Love In South Asia

Publisher description

In the twelfth century, the Catholic Church attempted a thoroughgoing reform of marriage and sexual behavior aimed at eradicating sexual desire from Christian lives. Seeking a refuge from the very serious condemnations of the Church and relying on a courtly culture that was already preoccupied with honor and secrecy, European poets, romance writers, and lovers devised a vision of love as something quite different from desire. Romantic love was thus born as a movement of covert resistance. In The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, William M. Reddy illuminates the birth of a cultural movement that managed to regulate selfish desire and render it innocent—or innocent enough. Reddy strikes out from this historical moment on an international exploration of love, contrasting the medieval development of romantic love in Europe with contemporaneous eastern traditions in Bengal and Orissa, and in Heian Japan from 900-1200 CE, where one finds no trace of an opposition between love and desire. In this comparative framework, Reddy tells an appealing tale about the rise and fall of various practices of longing, underscoring the uniqueness of the European concept of sexual desire.

A one-volume commentary, written and edited by South Asian Biblical scholars on all the books of the Bible.

An introduction to the peoples and cultures of South Asia

Marrying in South Asia looks closely at the changing notions and practices of marriage in Bangladeshi, Pakistani and south Indian Muslims, Bhutanese ethnic groups, Nepali widows, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, south Asian gays and lesbians, middle class and urban, working class communities, and many other groups. With the globalising world as the backdrop, the essays in this volume examine the processes that make a marriage, the implications of marriage, cohabitation and divorce on domesticity and work, and the acknowledgement of multiple sexualities, as well as the contestations and conflicts including in the law courts that are part of the institution. The diverse ethnographic accounts, demographic analyses and economic investigations provide a wider window to marriage than is usually available in a single volume. This volume brings together scholars in sociology, anthropology, economics, demography, development studies, queer theory and gender studies, and historical research from around the world. It is a must-read for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology and South Asia studies.Marrying in South Asia looks closely at the changing notions and practices of marriage in Bangladeshi, Pakistani and south Indian Muslims, Bhutanese ethnic groups, Nepali widows, the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora, south Asian gays and lesbians, middle class and urban, working class communities, and many other groups. With the globalising world as the backdrop, the essays in this volume examine the processes that make a marriage, the implications of marriage, cohabitation and divorce on domesticity and work, and the acknowledgement of multiple sexualities, as well as the contestations and conflicts including in the law courts that are part of the institution. The diverse ethnographic accounts, demographic analyses and economic investigations provide a wider window to marriage than is usually available in a single volume. This volume brings together scholars in sociology, anthropology, economics, demography, development studies, queer theory and gender studies, and historical research from around the world. It is a must-read for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology and South Asia studies.Read more

Selection from the contemporary love poetry of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Fiji, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.