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USA
University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton
1993
368pp, appendices, references, index, good copy in dustjacket. Madhu Natisar Nath is a Rajasthani farmer with no formal schooling. He is also a singer, a musician and a storyteller. At the centre of "A Carnival of Parting" are Madhu Nath's oral performances of two linked tales about the legendary Indian kings, Bharthari of Ujjain and Gopi Chand of Bengal. Both characters, while still in their prime, leave thrones and families to be initiated as yogis - a process rich in adventure and melodrama, one that offers unique insights into popular Hinduism's view of world renunciation. Ann Grodzins Gold presents these living oral epic traditions as flowing narratives, transmitting to Western readers the pleasures, moods and interactive dimensions of a village bard's performance. The tales are most profoundly concerned, Gold argues, with human rather than divine realities. In an afterword, she highlights their thematic emphases on politics, love and death. Madhu Nath's vital colloquial telling of Gopi Chand and Bharthari's stories depicts renunciation as inevitable and interpersonal attachments as doomed, yet celebrates human existence as a "carnival of parting". (When referring to this item please quote stockid 120443)
ISBN: 9780520075337
Related Subject Areas:
anthropology
Asian / Middle Eastern history
folklore
Hinduism
India
Religion
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