Description
Book SynopsisKabir was a great iconoclastic-mystic poet of fifteenth-century North India; his poems were composed orally, written down by others in manuscripts and books, and transmitted through song. Scholars and translators usually attend to written collections, but these present only a partial picture of the Kabir who has remained vibrantly alive through the centuries mostly in oral forms. Entering the worlds of singers and listeners in rural Madhya Pradesh, Bodies of Song combines ethnographic and textual study in exploring how oral transmission and performance shape the content and interpretation of vernacular poetry in North India. The book investigates textual scholars'' study of oral-performative traditions in a milieu where texts move simultaneously via oral, written, audio/video-recorded, and electronic pathways.As texts and performances are always socially embedded, Linda Hess brings readers into the lives of those who sing, hear, celebrate, revere, and dispute about Kabir. Bodies of Son
Trade ReviewRecommended. * J. Bussanich, CHOICE *
Hess decodes (for the uninitiated) the experience, confidence, and wisdom of ordinary men and women of India. She shows us how people have been living out their inner and outer lives and how they have been enriching further the traditional "bodies of song" through performance. By this decoding, Hess has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of some of the most poignant aspects of Indian religiosity. * Purushottam Agrawal, ITM University, The Journal of Religion *
Table of ContentsTransliteration ; Acknowledgements ; Preface ; 1. "You Must Meet Prahladji!" ; 2. Oral Tradition in the Twenty-first Century: Observing Texts ; 3. "True Words of Kabir": Adventures in Authenticity ; 4. In the Jeweler's Bazaar: Malwa's Kabir ; 5. Oral Tradition in the Twenty-first Century: Exploring Theory ; 6. A Scorching Fire, A Cool Pool ; 7. Fighting over Kabir's Dead Body ; 8. Political/Spiritual Kabir ; References ; Index
