This is a study of the Bengali Kartabhaja sect and its place in the broader movement of Tantrism, an Indian religious movement employing purposely shocking sexual language and rituals. Urban looks closely at the relationship between the rise of the Kartabhajas, who flourished at the turn of the 19th century, and the changing economic context of colonial Bengal. Made up of the poor lower classes laboring in the marketplaces and factories of Calcutta, the Kartabhajas represent "the underworld of the imperial city." Urban shows that their esoteric poetry and songs are in fact saturated with the...

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.
In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human...

Questioning the conventional depiction of India as a nation divided between religious communities, Gottschalk shows that individuals living in India have multiple identities, some of which cut across religious boundaries. The stories narrated by villagers living in the northern state of Bihar depict everyday social interactions that transcend the simple divide of Hindu and Muslim.

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks they usually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.
In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human...

Highly acclaimed as translators of Greek and Sanskrit classics, respectively, David Grene and Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty here present a complete modern translation of the three plays comprising Aeschylus' "Orestia" and, with the assistance of director Nicholas Rudall, an abridged stage adaptation. This blanced and highly successful collaboration of scholars with a theater director solves the contemporary problems of translating and staging the "Orestia, " which originally was written to be performed in Athens in the first half of the fifth century B.C.While remaning faithful to the original...

The seventy-two entries in this volume explore, among other topics, the history, geography, and religion of Greece, Plato's mythology and philosophy, the powers of marriage in Greece, heroes and gods of war in the Greek epic, and origins of mankind in Greek myths. Ancient Egyptian cosmology, anthropology, rituals, and religion closely linked to Greek mythology are also discussed.
"In a world that remains governed by powerful myths, we must deepen our understanding of ourselves and others by considering more carefully the ways in which the mythological systems to which we cling and social...

This volume begins with Roman myths and traces their influence in
early Christian and later European literature. Ninety-five entries
by leading scholars cover subjects such as sacrificial cults and rites
in pre-Roman Italy, Roman religion and its origins, the mythologies of
paganism, the survival of the ancient gods in the Middle Ages and the
Renaissance, gypsy myths and rituals, romanticism and myth in Blake,
Nerval, and Balzac, and myth in twentieth-century English literature.

Mythologies offers illuminating examples of the workings of
myth in the structure...

The Vaisnava-sahajiya cult that arose in Bengal in the sixteenth century was an intensely emotional attempt to reconcile the sensual and the ascetic. Exploring the history and doctrine of this cult, Edward C. Dimock, Jr., examines the works of numerous poets who are the source of knowledge about this sect. Dimock examines the life of the saint Caitanya, the mad Baul singers, the doctrines of Tantrism, the origins of the figure of Radha, and the worship of Krishna. His study will appeal to students of the history of religion as well as of Indian culture. This edition includes a new Foreword by...

Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled, who double themselves, who are seduced by gods doubling as mortals, whose bodies are split or divided. In "Splitting the Difference, " the renowned scholar of mythology Wendy Doniger recounts and compares a vast range of these tales from ancient Greece and India, with occasional recourse to more recent "double features" from "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" to "Face/Off."
Myth, Doniger argues, responds to the complexities of the human condition by multiplying or splitting its characters into unequal parts, and these...

Jean Dutourd's "A Dog's Head" is a wonderful piece of magical realism, reminiscent of Voltaire, Borges and Kafka. With biting wit, Dutourd presents the story of Edmund Du Chaillu, a boy born, to his bourgeois parents's horror, with the head of a spaniel. Edmund must endure his school-mate's teasing as well as an urge to carry a newspaper in his mouth. This is the story of his life, trials, and joys as he searches for a normal life of worth and love.
"Dutourd is a fine craftsman, whose work has the classic virtues of brevity, lucidity, and concentration. He has written a sardonic...