The mother of all goddesses

In a fascinating recounting of the story of Hariti, a child-devourer whom the Buddha brought to the path of Righteousness, and who then went on to become one of Buddhism’s — and

From Ogress to Goddess: Hariti
Madhurika K Maheshwari
IIRNS Publications
Rs3,000; pp 244

India’s — foremost Mother Goddesses, Madhurika K. Maheshwari’s From Ogress to Goddess — Hariti — A Buddhist Deity focuses on a deity that once enjoyed more prominence in the Indian subcontinent and beyond than it does today. Maheshwari’s study is very readable and wide-ranging, with its focus being the erstwhile prominent deity.

According to early Buddhist tradition, Hariti the Yakshini (yakshas and yakshinis being divine beings with benevolent and malevolent aspects), was an ogress who also became the city of Rajgriha’s protector demi-goddess, changed her wicked propensity for devouring children after Gautama Buddha helped her understand that her anguish for her missing child was no different than the sorrow felt by the parents of children she had eaten. Following her repentance, the Buddha raised Hariti to a divine status, making her protector not just of children and expectant mothers, but also of the Buddhist Sangha and its stupas, viharas, monastery-structures, people and morals.

Hariti became the predominant Mother-Goddess in India from about circa 1st century BC to 1st century AD and retained her relevance over the centuries, often becoming incorporated with local sub-regional goddesses, and with goddesses called upon to protect children from disease, death and disaster. It may be noted that Hariti became not just a protective deity and  fertility goddess — in common with other yakshinis in Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism — but she was also the consort of Panchika Kubera, king of the Yakshas and Lord of Wealth.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Paramacharya on Sanatana Dharma

‘Sanatana Dharma', the name by which Hinduism was known in the past, implies a code of human conduct, a set of tenets that has been handed down from time immemorial. This book presents select material from the Kanchi Paramacharya's wide-ranging discourses, and the topics covered include: religion in general; the sastras and modern life; the Vedas, their content and purport; the samskaras (purificatory ceremonies); dharma common to all; and the duties specifically enjoined on people in the four stages of human life.

Like the word ‘yoga' occurring in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘dharma' defies precise definition. It could mean one's duties linked to one's class and stage in life. Or it may refer to different areas of general human conduct, as for instance discipline, manners, management, and law. That one has to follow the ‘dharma' prescribed for him and it is hazardous to tread on what is ordained for another is stressed in the Gita in two places.

Full report here Hindu

Mythical icons become heroes in new Indian fiction

Rama, Ravana, Arjuna, Jesus Christ, Lord Shiva, Ganesha and the epics are becoming fodder for contemporary Indo-Anglian literature. Writers say it is a new way of looking at Indian culture and draw young readers.

The reprint of two popular titles - The Immortals of Meluha by Amish Tripathy and The Rozabal Line by Ashwin Sanghi last month - brought the gods back from their heavenly abodes to play action games on earth. The books have been published by Westland Ltd.

Amish Tripathy re-tells a folkore from Jammu and Kashmir about the descent of Lord Shiva in his blue-neck Neelkantha avatar from Tibet with his warriors to Meluha, a modern-day Indus Valley city located in Srinagar, to save the city. Sanghi spins a murder mystery around the supposed grave of Jesus Christ at the Rozabal shrine in Kashmir.

Three new fiction tomes - The Ganesh Scripture by Alice Albina, The Golden Sacrifice of the Mahabharata by Maggi Lidchi Grassi and Kalika and Dimna: The Panchatantra Retold by Ramsay Wood - published by Random House this year use Ganesha, Vyasa, Arjuna and mythical demons to narrate gripping stories.

Full report here Economic Times

Gita in Samba land

The Bhagawad Gita in Portuguese? Well, why not? Gloria Arieira, a Brazilian and an authority in Sanskrit has translated the Bhagawad Gita and parts of the Vedas to Portuguese, enabling her students across Brazil and Portugal to access the depths of this great philosophy. So if you are seeking spirituality in the holiday resort of Copacabana, Rio, then you will find it at Vidya Mandir, a school of Vedanta studies founded and run by Gloria.

