„Nap s Hold nélkül ragyog a fény”: Klasszikus hindi irodalom

Book

The volume "The Light Shines Without Sun and Moon": Classical Hindi Literature presents Hindi literature from the 14th to early 19th centuries and provides insight into some of its important issues in eleven chapters. Several chapters are based on independent studies that appeared between 1996 and 2020 in various forums, others have been written for this volume to fill in lacunae. Juxtaposed they provide a comprehensive picture of the main currents of Early Hindi literature. The chapters address, among others, questions, of social embeddedness, poetic and linguistic forms, performance. The first two studies review Indian and Western ideas about the emergence of Hindi poetry and then, in the light of recent research, present what we know about its literary beginnings. Further studies examine early poetry in Khari Boli, the grammatical template which serves as the basis of modern Hindi and Urdu, and relate its emergence to mixed language compositions and to Mughal efforts to develop a hybrid Indian culture. Another study presents the aesthetics of the classicizing rīti literature. Several chapters deal with individual poets, starting with the two representative bhakti saints, Kabīr and Mīrābāī. While Kabīr places the inaffable, “qualitiless” (nirgun) deity at the center of the search for God, Mīrābāī worships Krishna, the God with stories and qualities. Separate chapters introduce lesser-known poets such as Bajid, who was one of the most popular nirgun poets in handwritten codices but almost completely forgotten in printed books, or the court poet Thakur of Bundelkhand, several of whose poems were published for the first time by the writer of these lines. In addition to bhakti, the classicist literature is represented by Bihārī, considered the greatest representative of the rīti genre, and Anandghan, who presents the amalgamation of bhakti with new sense of the individual associated with western modernity. Yet he composed his poetry without being acquainted with western ideas. As only a few translations of early Hindi literature appeared in Hungarian, the studies are accompanied with poetic or prose translations. Apart from English and Russian hardly no book-length survey of early Hindi literature is available in European languages.

Authors: Bangha, I

• Alternative title: "The Light Shines Without Sun and Moon": Classical Hindi Literature
• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Eötvös Kiadó
• Pages: 1-277
• Place of publication: Budapest
• Publication date: 2023-01-01
• Edition: 1
• ISSN: 2062-7378
• ISBN: 9789634896241
• Language: Hungarian