Myths and Places

This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India.

Given its ambiguous relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical reality, myth has suffered an uncertain status in the field of professional history, with the latter’s preference for scientifism over more creative orders of representation. Myths and Places rehabilitates myth, not as history’s primeval ‘Other’, nor as an instrument of socio-religious propagation, but as communitarian mechanisms by which societies made sense of themselves and their world. It argues that myths helped communities fashion their identities and their habitat/habitus, and were fashioned by these in turn. This book explores diverse forms of territorial becoming and belonging in a grassroots approach from across India, studying them in culturally sensitive ways to recover local life-worlds and their self-understanding. Further, challenging the stereotypical bracketing of the mythical with the sacred and the material with the historical, the multidisciplinary essays in the book examine myth in relation to not only religion but other historical phenomena such as ecology, ethnicity, urbanism, mercantilism, migration, politics, tourism, art, philosophy, performance, and the everyday.

This book will be of interest to scholars and general readers of Indian history, regional studies, cultural geography, mythology, religious studies, and anthropology.

Shonaleeka Kaul is a cultural and intellectual historian of early India. She is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, and has also been the Malathy Singh Distinguished Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Yale University, USA; the Jan Gonda Fellow in Indology at Leiden University, The Netherlands; and the DAAD Professor of History at Heidelberg University, Germany.

She has authored The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rajatarangini (2018) and Imagining the Urban: Sanskrit and the City in Early India (2010), and edited Retelling Time: Alternative Temporalities from Premodern South Asia (2021), Eloquent Spaces: Meaning and Community in Early Indian Architecture (2019) and Cultural History of Early South Asia (2014). Translations by her include Hitopadesha (2022) and Looking Within: Life Lessons from Lal Ded, the Kashmiri Shaiva Mystic (2019).