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The Mahābhārata is one of the two major Smriti texts and Sanskrit epics of ancient India revered in Hinduism, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. It narrates the events and aftermath of the Kurukshetra War, a war of succession between two groups of princely cousins, the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas.
Parashurama, also referred to as Rama Jamadagnya, Rama Bhargava and Virarama, is the sixth avatar among the Dashavatara of the preserver god Vishnu in Hinduism. He is believed to be one of the Chiranjivis (Immortals), who will appear at the end of the Kali Yuga to be the guru of Vishnu's tenth and last incarnation, Kalki.
The Kama Sutra is an ancient Indian Hindu Sanskrit text on sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life. Attributed to Vātsyāyana, the Kama Sutra is neither exclusively nor predominantly a sex manual on sex positions, but rather was written as a guide to the art of living well, the nature of love, finding a life partner, maintaining one's love life, and other aspects pertaining to pleasure-oriented faculties of human life. It is a sutra-genre text with terse aphoristic verses that have survived into the modern era with different bhāṣyas. The text is a mix of prose and anustubh-meter poetry verses. The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfillment as one of the proper goals of life. Its chapters discuss methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics. The majority of the book is about the philosophy and theory of love, what triggers desire, what sustains it, and how and when it is good or bad.
Krishna Dvaipayana, better known as Vyasa or Veda Vyasa, is a revered rishi (sage) portrayed in most Hindu traditions. He is traditionally regarded as the author of the epic Mahābhārata.
Kamadhenu, also known as Surabhi, is a divine bovine-goddess described in Hinduism as the mother of all cows. She is a miraculous cow of plenty who provides her owner whatever they desire and is often portrayed as the mother of other cattle. In iconography, she is generally depicted as a white cow with a female head and breasts, the wings of a bird, and the tail of a peafowl or as a white cow containing various deities within her body. Kamadhenu is not worshipped independently as a goddess. Rather, she is honored by the Hindu veneration of cows, who are regarded as her earthly embodiments.
The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali is a collection of Sanskrit sutras (aphorisms) on the theory and practice of yoga – 195 sutras and 196 sutras. The Yoga Sutras was compiled in the early centuries CE, by the sage Patanjali in India who synthesized and organized knowledge about yoga from much older traditions.
Alain Daniélou was a French historian, Indologist, intellectual, musicologist, translator, writer, and notable Western convert to and expert on the Shaivite branch of Hinduism.
Josephine Acosta Pasricha is a Filipino indologist who translated the "Ramacharitamanasa" of Tulasi Dasa, the Hindi translation of the Ramayana by Valmiki in Sanskrit, into the Filipino language.
Moriz Winternitz was a scholar from Austria who began his Indology contributions working with Max Müller at the Oxford University. An eminent Sanskrit scholar, he worked as a professor in Prague in the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University after 1902, for nearly thirty years. His Geschichte der indischen Literatur, published 1908–1922, offered a comprehensive literary history of Sanskrit texts. The contributions on a wide range of Sanskrit texts by Winternitz have been an influential resource for modern era studies on Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Indrani, also known as Shachi, is the queen of the devas in Hinduism. Described as tantalisingly beautiful, proud and kind, she is the daughter of the asura Puloman and the consort of the king of the devas, Indra.
Maitreyi was an Indian / bhartiya philosopher who lived during the later Vedic period in ancient India. She is mentioned in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad as one of two wives of the Vedic sage Yajnavalkya; she is estimated to have lived around the 8th century BCE. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata and the Gṛhyasūtras, however, Maitreyi is described as an Advaita philosopher who never married. In ancient Sanskrit literature, she is known as a brahmavadini.
Mahamahopadhyaya Pandit Ram Avatar Sharma (1877–1929) was an Indian Sanskrit scholar and academic, apart from being an indologist and historian. He was born in a Bhumihar Brahmin family of scholars and pursued the same path of scholarship, becoming the professor of Sanskrit in University of Patna in pre-independence years. He was also a renowned Indologist. Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India and a favourite student of Pandit Sharma, was instrumental in getting his works published after his death. His son, Professor Pandit Nalin Vilochan Sharma was also a professor of Hindi Literature in University of Patna and started the Nai Kavita; New Poetry movement in Hindi literature.
The Bhagavad Gita, often referred to as the Gita, is a 700-verse Hindu scripture, which is part of the epic Mahabharata. It forms the chapters 23–40 of book 6 of the Mahabharata called the Bhishma Parva. The work is dated to the second half of the first millennium BCE.
Nalini Balbir is a French Indologist who lives in Paris. She is a scholar of Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism. She was previously a student of Indologist Colette Caillat. She is known for her work on the publication of the Catalogue of the Jain Manuscripts of the British Library published by the Institute of Jainology.
Venkataraman Raghavan (1908–1979) was a Sanskrit scholar and musicologist. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Padma Bhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Award for Sanskrit, and authored over 120 books and 1200 articles.
James L. Fitzgerald is an Indologist at Brown University. He studied at the University of Chicago, receiving his B.A. in 1971, his M.A. in Sanskrit in 1974 and his Ph.D. in Sanskrit and South Asian Civilizations in 1980. At Chicago he studied primarily with J. A. B. van Buitenen. From 1978 Fitzgerald joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee. In 2007 he was appointed Purandara Das Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit in the Department of Classics, Brown University.
Francis Wilford (1761–1822) was an Indologist, Orientalist, fellow member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and constant collaborator of its journal – Asiatic Researches – contributing a number of fanciful, sensational, controversial, and highly unreliable articles on ancient Hindu geography, mythography, and other subjects.
The Spitzer Manuscript is the oldest surviving philosophical manuscript in Sanskrit, and possibly the oldest Sanskrit manuscript of any type related to Buddhism and Hinduism discovered so far. The manuscript was found in 1906 in the form of a pile of more than 1,000 palm leaf fragments in the Ming-oi, Kizil Caves, China during the third Turfan expedition headed by Albert Grünwedel. It is named after Moritz Spitzer, whose team first studied it in 1927–28.
Charlotte Vaudeville was a French Indologist, best known for her researches into the bhakti traditions and literature. Her treatises on the medieval saint Kabir have been lauded. She retired as a professor at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 in 1988.
Françoise Mallison is a French Indologist specialising in the history and religious traditions of Gujarat. She was the Head of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Roland Lardinois (27 February 2010). "Influential Indologist". The Hindu. Chennai, India. Retrieved 2010-03-01.
