Concept of Hero in Indian Culture

The concept of the hero (vira, sura nayaka) is of crucial importance in Indian civilization, from the Vedic to the present times. The authors of the papers in this volume include scholars of Indology, history, religion, literature, politics and anthropology. They explore the concept of the hero in written and oral sources, in different historical epochs and regions of India, from the Himalayas to the South. Most of the contributions were originally written for a seminar organised by Gunther Dietz-Sontheimer at Heidelberg. He particularly stressed the continuities of the concept of hero in various realms of Indian culture, including folk religion. Strength, courage, fearlessness, self-confidence, righteousness, providing protection, special powers and feats, often a miraculous birth and a premature violent death, self-sacrifice or martyrdom are some of the features that heroes studied in the present volume share. Papers study 'The Birth of the Hero in Ancient India', including Vedic gods as well as the Jina and the Buddha (Bollee), 'Heroes and Kings' (Jansen), 'Kings as Heroes' in the Sanskrit carita literature (Thapar), and 'Himalayan heroes' (Zoller), as well as heroes in oral folk epics (van Skyhawk, Shankara-narayana),Tarnil folk narrative (Ferro-Luzzi), modern literature (Gatzlaff; Oesterheld) and Sanskrit drama (Byrski). Other papers deal with political leadership (Shelke), with Hanuman as Mahavira (Duncan) and 'From Sacrificer to Hero' (Sakharov). This is an indispensable volume for the scholars of Indian religion and culture.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; A Note on the Birth of the Hero in Ancient India; The Hero in Sanskrit Drama; Hanuman Mahavirasvami; Two Clever Heroes of Tamil Folk Narrative; Kali -- A Hero between Tradition & Progress; Hero & King; The Frustrated Hero; From Sacrificer to Hero; The Hero in the Junjappa Epic; Leadership in Maharashtra during the British Raj; On Heroes in the Karakoram; Of Kings as Heroes; Heroes in the Caritra-Bakhar, Povada & Akhyana of Seventeenth & Eighteenth Century Maharastra; Himalayan Heroes; Index.

About the Author :
Heidrun Bruckner (b. 1949) is Professor of Indology and South Asian Studies at the University of Wurzburg, Germany. She is the author of a monograph on texts and rituals of Tulu folk religion (Furstliche Feste, Wiesbaden 1995) and co-editor of Gunther-Dietz Sontheimers Essays on Khandoba (Delhi 1997), his Essays on Religion, Literature and Law (Delhi 2004), and a volume of essays in his memory In the Company of Gods (Delhi 2005). Hugh van Skyhawk is Associate Professor (Privatdozent) of Indology and History of South Asian Religions at the Institute ofIndology of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Claus Peter Zoller studied Classical and Modern Indology, and Germanic philology in Tubingen and Heidelberg. He did his Ph.D. in 1980 on the grammar of a Bhotia language of the Garhwal Himalaya. Then followed fellowships from the DAAD and the DFG for the study of Pahari languages and Himalayan folk traditions. Between 1985 and 1994 he was representative of the South Asia Institute in New Delhi and assistant professor in Frankfurt and Heidelberg. He then had a two years fellowship from the DFG for the completion of the habilitation with a postdoctoral thesis on the grammar and poetic style of an oral version of the Mahabharata from the Garhwal Himalaya. Since 1997 he has been working as a research fellow in the Pakistan-German research project Culture Area Karakorum on the dialects and oral folk traditions of Indus-Kohistan.