Sanskrit scholar and Vedanta teacher Gloria Arieira

Gloria, who is visiting Kalady, with a group of 28 students, has been to Kerala before. A disciple of Swami Chinmayananda and of Swami Dayananda, Gloria's entry into the world of spirituality was after she heard Swami Chinmayananda's talk on Vedanta in Rio. That was in 1973. Gloria felt that her search for the greater meaning to lifewas answered. With her curiosity aroused she wished to delve deeper into the philosophy of the Vedas and found her way to an ashram in Mumbai (Powai). Here she studied the Vedas and lived the ashram way of life. “It was a simple life and I felt at ease,” recalls Gloria who began teaching the Vedas when she went back to Rio in 1979. It was five years later that she started Vidya Mandir on land donated by one of her students. From eight students to start with, the numbers kept increasing. Soon the school became a centre where people came seeking spirituality.

Full report here Hindu

Commentary on Kuresa's hymns

Kuresa, revered over centuries as a gem of an Acharya, was among Ramanuja's foremost disciples, though older than him by seven years. Humility was his hallmark.

It was Kuresa who helped Ramanuja, while in Kashmir library, by storing all of the ‘Vritti grantha' in memory to serve in Ramanuja's dictation of ‘Sri Bhashya' which Kuresa wrote down.

Outpourings

Kuresa authored five hymns in Sanskrit, which are collectively designated ‘Panchastavee'. Without doubt, they are the outpourings of a saintly soul on the lines of the Naalaayiramof the Tamil savants, the Azhvars. It was but fitting that he came to be known as ‘Azhvan'. In recent times, many have come out with their own explanatory commentaries on them.

Of the five, ‘Sreestava' is the shortest, with 11 verses, and it is on Mahalakshmi. ‘Srivaikuntastava' is on ‘Paratva' and the bliss of Srivaikunta. ‘Atimaanushastava' is in admiration of the superhuman traits of God's incarnations such as Rama and Krishna. ‘Sundarabaahustava', with 132 verses, is on the deity, Kallazhagar (Azhagarkoil), whom he worshipped when he went into exile in the face of the threat of persecution by a Chola king. And the fifth one, ‘Varadarajastava'(101 verses) is in praise of the deity in Kanchi and it is recited in the shrine of the Lord even today. Very significantly, an invocation to Kuresa hails his works as constituting the auspicious maangalya sutraaround the neck of the ‘Veda' damsel, who is devoted to Lord Narayana. Among those who have written commentaries in Sanskrit on these works is Ramanujacharya, a renowned Vyakarana vidwan. His work had presumably been languishing, as manuscript in palm leaves at various places. It is to her credit that Geetha has diligently collated all the recensions, taking care to indicate the source in the footnote.

Full report here Hindu

Understanding Hinduism

Wendy Doniger, a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, is arguably the foremost, and unarguably the most prolific, scholar of Hinduism in the western world. Apart from translating the Rig Veda, Manu and Kamasutra into English, she has authored a number of monographs. When a scholar of her stature brings to bear half-a-century's work and understanding to provide a synthesised account of the subject, it necessarily evokes wide interest. Simply put, the reader is not disappointed...

The self-appointed custodian of Hinduism who threw an egg at Wendy Doniger at a lecture hall in London in 2003 was evidently ignorant of her credentials.Doniger comes in a long line of western scholars who have widened the world's understanding of one of its major religions, Hinduism. The 25-page bibliography lists the works mostly of western scholars on Hinduism. (It is symptomatic that it confuses the Indian historians Ranajit Guha and Ramachandra Guha!) This staggering list should have a salutary effect on anyone who claims an exclusive right to interpret and represent Hindu religion.

It is indeed a tall order to provide a historical account of a religion whose nomenclature itself is the subject of debate and dispute.Within a chronological framework, Doniger manages to give an engrossing account of Hindu religion across five millennia. There are enough standard historical accounts of Hinduism in English, but her book attempts an “alternative history,” the word ‘alternative' referring to the marginalised groups — namely women, lower castes and, yes, animals — rather than one from the perspective of texts written by men of the Brahmin community. She also seeks to bring in the vernacular, meaning non-Sanskritic, traditions of Hinduism into the picture. This is what makes the book different. I wonder if there is another book that looks at animals in such a detailed, empathetic, and informed fashion. The horse rears its head throughout the book, taking on different meanings at various moments, and it could well be a metaphor.

