Papers by Ajay Rao
Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +B... more Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
W ritten by Sheldon in the wake of the Ayodhyā violence in the early 1990s, "Rāmāyaṇa and Politic... more W ritten by Sheldon in the wake of the Ayodhyā violence in the early 1990s, "Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India" remains one of his most influential and controversial articles. Covering an extremely wide range of sources, Pollock charts historical antecedents for the use of the epic in contemporary nationalist discourse and documents the late date of cultic worship of Rāma, in effect developing a set of materials for theorizing the early-second-millennium encounter between Indo-Islamic and Sanskritic cultures in South Asia. The article is widely read and has engendered a number of critical appraisals. 2 "Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination" shaped my own research project and served as a powerful and challenging resource, an article I have read and reread for years. In this essay, I revisit the empirical terrain of "Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination" through a discussion of Pollock's etiology of Rāma worship. After a brief summary of the article, I present new evidence for a possible alternative causal hypothesis based on the role of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious order in developing a royal Rāma cult at Vijayanagara.
Books by Ajay Rao
Conference Presentations by Ajay Rao
The Global Past Research Initiative: Workshop 1, Toronto, 2023
Program from the first workshop of The Global Past Research Initiative, held in a hybrid format a... more Program from the first workshop of The Global Past Research Initiative, held in a hybrid format at the University of Toronto Mississauga on February 4–5, 2023.
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Papers by Ajay Rao
Books by Ajay Rao
Conference Presentations by Ajay Rao