Myths and Places New Perspectives in Indian Cultural Geography 1st by Kaul 9780367712006 1000897249

ISBN 10: 1000897249

ISBN 13: 9780367712006 

Author: Kaul 

This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India. Given its ambiguous relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical reality, myth has suffered an uncertain status in the field of professional history, with the latter’s preference for scientifism over more creative orders of representation. Myths and Places rehabilitates myth, not as history’s primeval ‘Other’, nor as an instrument of socio-religious propagation, but as communitarian mechanisms by which societies made sense of themselves and their world. It argues that myths helped communities fashion their identities and their habitat/habitus, and were fashioned by these in turn. This book explores diverse forms of territorial becoming and belonging in a grassroots approach from across India, studying them in culturally sensitive ways to recover local life-worlds and their self-understanding. Further, challenging the stereotypical bracketing of the mythical with the sacred and the material with the historical, the multidisciplinary essays in the book examine myth in relation to not only religion but other historical phenomena such as ecology, ethnicity, urbanism, mercantilism, migration, politics, tourism, art, philosophy, performance, and the everyday. This book will be of interest to scholars and general readers of Indian history, regional studies, cultural geography, mythology, religious studies, and anthropology.

1 Reclaiming Myth, Emplacing History

Hills and Mountains

2 The Mountain Numen: Myth and Everyday Life in Kangra and Chamba

3 Toponymic Tales: Myth, Memory, and Place-Making in Monyul

Plains and Deserts

4 Ecology, Mythic Imagination, and Kṛṣṇa Worship in Early Mathurā

5 The First Rajput Hero: Hammīra and the Making of Rajasthan

Rivers and Forests

6 Myths of Purity and the Miracle of Water by the Banks of the Ganga-Yamuna

7 Between Earth and Sky: The Kuinka Narrative of Origin and Self in Belgar

Cities and Coasts

8 Kāśī as Space and Notion in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina Myths

9 Tales of Two Cities: Valabhī and Dhārā as Narrated in the Prabandhacintāmaṇi

10 The Patriarch King: Myths from a Jewish Homeland in Kodungallur

11 Myth as Palimpsest: Performance and Provenance of the Tamil Śilappadikāram

Supra-Region

12 Peregrination as Pedagogy: Ádi Śaṃkarācārya’s Digvijaya and the Idea of India