Archaeology of Bhakti I

Francis, Emmanuel [u.a.] [Hrsg.]:
The Archaeology of Bhakti / ed. by Emmanuel Francis & Charlotte Schmid. - [Vol.] 1: Mathurā and Maturai, back and forth. - Pondichéry ; Paris : Institut Français de Pondichéry ; École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 2014. - XII, 366 S. : Ill. - (Collection indologie ; 125)
ISBN 978-81-8470-200-2
ISBN 978-2-85539-139-7
EUR 43,00 / Rs. 1000,00
DDC: 294.54

Beschreibung
This volume - the outcome of a workshop-cum-conference that took place from 1st to 12th August 2011 in the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, - is an invitation to practise the "archaeology of Bhakti" with the help of both textual and non-textual sources.
   Bhakti, broadly defined as an attitude, a strategy or a style of devotion—one that may be intellectual, emotional or rooted in acts of worship—towards God or the Divine, manifests itself through the personal voices of devotees as well as through the collective effort that constitutes the building of a temple. The "archaeology of Bhakti" aims at correlating different realms of representation, such as texts and images, in order to illuminate the elusive, pan-Indian phenomenon of Bhakti. The focus is on sources, agencies and layers. A special attention is given to inscriptions, which belong both to the realm of artefacts and to that of texts, and which help to distinguish royal demonstrations of Bhakti from local manifestations. In the realm of textual sources, "archaeology" is put to work to identify how literary conventions and concepts have formed and been incorporated, layer upon layer, into a given composition.
   After an introduction by the editors about the complexities of the concept and practices of Bhakti in the Indian world, essays by nine scholars explore the phenomena of Bhakti and their chronology from different perspectives (textual, epigraphical, archaeological, iconographical). In the course of these explorations, the reader is transported from the North to the South of the subcontinent, back and forth between Mathurā and Maturai. [Verlagsinformation]

Herausgeber
EMMANUEL FRANCIS was educated at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium) where he obtained his PhD in languages and literatures (2009). He is currently a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and is affiliated to the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud / Centre for South Asian Studies (CEIAS, UMR 8564, EHESS-CNRS) in Paris. Specialized in Sanskrit and Tamil philology as well as in the history of South India, his publications include several articles on Indian epigraphical sources. The first volume of his study on the royal ideology of the Pallava dynasty of South India (circa 300–900 ce) substantially based on Tamil and Sanskrit inscriptions has been recently published under the title Le discours royal en Inde du Sud ancienne. Présentation.
CHARLOTTE SCHMID is member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient [EFEO] since 1999. Her researches are articulated between two areas of field-work, the north and the south of the Indian peninsula. Having studied the first known figures of a major Hindu deity of Bhakti, Kr̥ṣṇa in Mathurā, she was lucky enough to devote several years of work to the Tamil country, looking for inscriptions and sculptures produced during the Pallava and the Cōḻa period (6th-12th century), reading texts with the help of the pandits at the centre of the EFEO in Pondicherry. Her recent works include two forthcoming books Sur le chemin de Kr̥ṣṇa : la flûte et ses voies and La Bhakti d’une reine. Présentation.

Quellen: Institut Français de Pondichéry; École française d'Extrême-Orient; WorldCat; Réseau Asie et Pacifique
Bildquelle: Institut Français de Pondichéry
Bibliographie: [1]

References