Bodies of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India - Softcover

Hess, Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199374171 ISBN 13: 9780199374175

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Kabir 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 Song is rich in stories of individuals and families, villages and towns, religious and secular organizations, castes and communities. Dialogue between religious/spiritual Kabir and social/political Kabir is a continuous theme throughout the book: ambiguously located between Hindu and Muslim cultures, Kabir rejected religious identities, pretentions, and hypocrisies. But even while satirizing the religious, he composed stunning poetry of religious experience and psychological insight. A weaver by trade, Kabir also criticized caste and other inequalities and today serves as an icon for Dalits and all who strive to remove caste prejudice and oppression.

About this title

About the Author

Linda Hess is a Senior Lecturer of Religious Studies at Stanford University.

Review

"[A] rich and complex book...Bodies of Song is a deeply personal testimony. Hess certainly succeeds in giving the reader a feeling of actually accompanying her on her travels, her interaction and conversations with local people, and her perception of their values, goals, and emotions. She makes us realize the 'embodiedness,' the physical and social experience inseparable from the performance of Kabir's songs...[A]n exceptionally good read-for Indologists, scholars of oral traditions and cultural communication, historians of religion, and, not least, the many who are involved in one way or another with the infinite complexity of India. All will, I am sure, find that spending time in Linda Hess's company is not also challenging, but also rewarding."--History of Religions

"Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty."--CHOICE

"This wide-ranging and impassioned study will remain a benchmark of Kabir studies for decades to come." --Religious Studies Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0199374171
• ISBN 13: 9780199374175
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 488