Department of Sanskrit Studies

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Browsing Department of Sanskrit Studies by Author "Parasher-Sen, Aloka"
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    Bearing historywomen, death and the Jaina ritual of sallekhana
    ( 2011-08-01) Parasher-Sen, Aloka
    The largely-prescriptive Jaina literary texts contained severe strictures on women that forbade them from undertaking sallekhana (fasting to death) to attain spiritual liberation. However, fragmentary inscriptions written on stone slabs and pillars found in the Deccan indicate that women did undertake and experience this ritual practice. These records, written at the behest of those who took care of individuals going through sallekhana, enable us to juxtapose these two sources to argue that there was a dynamic regional religious and social milieu which prevailed over the didactic and normative depictions of an apparently pan-Indian Jaina sensibility. The idea and practice of spiritual liberation during early medieval times in this case study of the Deccan thus illustrates the gender and institutional history of the Jaina faith in its regional and local dimensions. © 2011 South Asian Studies Association of Australia.
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    Localities, Coins and the Transition to the Early State in the Deccan
    ( 2007-01-01) Parasher-Sen, Aloka
    Looking from the perspective of different localities while making the numismatic data central to our analysis, this article not only raises critical questions about the transition to early state, but also interrogates the nature of this state in the Deccan. Localities cannot be understood as isolated historical entities, but in the context of region-based studies they cannot be treated as mere peri-pheries either. Since this task necessarily entails a minute and an in-depth study of the sources, we shall take two illustrative examples of localities in what we call the Telangana and Andhra areas of the present-day state of Andhra Pradesh, with their nodal points and spread around the sites of Kotalingala–Dhullikatta–Peddabankur and Amaravati–Bhattiprolu–Vaddamanu respectively. The coins under discussion shall necessarily be related to the broader archaeological and material profile of these two localities. There is a general tendency among historians to first look at the history of a region from its broadest definition and then move to its smaller units. Here we prefer to first focus on the history of small entities or localities, and then move both vertically and horizontally to etch out the historical moorings of early society and state in the region as a whole—the Deccan in this case study. © 2007, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.
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    Naming and Social Exclusion: The Outcast and the Outsider
    ( 2011-10-03) Parasher-Sen, Aloka
    This chapter discusses the terms "outcast" and "outsider" as well as naming and social exclusion and begins with quotes from Michel de Certeau and B. R. Ambedkar. Social exclusion has been much written about in the past, but not in the context of how naming as a process interjected to define linkage between those who named and those who were named. Looking critically at naming in the present context provides space for understanding the multiple nodes of social exclusion, each in turn, throwing up a series of other names apparently synonymous to each other, yet different in their localization in time and space. This sort of flowering out from a strong linear stem enables the chapter to pattern and map the complex relationship between hierarchy and diversity in the social landscape of the subcontinent during a period of some of the most critical centuries in its evolution that has been defined as the period "between the empires."
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