Welten Süd- und Zentralasiens / Worlds of South and Inner Asia / Mondes de l'Asie du Sud et de l'Asie Centrale

This volume, the first of its kind in nearly two decades, comprises 16 articles on the Atharvaveda, India’s second oldest text, by the world’s leading scholars in the field, from India, Japan, Europe and North America. Linguistic, ritual, mythological, historical and hermeneutical aspects of the Atharvaveda are studied alongside its transmission, influence and reception, from a broad variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives.

This volume considers the Prabodhacandrodaya Nāṭaka (c. 1760 CE), an allegorical drama composed by Brajvāsīdās in Brajbhāṣā. It contributes to the study of vernacular nāṭakas with its first complete English translation. Moreover, the critical analysis shows that the foundational Sanskrit texts for Vedānta and those for Bhakti play a part in the Prabodhacandrodaya Nāṭaka’s philosophical and religious edifice. At the same time, the investigation demonstrates that Brajvāsīdās expresses several philosophical ideas by adaptively reusing the Rāmcaritmānas by Tulsīdās (c. 1574 CE). Brajvāsīdās composes a dohā by combining one line of his invention with a line from the Mānas. This method is employed throughout all the personified metaphysical concepts. That Brajvāsī not only read Bhakti but also Vedānta through the Rāmcaritmānas highlights the philosophical and literary creativity in 18th c. North India. It points to the necessity to rethink the sources of Vedānta philosophies, by including works non-conventional for language and genre, because not in Sanskrit and not śāstras. Such sources may not be original in their contribution per se but are essential to understand how early modern philosophy was done, conceived and transmitted.

This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography.

The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts.

Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia.

The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century.

The book should appeal to scholars of the Russian Empire and Central Asia; of history of photography and visual culture; of memory studies. It should be appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate courses, and even a broader public.

How does a writer discuss her creative process and her views on a writer’s role in society? How do her comments on writing relate to her works? The Hindi writer Krishna Sobti (1925-2019) is known primarily as a novelist. However, she also extensively wrote about her views on the creative process, the figure of the writer, historical writing, and the position of writers within the public sphere. This study is the first to examine in detail the relationship between Sobti’s views on poetics as exposed in her non-fictional texts and her own literary practice. The writer’s self-representation is analysed through her use of metaphors to explain her creative process. Sobti’s construction of the figure of the writer is then put in parallel with her idiosyncratic use of language as a representation of the heterogeneous voices of her characters and with her conception of literature as a space where time and memory can be "held." At the same time, by delving into Sobti’s position in the debate around "women’s writing" (especially through the creation of a male double, the failed writer Hashmat), and into her views on literature and politics, this book also reflects on the literary debates of the post-Independence Hindi literary sphere.

This book provides an in-depth examination of the Yungdrung Bon religion in light of globalization. In its global dimension, Bon has been attracting a growing number of Westerners, particularly to its Dzogchen teachings and meditation practices. In this expansion, Bon operates in a dynamic context where forces that create changes in the tradition coexist, sometimes in tension and sometimes in tandem, with other forces that aim to preserve it. In tracing the process through which Bon has become a global religion, this monograph narrates the story of the principal figures who initially facilitated this transmission, following their journey from Tibet to India and Nepal. The narrative then moves to explore the dynamics taking place in the transmission and reception of Yungdrung Bon in Western countries, opening up a new viewpoint on the expansion of Tibetan religious traditions into the West and painting a comprehensive picture of the modern history of the Yungdrung Bon religion as narrated by its participants. In so doing, it makes an invaluable contribution to the study of Tibetan traditions in the West as well as to the wider history of religions, social anthropology, psychology, and conversion studies.

This volume looks at the rīti poet Dev’s works and career through the study of the socio-historical context of the first half of the 18^th century and the analysis of the Rasavilāsa, a text dedicated to the description of the feminine literary figure of the nāyikā. The poet’s biography is examined with a new perspective and several patrons who offered their support are identified, giving a better view of Dev’s career. His status of itinerant poet is read in conjunction with the historical context and as an opportunity to make his works circulate in various circles. This compels the poet to write many texts and to recycle part of his repertoire through various processes which are examined. Assimilating the poet with a craftsman – "artisan-poète" – underlines this practical aspect to be considered for itinerant poets. At the same time and through the translation and the study of a good number of poems from the Rasavilāsa translated for the first time, the book also shows the evolution of the nāyikābheda genre and the important influence exerted by other literary traditions such as Sanskrit kāmaśāstras and Indo-Persian shāhrāshob.

This volume brings together a variety of historians, epigraphists, philologists, art historians and archaeologists to address the understanding of the encounter between Buddhist and Muslim communities in South and Central Asia during the medieval period. The articles collected here provoke a fresh look at the relevant sources. The main areas touched by this new research can be divided into five broad categories: deconstructing scholarship on Buddhist/Muslim interactions, cultural and religious exchanges, perceptions of the other, transmission of knowledge, and trade and economics. The subjects covered are wide ranging and demonstrate the vast challenges involved in dealing with historical, social, cultural and economic frameworks that span Central and South Asia of the premodern world. We hope that the results show promise for future research produced on Buddhist and Muslim encounters. The intended audience is specialists in Asian Studies, Buddhist Studies and Islamic Studies.

The book focuses on the relational dynamic between “masters” and “natives” in the construction of scholarly narratives about the past, in the fields of archeology, history or the study of religions. Reconsidering the role of subaltern actors that recent postcolonial studies have tended to ignore, the present book emphasizes the complex relations between representatives of the imperial power and local actors, and analyzes how masters and natives (and their respective cultures) have shaped each other in the course of the interaction. Through various vectors of intercultural transfer and knowledge exchange, through the circulation of ideas, techniques and human beings, new visions of the past of extra-European regions emerged, as did collective memories resulting from various kinds of appropriations. In this framework, the most important question is how these dynamic processes determined collective memories of the past in plural (post-)colonial – in particular, Asian – worlds, participating to the construction of national/imperial/local identities and to the reinvention of traditions.

Based on richly detailed ethnographic materials, the author of this monograph describes how nomads in the Tibetan highlands employ motorcycles, cars, and mobile telephones. The study is grounded in theoretical and methodological conceptions of mobile technologies and mobility, making it of great interest to Asian scholars and comparatists in the social and communication sciences.