Exploring the roots of village Hinduism in South Asia

Brill's Encuclopedia of the Religions of the Indigenous Peoples of South Asia, 2020

I try here to give an overall view of the situation of the tribes of Western India, particularly in regard to religion. I stress the continuity between tribal religion and popular Hinduism in the region, but also point to various specific traits of the tribal religions. The present pressure from Hindu orgaizations is stressed, but in a erspective of continuous contact over the centuries.

2019

The present paper explains the village deity tradition prevailing in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. Here, every village of Shimla, Kullu, Mandi, Kinnaur, and Sirmaur districts has its own local God or Goddess which governs the daily life of these culturally rich villages. The paper describes how people worship their deities for the whole year, what rituals and traditions they follow during worshiping their deities, and what are the beliefs of people. (For example; Animal sacrifice, Symbolic Human Scarifies, taking deity to far of places in order to purify by providing a holy dip in some pious water etc.). The study is based on intensive field survey which includes Visuals, Audio collections, and personal interviews of the people and priests/Gur/Mali(Oracle or Mouthpiece of Deity) of the associated Deity. Documentaries of rare rituals and traditions are also part of this study, which is one of the objectives of this study to preserve the cultural heritage of these rare traditions by doing such kinds of Archival studies. Keywords: Tradition, Sacrifice, Priests, Rituals, Human Sacrifices

Acme International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2017

A large number of folklore related to religious groups, cults, personality based cults, exists these days in every region of the Indian sub continent. In India religious diversity is respected and encouraged. People from diverse cultures and backgrounds have always accommodated and amalgamated in Indian society. The growth of the folklore provides an interesting window to study the mixing of the legends, oral traditions, religious beliefs, culture and the actual history of the region. For instance in Eastern India there exists variety of folklore , folk literature, Mangal-Kavyas (Panchali) that deals generally with the religious cults, sects, traditions and stories of gods and goddesses , various forms of worship, it's beliefs, rituals and variety of practices etc. The folklore also shows how and why we worship Trees, Sacred Animals, Birds, Emblems, Pictures, Signs, and Motifs etc. The main reason to worship these manifestations is to show devotions to god and goddesses. It symbolizes the religious and cultural practices of both Aryan and non-Aryan traditions. It shows cultural synthesis and ongoing process of socio-anthropological development of the society. Therefore an assessment of Indian culture is possible through a careful study of the religion and folklore .

The paper discusses religious narratives about annual deity of Savara of South Bengal that can be conceptualized as myths, legends, and memorates according to folklore of 'Sitalamangal'. These narratives confirm the power of deities to assist people in hardships and give warning examples of supernatural sanctions that follow the breaking of norms. In almost every part of India there is a goddess, known by a variety of local names, concerned with smallpox. Throughout most areas of northern India, from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east, there is found a smallpox goddess to whom is attached some variant of the name 'Sitala'. This goddess is primarily associated with smallpox, yet she is occasionally given other roles and powers, including those as the protector of children and the giver of good fortune. The wide geographical and historical appearance of Sitala allows for examination of her personalities and attributes in a variety of cultural traditions. Volume 1, Number 1 ,September, 2013 (IJCLTS) ISSN:2321-8274 https://sites.google.com/site/indjournalofclts/ Volume 1, Number 1 ,September, 2013 (IJCLTS) ISSN:2321-8274 https://sites.google.com/site/indjournalofclts/ unquestionably the most highly developed in Bengal. There are found major all village puijas, lengthy poems (mangal) written in her honor and numerous Sitala temples.

Lokratna, Vol. XI (2) In collaboration with University of Cambridge World Oral Literature Project , 2018

India is a country of cultural inspiration and amusements. It is the land of folklores, folktales, temples and tourism. Again it is the beautiful fabrication of inter-culture and intra-culture, belief systems and people that paves ways towards research explorations and opportunities. Recent visits to ‘Amman’, ‘Gramadevis and Gramadevata’ temples, in rural areas near Chennai pushed me to study the significance of rural female folk deities and the rituals associated with it. The following paper is an attempt made to study the predominance of female deities worshipping especially by women folk with vigor as religious routine for daily life existence in rural Tamil Nadu.

Living Folk Religions, 2023

Religions of Early India: A Cultural History, 2024

This narrative history of the myriad religious cultures of early India covers a broad span of two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable religious activity: elaborate sacrificial rituals, rigorous regimes of personal austerity, psycho-spiritual experimentation, vigorous theological debate, sophisticated poetic composition, ideals of righteous kingship, flourishing arts of sculpture and architecture, fervent devotional practices, utopian visions, and energetic missionizing. It was the birthplace of the three world religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions, usually classified as “folk” or “popular” religions. To examine the historical origins of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, this narrative history considers them as interacting communities within a shared, changing social and political reality, in which they may compete with one another for resources and influence. In the perspective adopted here, religious cultures define and redefine themselves in relation to one another. This historical study speaks, as much as is feasible, through voices from early India. The voices are recorded in verbal works: hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, ritual guidebooks, theological discourses. The narrative also attends to voices that speak from ancient material remains, including coins, sculptures, inscribed rocks and pillars, built structures, cityscapes. All these represent intentional works of human labor, articulating distinctive voices or visions, realized at certain moments in the human past.

Routledge, 2019

(PDF contains a preview of the book from Routledge's website, including the TOC and Introduction.) This book explores the key motif of the religious other in devotional (bhakti) literatures and practices from across the Indian subcontinent unmasks processes of representation that involve adoption, appropriation, and rejection of different social and religious agents. The contributing authors reconsider and challenge inherited notions of the bhakta’s or devotee’s other. Considering the ways in which bhakti might be conceived as having an inter-regional impact—as a force, discourse, network, mythology, ethic—the book critically engages with extant scholarly narratives about what bhakti is and traces when and how those narratives have been used. The sheer diversity of South Asia’s devotional traditions renders them an especially rich resource for examining social and religious fault lines, thereby furthering scholarly understanding of how communalism and sectarianism originate and develop on local or regional levels, with wider geographic implications. Bringing together studies from a subcontinent-wide variety of linguistic, geographical, and historical frames for the first time, this book will be an important contribution to the literature on bhakti and will be of interest to scholars of South Asian Religions and Asian Religions.

2012

The purpose of this course is to provide an historical overview of the many different indigenous religious movements in India that we now call "Hinduism." Through the reading of mythological, philosophical, ethical, meditative, and devotional primary texts, as well as historical and anthropological studies, we will show how Hindu traditions were constructed through a set of ongoing tensions: Between ascetic/contemplative and sacrificer/priest, villager and city-dweller, low caste and high caste, poet and philosopher, colonized and colonizer, and "secular" citizen and "religious" citizen. In tracing these tensions and the developments they brought about throughout Indian history, we will: 1) examine the roots of Indian tradition; 2) master the basic vocabulary of Indian thought; 3) use that terminology to study developments in Hindu doctrine and popular practice; and 4) examine the religio-political significance of contemporary beliefs and rituals.