Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online

Dādū Dayāl (1545?-1603) was a religious teacher and poet in the Sant tradition who lived in Rajasthan and gave rise to a sect named the Dādūpanth (“Path of Dādū”). Dādū is the respectful endearing Rajasthani term for “grandfather” rather than a variant of the Muslim name Dā῾ūd. Dayāl(u) (“Compassionate”), sometimes also Dīndayāl(u) (“Compassionate with the Afflicted”), is an epithet attached to his name. Both epithets were used by Dādū himself for God and were hence applied by his followers to the master himself.LifeOn Dādū’s life, the only near-contemporary sources are the h…

I had the misfortune of being born with the stigma of [being] an Untouchable. However, it is not my fault; but I will not die a Hindu, for this is in my power. (B.R. Ambedkar [see Zelliot, 1992, 206]) Debates on Nomenclature“Dalit” (meaning downtrodden, broken, torn into pieces) was first used in the context of caste by Jotirao Govindrao Phule (1827-1890), the leader of the Satya Shodhak Samaj, a 19th-century anti-Brahmanical movement. The Marathi word gained prominence as a collective pan-Indian signifier from the 1970s onward due to …

“Dalit” today is the most widely used term in the English language and in scholarly circles for the South Asian subpopulation of former unfree agrarian servants, members of India’s lowest castes­ whose very touch was widely regarded to be polluting by those who consider themselves higher. Precolonial India lacked any single term for Dalits, and the relatively recent English-language coinage “Untouchable” (Charsley, 1996) expresses a particular theory of caste according to which caste itself is u…

Dance: Classical Tradition Dance: Regional Tradition: KeralaBibliography

The concept of Hindu dance encompasses many regional practices, religious traditions, and forms of performance, reflecting the expansive term “Hindu.” In tracing the concept of Hindu dance, it becomes apparent that several practices that precede the expression “Hindu” and “Hinduism” have influenced the formation of significant bodily and aesthetic religious traditions and beliefs. There is, today, a plethora of dance forms with connections to Hindu values, philosophies, worldviews, and themes, t…

Kerala, the southwestern-most state in peninsular India located between the mountain ranges of the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, occupies a total area of 62,543 km2 and defines a coastline of 580 km. Its geographical position and abundance of natural plant products add to its natural beauty and serenity, and Malayalis popularly refer to it as “God’s own country.” The deities, pilgrimage, and traditions of Kerala reflect aesthetic beauty and diversity (Pati, 2009). Such diversity can be observed in the performative t…

The Daśanāmī order is a Hindu monastic federation that according to its own tradition was founded and organized by the famous Advaita Vedānta philosopher Śaṅkara. The hagiographic accounts of Śaṅkara’s ascetic life, the texts describing the normative structure of the order attributed to him, and the many influential philosophical texts attributed to Śaṅkara and his disciples, taken together, have endowed this order with considerable prestige and influence. If one accepts the conventional date…

Dattātreya is a puranic deity, in origin a tantric antinomian yogin later sanitized and adapted to the devotional milieu of the Purāṇas. The mythical accounts present him as the son of the  ṛṣi Atri (“Devourer”; son of Brahmā and author of vedic hymns) and of his chaste wife Anasūyā (“Non-Envious One”). Thanks to the help offered by Anasūyā to the triad ( trimūrti) of Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva (through her śakti, she had restored the sun’s light, which had been obscured by the pious Śāṇḍilī, who wished to save her husband Kauśika, cursed by sage Māṇḍavya that…

Dayananda Saraswati (1824­–1883), as he came to be known, was born into a Brahman family of the Audichya caste in the Morbi district, Gujarat. His earlier name was Dayaram Mulshankar. At an early age, this Śaiva reformer left his parental home and began his journey in search of mokṣa. As an itinerant reformer, he wandered in the Kumaon Mountains of the Himalayas and the Vindhya ranges. He walked in Doab regions and traveled to Banaras, Calcutta, Bombay, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh. Dayananda’s last days were spent in Rajasthan, where he emerged…

As a biological phenomenon, death is universal. On a general level, reflections on death show many similarities cross-culturally. Coping with death through ritual practice can be observed in every society; ritual actions such as funerary rites, rituals of mourning, and rites of remembering as well as various concepts of death and afterlife are thought to try to conquer death, regenerate life, achieve immortality, and continue life after death (Bloch & Parry, 1982). Despite these conceptual simil…

Hindus in diaspora make up the most significant proportion of Hinduism in Denmark. However, Hinduism is also represented among the ethnic Danish community, either as an alternative or a supplement to the Evangelical Lutheran Church (the national church of Denmark), of which more than 80% of Danish citizens are members. Almost two thousand people of primarily Danish ethnic origin are a part of what could be termed Hindu-related groups (e.g. ISKCON, Radhasoamis, and Brahma Kumaris), but many more are related to Hindu-inspired groups (e.g. Transcendental Meditation and other yoga and …

Courtesans between Power, Shame, and Fame Devadāsī (slave of god) ranks among the most controversial and powerful incentives of Western fantasies about the East. As “container term,” it came to frame nearly all women working in the Indian public sphere, both sacred and secular; thereby it obliterated large differences in regional, historical, social, and professional hierarchies. Other terms that have been very productive historically are the Sanskrit gaṇikā (precious, courtesan) and the Anglicized nautch (from Skt. naṭ-, “to dance”) . The encounter among Western travelers…