a sophisticated and intricate examination of the parallels between Sanskrit and Greco-Roman literature. By means of a philological and literary analysis, Morales-Harley hypothesizes that Greco-Roman literature was known, understood, and …
A wordsmith, an extempore poet and a satirist, Kāḷamēkam (also known as Kāḷamēka Pulavar; fifteenth century) is widely known for his taṉippāṭals or 'self-contained verses', on a panoply of topics. These splendid but notoriously provocative verses were composed during a transitional phase of Tamil literature, by now in deep conversation with …
According to Vālmīki's Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa (early centuries CE), Śambūka was practicing severe acts of austerity to enter heaven. In engaging in these acts as a Śūdra, Śambūka was in violation of class- and caste-based societal norms prescribed exclusively by the ruling and religious elite. Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa epic, is dispatched to kill …
For My Blemishless Lord (de Gruyter, 2023) presents the text and translation of the exquisite poem Amalaṉ Āti Pirāṉ by Tiruppāṇ Āḻvār, which is part of the Śrīvaiṣṇava canon, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (6th- 9thcenturies CE), as well as of the three Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries in Tamil-Sanskrit Manipravala (13th- 14th centuries) by key figures in …
Between 800 and 1700 CE, a plethora of Mahabharatas were created in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, and several other regional South Asian languages. Sohini Pillai's Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative (Oxford UP, 2024) is a comprehensive study of …