Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing

Die Kaṭha-Upaniṣad ist ein vor etwa 2000 Jahren verfasster Sanskrit-Text, der sich mit dem Wesen des Menschen nach dem Tod beschäftigt. Als eine der frühesten Quellen, die eine als Yoga bezeichnete heilseffektive Methode lehren, hat sie auch außerhalb Südasiens Bekanntheit erlangt. Aufgrund ihrer textlichen Heterogenität wurde ihr jedoch schon oft Inkohärenz unterstellt.

In der vorliegenden Studie legt Dominik A. Haas eine neue, kommentierte Übersetzung der Kaṭha-Upaniṣad vor und analysiert sie mit Hilfe textlinguistischer Methoden. Er argumentiert, dass diese Upaniṣad von Anfang an als Kompilation konzipiert war, die neue kontemplative und yogische Lehren mit der Ritualmystik des berühmten vedischen Feueraltars verbinden sollte.

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.

Transgression in the Bengali Avant-Garde wants to introduce the Hungry Generation movement to a global audience through its poetry, manifestoes and other literary materials. Emerged from the cities of Patna and Calcutta in the early 1960s, the Hungry Generation gained international attention after the poets' arrest on charges of obscenity in 1964. Fiercely provoking the literary establishment, these Bengali bohemians used poetry and literature as means of cultural radicalism, tackling subjects like sexuality, perversion, alcohol and drug consumption, masturbation, and hyper-masculinity to challenge bourgeois morality and respectability.

The book sheds light on a variety of Hungryalist sources and explores the literature of the Hungry Generation through the filter of 'transgression', showing how this concept unfolded in the language, aesthetics and culture behind this Bengali avant-garde movement. Furthermore, the book will delve into the poetry of some iconic representatives of the Hungry Generation, critically reading their oeuvre in the context of changing models of sexuality, consumption, and modernization in post-colonial 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

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.