The philologist in Doniger keeps pointing to cognates across languages and language families, sometimes illuminating the argument and occasionally providing diversionary relief. Stories, replete in the text, are her device to push the narrative forward. Putting together all the tales narrated in the book would in itself add up to a lively anthology, although one may not always agree with her often Freudian readings of them. Doniger is at her best when she handles the texts and discusses gods, animals, and humans figuring in the Vedas, women and ogresses in the Ramayana, and the violence in the Mahabharata. 

Full report here The Hindu

REVIEW: Krishna's Mandala

REVIEW

Krishna's Mandala - Bhagavata Religion and Beyond
D. Dennis Hudson
Oxford University Press
Rs. 725
ISBN: 9780198062769
Hardback

Blurb
This posthumous volume brings together seminal essays by one of the foremost American scholars on the religions of India. Exploring the ancient Indian milieu with an innate sense of mandala, ‘the surround’, D. Dennis Hudson’s writings constantly engaged with the core of Bhagavata dharma—Krishna as preceptor and lover in the real world. Hudson was driven by a desire to understand how this ancient vision of Vishnu’s forceful, subtle activity managed to stay alive in south India as rulers, poets, and ordinary people changed.

This collection is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘Tales of Two Cities’, deals with the physical, conceptual, ritual, and moral layouts of two ancient Tamil capitals—Madurai and Kanchipuram. The second, ‘Reading Bhagavata Texts—Temples and Tomes’, proposes radical interpretations of two familiar texts, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Bhagavata Purana, and shows how they connect to temple architecture. The final section, ‘Andal and the Sri Vaishnava World’, explores the connections between Bhagavata religion and gender, underlining the example of Andal, the only woman Alvar saint.

In the introduction, John Stratton Hawley highlights the crosscurrents in Dennis Hudson’s writings and situates this collection in the larger context of Hudson’s academic and personal world. The foreword by Romila Thapar depicts a vigorous, passionate scholar ‘not driven by scholarship alone’

Reviews
Chaotic confusion  Hindu
Among the foreign Dravidologists of recent times, Dennis Hudson has a special place. He did have varied interests in south India's religious world (Christianity, Buddhism, Vaishnavism and Saivism), but his centre of literary research was the Vaikuntha Perumal temple in Kancheepuram. Krishna's Mandala is a posthumous publication edited by John Stratton Hawley, who is himself well known for his work on the bhakti poets of North India. Hawley's detailed introduction to the assorted essays presents Hudson's style of work in its proper “surround,” which had its accent on relating Hindu temples to the text of bhakti poetry. Hudson had linked the Vaikuntha Perumal temple to Tirumangai Azhvar's decad. A natural extension of this line of reasoning led him to study Andal's poems and the Srivillipputtur temple. The outcome of this research forms a substantial portion of the book.

Unfortunately, by falling in line with the style employed by some of his U.S. colleagues in the discipline of religion (Jeffrey Kirpal and Sarah Caldwell, among them), Hudson slips into the Serbonian Bog of Freudian analysis. “Historical interpretation of poetry necessarily requires conjecture,” he says. But how far should speculation be stretched?

Influential Indologist

The passing away of the French scholar Madeleine Biardeau, translator of the Ramayana and an outstanding specialist of the Puranas, is a loss to understanding Hindu India.

Madeleine Biardeau, the widely respected French Indologist, passed away on February 1 in France. She was 88. Born in Niort, in the West of France, in 1922 into a middle class family of small entrepreneurs, Madeleine Biardeau joined the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure of Sèvres (restricted to girls then) at Paris, in 1943, where she studied philosophy. There she discovered the classical heritage of Indian culture with a group of young Christian women who were attracted by the so called spirituality of the East.
Madeleine Biardeau, who was close to the Left Catholic milieu and had a strong secular feeling in spite of being herself a practising Catholic, departed from her friends and started learning Sanskrit intensively in order to study Hindu philosophy to which she devoted a great part of her academic life. But she did not intend to consider Hinduism only from her academic milieu far from India. Aware of the ancient tradition of scholarship that was still alive there, and very curious about the country and its people, she joined the University of Travancore for two years, in the1950s, learning much from the Pandits with whom she read Sanskrit texts. It was the beginning of a lasting intellectual and personal relationship with India, which she visited almost every year until the 1990s.

Full report here The Hindu