196 research outputs found
Banaras jyotirliṅgas: constitution and transformations of a transposed divine group and its pilgrimage
No full textBanaras (Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India) is renowned as one of the more notable pilgrimage destinations of India. The ways of approaching and investigating the sacred landscape and the religious practices of this city varied throughout times and are still a matter of discussion among scholars. The author firstly addresses this debate in order to re-conceptualize the need and intents of writing (still) about Banaras and its mainstream religious traditions. The contribution addresses one common pattern of Indian sacred geography, that is the spatial transposition of gods. The article, in fact, goes through the formation path of a transposed group of pan-Indian deities, namely the jyotirliṅgas, in a city which is presented by eulogistic literature as a universal tīrtha, where all sacred centres and gods dwell. Through the analysis of textual and visual material the author shows how these divine forms have been produced in the city’s territory throughout time and projected spatially in the various shrines and, eventually, in a procession. The pilgrimage circuit connected with the twelve local jyotirliṅgas is investigated as a recent and evolving practice of Banaras religious life and its currently deviating path is shown as something to be constantly rephrased and negotiated. Ritual transformations appear as challenged by the need to adapt and survive in a developing urban context, where sacred space is shared, contested and cyclically re-written
Constructing the eternal city of light through history and society : evolution of the image of Kashi in the Eighteenth-Twentieth century picture maps
No full textNo account or discourse on Kāśī goes without claiming the extraordinary status of the place; the city is considered the eternal tīrtha, where all notable places of Indian sacred geography are represented by local replicas; moreover, according to Puranic tradition Kāśī dwells on Lord Śiva triśūla, surviving the universal dissolution for it exists outside space, beyond time. The perception of the historical place gets often confused with the mythical image forged by the māhātmya tradition and supported by different actors in the course of time (sacred specialists, “new Hindūs”, nationalists, orientalists and tourists). The paper deals with the image of Kāśī beyond time and space and analyses its construction through history and society. Basing our reflections on the phenomenological approach to the study of spatial dimension, we want to highlight the interactions between the struggle of creation of a mythic space of the city and the inevitable intrusions and contributions of lived places and their practices, as depicted in the visual sources on Banāras
Michael S. Dodson, (ed.), Banaras. Urban forms and cultural histories, Routledge, New Delhi and Abingdon, 2012, pp. 251, 50 plates, ISBN: 978-0-415-69377-6
No full textQuestioning meaningful layers of locality in a pan-Indian tirtha
No full textThis paper critically addresses notions of locality, tradition, and pan-Indian-ness by analyzing the case of Kedāreśvara in Varanasi. Textual evidence from local māhātmyas and digests, as well as historical sources, depict Kedāreśvara as one of the city’s major manifestations of Śiva. However, the shaping of a progressively more locally-oriented myth in eulogistic texts, together with a mix of regional elements and contemporary practices at the temple constitute a complex reality, where various fragments of locality intersect. Drawing on the anthropological concepts of locality and localization, I detail the layers that constitute part of a supposedly ‘great’ tradition in one of the most notable and so-considered pan-Indian tīrthas. The paper questions the existence of a unified, ‘great’ Brahmanical tradition as opposed to and distinct from elements of regionalism and locality; on the contrary, it highlights variations
within glorification texts, while documenting interpretations, adaptations and transformations
of their narrative material as transmitted and enacted in the contemporary shrine and its environs
Considerazioni antropologiche sulla trasposizione spaziale: voci e strategie di Kedar ji, un jyotirlinga di Varanasi
No full textJnanavapi tra etnografia e storia: note di una ricerca su un pozzo sacro al centro dei pellegrinaggi locali di Varanasi
No full textPrincipio da qui; da colui che è stato negli ultimi anni, ed è tuttora, centro, voce narrante, informante,6 soggetto e oggetto di ricerca, presso cui converge una serie di percorsi di studio di cui vorrei fornire in questa sede una trama generale, al fine di presentare i vari temi di indagine, i possibili sviluppi di una ricerca incentrata su Jñānavāpī
Tra il tempio e il quartiere a luci rosse: spazi, retoriche morali e performance della prostituzione a Banaras
No full textAlla luce della genealogia di eventi che a partire dal secolo scorso ha visto cortigiane e prostitute collocarsi ai margini della vita socio-religiosa e dell’agglomerato urbano di Banaras, la ricerca indaga lo stato attuale di questa formazione sociale esplorando il nesso dialettico che pone tuttora le donne residenti nel quartiere a luci rosse di Shivdaspur in stretta relazione alla dimensione rituale della città e ai suoi spazi, fra retoriche morali, meccanismi di controllo della sessualità stringenti, e sovversioni performate degli stessi
Transposed sacred places in Varanasi: connecting local sites to pan-Indian places of pilgrimage
No full textRepetition and adaptation: narrative style of the Kashikedaramahatmya
No full textIt is common knowledge that māhātmya is a specific literary genre of the Puranic corpus turned to the glorification of local entities. Generally considered of poor value in the study of Indian literature, māhātmyas, on the contrary, are fundamental sources for the understanding of sacred places and their representation. The main purpose of these texts is, in fact, to justify the existence of a certain place and to explain its special power. Māhātmyas directly address worshippers, giving them instructions about the propitious actions and revealing the divine mysteries connected to the specific place. Māhātmyas link local places to the great events of the mythical past. This creative process has been defined as “the geographical equivalent of Sanskritization: it is the attempt of peripheral realities to participate in the Pan Indian tradition, which is here represented by the Mahāpurāṇas, whose authority is widely recognized; in fact, māhātmyas often claim to be appendixes of well-known Purāṇas. Moreover, they use a specific narrative style, which adapts and retells the existing mythological material in order to promote a specific representation of the local dimension.
This paper aims at showing the elements we mentioned as they are specifically employed by the Kāśīkedāramāhātmya to promote the local sacred place, that is Kedāreśvara Temple in Banāras. After introducing the text and its content, we will focus on King Divodāsa’s myth as a revealing example of how the local tradition is constructed by the devotional text; we will briefly retrace the evolution of the Puranic version of the myth up to the most renowned variation of the Kāśīkhaṇḍa (Kkh), which is the main canonical source on Varāṇāsī and its sacred geography5, in order to highlight the original adaptation of the Kāśīkedāramāhātmya (Kkm)
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