In 1989, Heidrun Bruckner and Viveka Rai discovered a manuscript in the Gundert estate of the Tubingen University library archives that turned out to be an oral text in the Dravidian Tulu language written down in an old form of the Kannada script. It can be assumed that it was collected in the 1840s for someone in the Basel mission, presumably either Herrmann Mogling or Gottfried Weigle, missionaries who were studying both Kannada and Tulu. The manuscript contains two epic narratives that can be identified as paddanas, a popular oral genre in the Tulu language dealing with the lives and feats of local deities and heroes. The book presents on facing pages an edition of the texts in Roman transliteration with diacritical marks and an English translation of the texts. In an extensive introduction, the editors analyze and contextualize the two epics and sketch the history of research on oral Tulu literature from its beginnings to the present day. Narrative themes and stylistic features of the 19th-century texts are compared to other specimens of the genre collected in more recent times. The book will be of interest to Indologists, South Asia anthropologists, Dravidologists, folklorists and scholars of oral narratives.

The book consists of a collection of essays on aspects of Tulu oral literature and its cultural and religious context. Taking sung poetic ritual texts from the west coast of South India (coastal Karnataka) as her starting point, the author addresses the relationship between text structure and the social and geographical distribution of particular local and subregional cults; questions of gender and genre, of the correlation between narrative and ritual dramatization especially with respect to death, and of success and failure of rituals in the local perception. One essay studies features of South Indian popular cults in a wider perspective. Two of the nine essays discuss historical material relating to Basel Mission activities in the area and compare texts collected in the 19th century with versions collected by the author in the 1980s. The last paper provides a short synopsis of the author's 1995 German monograph on the topic.

This volume deals with South Indian Sanskrit manuscripts, predominantly on palm leaf and rarely older than three to four centuries, and their role in a manuscript culture that had a significant impact on Indian intellectual history for around two millennia.

The volume examines translation of key German texts into the modern Indian languages as well as translation from the vernacular languages of South Asia into German. Our key concerns are shifting historical contexts, concepts, and translation practices. Bringing an intellectual history dimension to translation studies, we explore the history of translation, translators, and sites of translation. The organization of the volume follows some key questions. Which texts were being translated? At what point or period in time did this happen? What were the motivations behind these translations? Topics covered range from thematic nodes or clusters, e.g., translations of Economics texts and ideas into Urdu, or the translation of Marx and Engels into Marathi, to personal endeavours, such as the first Hindi translation of Goethe’s Faust done by Bholanath Sharma in 1939. Missionary as well as Marxist activist translation work from Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu is included too. On the other hand, German translations of Tagore and Gandhi setting in shortly after 1912 are also examined. Also discussed are political strategies of publication of translations from modern Indian languages guiding the output of publishing houses in the GDR after 1949. Further included are the translator’s perspective and the contemporary translation and literary culture. What happens through the process of linguistic translation in the realm of cultural translation? What can a historical study of translation tell us about the history of Indo-German intellectual entanglements in the long twentieth century? The volume brings together multifaceted interdisciplinary research work from South Asian and German studies to answer some of these questions.

Contributed articles on various aspects of Sanskrit literature and Hindu philosophy; includes bibliographical list of K. Krishnamoorthy publications and research articles.

Research papers on various aspects of Tulu culture and folklore; presented at various conferences.