Overview for The 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 Himalays to the South. Most of the contributions were originally written for a seminar organized 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, Shankaranarayana), Tamil 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.
Claus Peter Zoller (Editor)
Claus Peter Zoller is Associate Professor of Hindi at the University of Oslo. In 1980 he did his PhD at the university of Heidelberg on the grammar of a Bhotia language of the Himalayas. In 1997 he habilitated at the University of Heidelberg with a thesis on an oral Mahabharata from the Western Himalayas. Since 2004 he is coordinator of the Heidelberg based Hindi text Database Project.
Heidrun Bruckner (Editor)
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 Sontheimer's 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 (Editor)
Hugh van Skyhawk is Associate Professor (Privatdozent) of Indology and History of South Asian Religions at the Institute of Indology of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. He has published widely on devotional religion (bhakti) and the cults of Hindu-Muslim saints of the Deccan. Since 1990 he was worked on the languages, cultures and religions of the ethnic groups of the Karakoram, publishing a monograph on the Gesar epic in the Burushaksi of Nager in 1996 and a more comprehensive monograph on the archaic alpine culture of the people of Hispar (Nager) in 2003.