Bøker av Shonaleeka Kaul

Retelling Time challenges the hegemony of colonial modernity over academic disciplines and over ways in which we think about something as fundamental as time. It reclaims a bouquet of alternative practices of time from premodern South Asia, which stem from worldviews that have been marginalized.These practices relate to a range of classical and vernacular genres including aläk¿ra, therav¿da, yoga, r¿makath¿, tasawwuf, ¿y¿räga, pur¿¿a, trik¿-tantra, navya-ny¿ya, pratyabhijñ¿, carita, k¿¿¿y¿¿¿am and mägala k¿vya. These represent multiple languages such as Sanskrit, Persian, Pali, Prakrit, Awadhi, Malayalam, Kannada, and Bengali, as well as diverse streams, from Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sufi Islam to logic, yoga, tantra, theatre, and poetics. Retelling Time questions the modern Eurocentric belief in an empty, homogenous, abbreviated, secular and irreversible time. It proposes instead that that premodern South Asia invested time with cultural function and value, which ranged from the contingent to the transcendent, the quotidian to the cosmic, the fleeting to the eternal, and the social to the spiritual. Accordingly, time was reworked --- stretched, melded, collapsed, recursed, rolled over, and even extinguished. Sacred, social, aesthetic, scientific, fictional, historical, and performative South Asian traditions are seen here in conversation with one other, mediated by an ethical paradigm. Their collective challenge is to decolonize our ways of knowing and being.This book will be of interest to scholars of South Asian history, philosophy of history, anthropology, literature, Sanskrit, post colonial studies, cultural studies, studies of temporality and of the Global South.

The Hitopadesha-whichliterally means good advice-was composed in Sanskrit sometime between the ninthand tenth centuries CE by Pandit Narayana. Arranged in four fascinatingsections-Winning Friends, Losing Friends, Waging War, and Making Peace-thevignettes that comprise the text include tales of anthropomorphized birds andanimals who are imbued with all too human qualities and frailties. Using humour, satire, and unconventionalmethods of narration, the stories in the collection prescribe canny andpragmatic responses to a range of very human situations, ambitions, problems,and dilemmas. Not only does the book have advice for the rulerwho is too timid or too haughty, but also for the minister who must serve him,as for the innocent husband with the conniving wife, the beautiful wife withthe undeserving husband, friends turned enemies, enemies reconciled, cleverpeople, foolish people, the greedy, the distraught, and so on. TheHitopadesha, like the Panchatantra, is among the most widelytranslated classical texts of India. This new version by historian andSanskritist Shonaleeka Kaul is an idiomatic translation in simple narrativeprose and free verse that retains the freshness and wit of the original.