BiblioVault - Books about Hinduism

The Tamil Veda

Pillan's Interpretation of the Tiruvaymoli

John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan

University of Chicago Press, 1989

In this multifaceted work, John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan clarify historical developments in South Asian religion and make important contributions to the methodology of textual interpretation and the comparative study of world religions.

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Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism

Edited by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

University of Chicago Press, 1990

"A wider range than usual of Sanskrit texts: not only interesting Vedic, epic, and mythological texts but also a good sampling of ritual and ethical texts. . . . There are also extracts from texts usually neglected, such as medical treatises, works on practical politics, and guides to love and marriage. . . . Readings from the vernacular Hindi, Bengali, and Tamil traditions [serve to] enrich the collection and demonstrate how Hinduism flourished not just in Sanskrit but also in its many mother tongues."—Francis X. Clooney, Journal of Asian Studies

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Theft of a Tree

Nandi Timmana

Harvard University Press, 2022

A thousand-year-old story of Krishna and his wife Satyabhama retold by the most famous court poet of the Vijayanagara Empire.

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband’s affections.

Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna does so to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, Krishna plants the tree for Satyabhama—but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. The poem’s narrative unity, which was unprecedented in the literary tradition, prefigures the modern Telugu novel.

Theft of a Tree is presented here in the Telugu script alongside the first English translation.

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Theft of a Tree

A Tale by the Court Poet of the Vijayanagara Empire

Nandi Timmana

Harvard University Press

The first English translation of a thousand-year-old story of Krishna and his wife Satyabhama, retold by the most famous court poet of the Vijayanagara Empire.

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband’s affections. Timmana based his work on a popular millennium-old Krishna tale.

Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the wish-granting pārijāta tree from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna takes the tree to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, he plants the pārijāta for Satyabhama—but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness.

This is the first English translation of the poem, which prefigures the modern Telugu novel with its unprecedented narrative unity.

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Trance-Migrations

Stories of India, Tales of Hypnosis

Lee Siegel

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Listen to what I am about to tell you: do not read this book alone. You really shouldn’t. In one of the most playful experiments ever put between two covers, every other section of Trance-Migrations prescribes that you read its incantatory tales out loud to a lover, friend, or confidant, in order to hypnotize in preparation for Lee Siegel’s exploration of an enchanting India. To read and hear this book is to experience a particular kind of relationship, and that’s precisely the point: hypnosis, the book will demonstrate, is an essential aspect of our most significant relationships, an inherent dimension of love, religion, medicine, politics, and literature, a fundamental dynamic between lover and beloved, deity and votary, physician and patient, ruler and subject, and, indeed, reader and listener.

Even if you can’t read this with a partner—and I stress that you certainly ought to—you will still be in rich company. There is Shambaraswami, an itinerant magician, hypnotist, and storyteller to whom villagers turn for spells that will bring them wealth or love; José-Custodio de Faria, a Goan priest hypnotizing young and beautiful women in nineteenth-century Parisian salons; James Esdaile, a Scottish physician for the East India Company in Calcutta, experimenting on abject Bengalis with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic; and Lee Siegel, a writer traveling in India to learn all that he can about hypnosis, yoga, past life regressions, colonialism, orientalism, magic spells, and, above all, the power of story. And then there is you: descending through these histories—these tales within tales, trances within trances, dreams within dreams—toward a place where the distinctions between reverie and reality dissolve.

Here the world within the book and that in which the book is read come startlingly together. It’s one of the most creative works we have ever published, a dazzling combination of literary prowess, scholarly erudition, and psychological exploration—all tempered by warm humor and a sharp wit. It is informing, entertaining, and, above all, mesmerizing.

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A Treatise on Dharma

Yajnavalkya

Harvard University Press, 2019

A new English translation of the most influential legal text in medieval India.

A Treatise on Dharma, written in the fourth or fifth century, is the finest example of the genre of dharmaśāstra—texts on religious, civil, and criminal law and the duties of rulers—that informed Indian life for a thousand years. It illuminates major cultural innovations, such as the prominence of documents in commercial and legal proceedings, the use of ordeals in resolving disputes, and the growing importance of yoga in spiritual practices.

Composed by an anonymous author during the reign of the imperial Guptas, the Treatise is ascribed to the Upanishadic philosopher Yajnavalkya, whose instruction of a group of sages serves as the frame narrative for the work. It became the most influential legal text in medieval India, and a twelfth-century interpretation came to be considered “the law of the land” under British rule.

This translation of A Treatise on Dharma, based on a new critical edition and presented alongside the Sanskrit original in the Devanagari script, opens the classical age of ancient Indian law to modern readers.

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The Two Oldest Veda Manuscripts

Facsimile Edition of Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā 1–20 (Saṃhitā- and Padapāṭha) from Nepal and Western Tibet (c. 1150 CE)

Michael Witzel

Harvard University Press

This volume offers unexpected insights into the history of the Veda, the earliest texts of South Asia, and their underlying oral transmission. In side-by-side facsimiles, Michael Witzel and Qinyuan Wu present the two oldest known Veda manuscripts, the Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā of the White Yajurveda and its contemporaneous sister text, a Vājasaneyi Padapāṭha, recently found in western Tibet. These two manuscripts have retained an unusual style of representing the pitched accents, and their juxtaposition in this edition invites comparison between the oral Veda transmission of a thousand years ago and the recitation still maintained today. Both manuscripts are important testimonies for the history of the Vedas, their medieval transmission, and their first codification in writing. As such, they are of great interest to historians, Indologists, and scholars studying the interface of oral and written traditions.

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