Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing

The Kaṭha-Upaniṣad is a Sanskrit text composed about 2000 years ago dealing with the nature of human beings after death. As one of the earliest sources that teach a salvific method designated as yoga, the Kaṭha-Upaniṣad has gained renown outside of South Asia. However, due to its textual heterogeneity, it has often been said to be incoherent.
In this study, Dominik A. Haas offers a new annotated German translation of the text and analysis using text-linguistic methods. He argues that, from the beginning, the Kaṭha-Upaniṣad was conceived as a compilation intended to combine new contemplative and yogic teachings with the ritual mysticism of the famous Vedic fire altar.

This book seeks to explore the societal role and self-perception of critical architects in post-independent and contemporary India. It takes particular interest in the role of documentary films and other media forms used by architects, or architectural design experts, to intervene in ongoing debates on affordable housing and to share different perspectives as well as their alternative visions on housing, spatial design, and sustainable architecture. As a heterogeneous and highly mobile group of social actors, architects and designers develop and implement viable solutions at the intersection of extremely complex challenges and specific local contexts. Therefore, the book argues that architects from India (and South Asia in general) deserve far more attention than they have received to date. Another interest of the book is to shed light on the direct and indirect connections between the now two or three generations of architects in post-independent India, who engage deeply with questions such as context-sensitivity, affordability, and durability. Many of them have also begun to experiment with ‘alternative’ or locally available building materials and methods long before terms such as sustainable building were on everyone's lips. The book argues that these diverse connections in their architectural design thinking and work can best be viewed and understood through the conceptual lens of critical regionalism.

It is not only goods, financial capital or technologies that are being traded, negotiated and circulated along the China-led Belt and Road Initiative but also values, emotions and cultural practices. The latter are often decisive when imagining and establishing a transregional infrastructure of the scale of the BRI. This book explores connections and disconnections along the New Silk Roads through narratives and their cultural configurations. Focusing on China-Africa-relations, the authors of this book investigate the role of narratives and various forms of cultural configurations to understand how processes of transregionalization shape local patterns of thought, perception and practice.

The publication introduces the Bengali avant-garde movement Hungry Generation to a global audience through its poetry and other literary material. The poetry movement emerged from the cities of Patna and Calcutta, and it became known internationally after the poets’ sentence for obscenity in 1964. Aiming at shocking the Bengali establishment and middle-class morality, these Bengali bohemians featured topics like sexuality, alcohol and drug consumption, masturbation, and hyper-masculinity in their poetry as tropes and practices of cultural radicalism.

Exploring transgression as a worldling avant-garde practice, this book will delve into the poetry of some iconic representatives of the Hungry Generation, reading their oeuvre against the new models of sexuality, consumption and modernity in post-independence India.

This book traces a conceptual history of literature, leisure and emotions in modern South Asia. Reading colonial capitalism as entwined with the ‘myth of the lazy native’, it focuses on vernacular literary contestations. It foregrounds otium, leisure and idleness as entangled with emotions and temporalities, in expressions of the self and community. It identifies literary spheres as emotionally evolving, where discourses of leisure are played out in stylistic innovations, negotiations of colonial modernity and postcolonial uncertainties. Highlighting key expressions, discussions, and processes, it explores nostalgia, melancholy, topophilia and haunting as emotions deeply attached to South Asian literary cultures, while resonating with ideas of otium across global modernity.

In an era marked by rapid media diffusion and globalised social movements, Mediatized Solidarity delves into the evolving dimensions of solidarity within Indian social and protest movements. Focused on the period from 2014 to the present, it analyses the interplay between media practices, including social media, and solidarity expressions. Through three case studies – Shaheen Bagh, the Indian Farmers’ Protest, and contemporary youth climate activism – the book explores how media and visual art shape and are shaped by solidarity and the extent to which shared memories and cultural heritage are used to stage social cohesion

In den altindischen Veden findet man Sätze mit sehr verschiedenen Inhalten, darunter religiöse Aussagen ("Varuṇa ist wahrhaftig der Götter König"), Lebensweisheiten ("Das Denken ist schneller als die Rede") oder auch banale Beobachtungen ("Gattin und Gatte waschen einander den Rücken"). Die bekannten Erlanger Indogermanisten und Indologen Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996) und Johanna Narten (1930-2019) haben bei ihrer jahrzehntelangen Arbeit an den Veda-Texten solche Sätze in der Originalsprache gesammelt. Diese Sammlung von 863 Kurztexten wurde von Antonia Ruppel und Bernhard Forssman zweisprachig (Englisch und Deutsch) mit Übersetzungen und einem vollständigen Vokabular versehen und wird hier erstmals veröffentlicht.

The ancient Indian Vedas contain sentences of rather varied content, including religious statements ("Varuṇa truly is the king of the gods"), words of wisdom ("Thought is quicker than speech") or even banal observations ("Wife and husband wash each other's back"). The well-known Erlangen Indo-Europeanists and Indologists Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996) and Johanna Narten (1930-2019) collected such sentences in the original language during their decades of work on the Vedas. Antonia Ruppel and Bernhard Forssman have furnished this collection of 863 short texts with translations and a complete vocabulary in two languages (English and German) and are publishing it here for the first time. 

The volume presents recent scholarly research on texts and performative traditions of India in the early modern and colonial periods with a specific focus on challenges to conventional norms in literary, social, and political contexts. It gathers a selection of contributions, presented at the international webinar on “Transmission, Alteration, and Voices: Texts and
Performative Traditions in South Asia in the Early Modern and Colonial Periods”, which bring new material to approach the variety of intentions involved in transmitting and altering texts and ideas. Arranged in four parts - Adaptation and Translation, Between Performance and Script, Genres and Kingdoms, and Voices and Gender - the essays investigate altering concepts from different angles and traditions (Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Sikh). The authors shed light on exchanges pertaining to sectarian, cultural, and political issues and examine redirections by questioning channels of transmission and media used to convey transformational concepts. The topics covered include retellings in vernaculars and their adaptations to new socio-cultural contexts, transitions from oral to written traditions and contemporary performance, alterations of genres and styles in their association with courtly milieus and historical background, questions of gender and voices raised to stimulate social and political change. Strategies for creating and transforming spaces for communication of new clusters, genres, sectarian systems, and artistic representations are also discussed. The volume thus displays multiple ways of reframing tradition and diverting the course of established concepts as a common feature found across the landscapes of South Asia during these periods.