Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online
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Subject: Asian Studies
Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism presents the latest research on all the main aspects of the Hindu traditions. Its 438 essays are original work written by the world’s foremost scholars on Hinduism. The encyclopedia presents a balanced and even-handed view of Hinduism, recognizing the divergent perspectives and methods in the academic study of a religion that has ancient historical roots with many flourishing traditions today. Including all essays from the heralded printed edition, Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism is now to be regularly updated with new articles and available in a fully searchable, dynamic digital format.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Edited by: Knut A. Jacobsen (Editor-in-Chief), University of Bergen, and Helene Basu, University of Münster, Angelika Malinar, University of Zürich, Vasudha Narayanan, University of Florida (Associate Editors)
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Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism presents the latest research on all the main aspects of the Hindu traditions. Its 438 essays are original work written by the world’s foremost scholars on Hinduism. The encyclopedia presents a balanced and even-handed view of Hinduism, recognizing the divergent perspectives and methods in the academic study of a religion that has ancient historical roots with many flourishing traditions today. Including all essays from the heralded printed edition, Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism is now to be regularly updated with new articles and available in a fully searchable, dynamic digital format.
Subscriptions: see brill.com
Food
(5,597 words)
For millennia the obvious facts about food and eating have carried with them a particularly heavy cultural weight in India. After being laboriously produced, food can be manipulated and transformed in manifold ways: it may be shared, offered, distributed, or exchanged. Culinary practices are subject to explicit or implicit rules: what, with whom, and how food is eaten is prescribed as well as proscribed. Food is ingested and becomes part of the body. Therefore, food is a key symbol of personhood…
Date:
2020-05-18
Footprints
(3,126 words)
In what may seem an internal contradiction in Hindu culture, feet, as physical and social facts, are both despised as the lowliest and dirtiest part of the human body, and at the same time exalted in many forms, especially in the sensual
pādaghāta (foot-kicking) type of seasonal poetry and in devotional practices.An example of the low status of human feet is expressed by the phrase that is preventively used as an apology for stepping on – and possibly injuring or polluting – the earth. This phrase is part of the morning prayer called
Samudra Vasane Devi, which is dedicated to Bhūmi Devī (…
Date:
2020-05-18
Foreigner (Mleccha)
(3,861 words)
Sanskrit
mleccha and Pali/Prakrit
milakkha were terms used to describe foreigners as well as indigenous tribes and peoples of the Indian subcontinent who were considered outsiders to a value system built around the concept of
dharma initially understood as a universal natural order that later became the basis of social and political law. They were used in several contexts to define speech (
vāc), language (
bhāṣā), area of habitation or country (
deśa), community (
jāti), and a variety of cultural practices that hinged around how the literature of the Brahmans, Buddhis…
Date:
2020-05-18
France
(3,338 words)
As in other Western countries, the presence of Hindu traditions in France raises the issue of the globalization of Hinduism through two topics: the worldwide migrations of Hindu populations and the global diffusion of religious movements of Hindu origin in the West. Indeed, these traditions take on two main forms in France. The first concerns the ritual and community practices imported by South Asian Hindus mainly in Paris and its suburbs. The second form corresponds to the philosophical, religi…
Date:
2020-05-18