An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.

For my Blemishless Lord presents the text and translation of the exquisite poem Amalaṉ Āti Pirāṉ by Tiruppāṇ Āḻvār, which is part of the Śrīvaiṣṇava canon, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham (6th – 9th centuries CE), together with the three Śrīvaiṣṇava commentaries in Tamil-Sanskrit Manipravalam (13th – 14th centuries) by key figures in the medieval religious history of South Asia, namely, Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai, Aḻakiya Maṇavāḷa Perumāḷ Nāyaṉār, and Vedānta Deśikaṉ. Offering the first fully annotated, complete translation of these exegetical writings, this volume analyses the language, commentary techniques, and theological positions of the commentators. Looking also at cultural, religious, and other allusions made by them, it places them in their literary, social, and religious backgrounds during a period of budding dissent within the Śrīvaiṣṇava community, to which they contributed at least in part. This rich resource is made available in English for the first time for students of Tamil and Manipravala, theology, religious history, and philology.

With fourteen articles written by well-known anthropologists, this book addresses the theme of representation in anthropology and explores the directions in which anthropology is moving following the debates of the 1980s.

This companion volume focuses on the application and practical ramifications of Indian ethics. Here Indian dharma ethics is moved from its preeminent religious origins and classical metaethical proclivity to, what Kant would call, practical reason – or in Aristotle’s poignant terms, ēhikos and phronēis –and in more modern parlance normative ethics. Our study examines a wide range of social and normative challenges facing people in such diverse areas as women’s rights, infant ethics, politics, law, justice, bioethics and ecology. As a contemporary volume, it builds linkages between existing theories and emerging moral issues, problems and questions in today’s India in the global arena. The volume brings together contributions from some 40 philosophers and contemporary thinkers on practical ethics, exploring both the scope and boundaries or limits of ethics as applied to everyday and real-life concerns and socio-economic challenges facing India in the context of a troubled globalizing world. As such, this collection draws on multiple forms of writing and research, including narrative ethics, interviews, critical case studies and textual analyses. The book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of Indian philosophy, Indian ethics, women and infant issues, social justice, environmental ethics, bioethics, animal ethics and cross-cultural responses to dominant Western moral thought. It will also be useful to researchers working on the intersection of Gandhi, sustainability, ecology, theology, feminism, comparative philosophy and dharma studies.

This text presents new English translations of 150 erotic poems composed in India's three classic languages, Old Tamil, Sanskrit and Maharasti Prakit. The poems are selected from anthologies that date from as early as the first century C.E.

This is a sequel to a volume published in 2011 by OUP under the title The Ubiquitous Śiva: Somānanda's Śivadṛṣṭi and his Tantric Interlocutors. The first volume offered an introduction, critical edition, and annotated translation of the first three chapters of the Śivadṛṣṭi of Somānanda, along with its principal commentary, the Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti, written by Utpaladeva. It dealt primarily with Śaiva theology and the religious views of competing esoteric traditions. The present volume presents the fourth chapter of the Śivadṛṣṭi and Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti and addresses a fresh set of issues that engage a distinct family of opposing schools and authors of mainstream Indian philosophical traditions. In this fourth chapter, Somānanda and Utpaladeva engage logical and philosophical works that exerted tremendous influence in the Indian subcontinent in its premodernity. Among the authors and schools addressed by Somānanda in this chapter are the Buddhist Epistemologists, and Dharmakīrti in particular; the Hindu school of hermeneutics, i.e., the Mīmāṃsā; the Hindu realist schools of the logic- and debate-oriented Nyāya and their ontologically-oriented partners, the Vaiśeṣika; and the Hindu, dualist Sāṃkhya and Yoga schools. Throughout this chapter, Somānanda endeavors to explain his brand of Śaivism philosophically. Somānanda challenges his philosophical interlocutors with a single over-arching argument: he suggests that their views cannot cohere--they cannot be explained logically--unless their authors accept the Śaiva non-duality for which he advocates. The argument he offers, despite its historical influence, remains virtually unstudied. The Ubiquitous Śiva Volume II offers the first English translation of Chapter Four of the Śivadṛṣṭi and Śivadṛṣṭivṛtti along with an introduction and critical edition.