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This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically and culturally diverse context of India.
List of contents
List of Illustrations. List of Contributors. Acknowledgments. Part I: Introduction 1. Reclaiming Myth, Emplacing History Part II: Hills and Mountains 2. The Mountain Numen: Myth and Everyday Life in Kangra and Chamba 3. Toponymic Tales: Myth, Memory and Place Making in Monyul Part III: Plains and Deserts 4, Ecology, Mythic Imagination, and Kṛṣṇa Worship in Early Mathurā 5. The First Rajput Hero: Hammīra and the Making of Rajasthan Part IV: Rivers and Forests 6. Myths of Purity and the Miracle of Water along the Banks of the Ganga-Yamuna 7. Between Earth and Sky: The Kuinka Narrative of Origin and Self in Belgar Part V: Cities and Coasts 8. Kāśī as Space and Notion: Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina Myths 9. The Rise and Fall of Two Cities: Valabhī and Dhārā as Narrated in the Prabandhacintāmaṇi 10. The Patriarch King: Myths from a Jewish Homeland in Kodungallur 11. Myth as Palimpsest: Performance and Provenance of the Tamil Śilappadikaram Part VI: Supra-Region 12. Peregrination as Pedagogy: Ādi Śaṃkarācārya’s Digvijaya and the Idea of India. Index.
About the author
Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India. She is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The Netherlands; and the DAAD Professor of History at Heidelberg University, Germany.
She has authored The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (2010), and edited Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia (2021), Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community in Early Indian Architecture (2019) and Cultural History of Early South Asia (2014). Translations by her include Hitopadesha (2022) and Looking Within: Life Lessons from Lal Ded, the Kashmiri Shaiva Mystic (2019).
Summary
This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically and culturally diverse context of India.
