Conference Presentations by Andrea Lorene Gutierrez
This paper explores the role of power in the elephant spectacles and races in the sporting arena... more This paper explores the role of power in the elephant spectacles and races in the sporting arena described in the Mānasollāsa (1131 CE). This Chalukyan-kingdom Sanskrit encyclopedia provides a rich look into medieval South Indian royal culture through its on-the-ground, localized writing. Of the three sections of the Mānasollāsa that discuss elephants at length, the section on elephant spectacle as royal diversion (vinoda) is the most curious: it does not appear in any other elephant manual of the gajaśāstra tradition but offers a vital clue as to how kings deployed soft power in peace times, as well as maintained the animal’s fitness for battle. The spectacles that elephants were required to participate in—recalling Roman gladiator fights—were violent, horrific acts that pitted elephant against human and elephant against elephant. The violence of these power relations likely explains why the passage is not copied in later elephant manuals that use the Mānasollāsa’s elephant content.
This is the first study to put this long-neglected passage alongside other aspects of elephant management in gajaśāstra texts and the Asian elephant’s broader history. Where it illuminates human/elephant intra-actions, I bring continental and other philosophy to my animal studies discussion. My paper provides one missing clue to the ways elephants have been used historically in South Asia, leading up to the present-day human-elephant conflict and the Asian elephant’s endangered status.
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From the limited scholarship completed thus far on the Nala Pākadarpaṇa (ca. 11th-15th c.), we kn... more From the limited scholarship completed thus far on the Nala Pākadarpaṇa (ca. 11th-15th c.), we know that this fascinating culinary śāstric text is incomplete as it stands today, both in the print editions and in manuscript form. Its chapters are grossly disparate in length, some with only thirty verses, others with almost 500. My research also suggests some re-ordering of content in the present redaction left to us. The earliest text with confident dating that cites the Nala Pākadarpaṇa is the encyclopedic Śivatattvaratnākara (ca. 1700). In its pākaśāstra section, the Śivatattvaratnākara heavily cites the Mānasollāsa in addition to the Pākadarpaṇa, but there is a great deal of pākaśāstric content that derives from an unknown source. After examining these Śivatattvaratnākara verses, I have identified additional recipes which I argue rightfully originated in the Nala Pākadarpaṇa. I supply lexical evidence related to the medieval techniques and technologies described in the Nala Pākadarpaṇa to support my argument and bring more questions to the fore in relation to these technologies. This paper sheds light on one small corner of our scholarly understanding of the South Asian culinary sciences and fills lacunae in the Pākadarpaṇa’s manuscript record.
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Vaishnava food offerings provide a rich abundance of evidence for material studies even in terms ... more Vaishnava food offerings provide a rich abundance of evidence for material studies even in terms of modern-day ritual practice, but the medieval Cōḻa (Chola) record of donative inscriptions offers us a wealth of details on the dishes gifted by devotees to be cooked for temple deities as naivedya or tiru amutu, holy food offerings or “holy ambrosia.” I will present a range of ideas on this form of worship as gleaned from the epigraphic record and in particular address donations made at and for the Srirangam temple dedicated to the reclining Vishnu, one of the main sites of Vaishnava devotion. My study will first present the state of the field of historical temple offerings and then explore three micro-studies on dish types offered at (but not only at) Srirangam: 1) appam as a signature religious offering, 2) the matter of what “sambhar” (cambāram, etc.) is for the Chola record, and 3) kannam (kaṇṇāmaṭai, etc.). I will present my restoration of recipes for these three medieval offerings, recovered using epigraphic evidence from Srirangam for all three cases. Finally, I will put my research on Chola temple offerings in context with the concurrent and broader historical culinary record.
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Bhoga as enjoyment—originally the enjoyment of property and the produce of the land, and by exten... more Bhoga as enjoyment—originally the enjoyment of property and the produce of the land, and by extension, the enjoyment of women, food, and other delights associated with kāma—has been a royal prerogative since the ancient period in South Asia. In the second millennium bhoga comes to the forefront with new modes of royal expression. With kāma as one of the threefold puruṣārthas (pursuits of man), it is no surprise that the expression of royal enjoyment and consumption takes on varied forms in arts and literature. Using royal culinary writing as a point of focus, I explore the expression of bhoga in two medieval Sanskrit recipe collections, 1) the annabhoga (enjoyment of food) section of the Mānasollāsa and 2) the Nala Pākadarpaṇa, Nala’s Mirror on Cooking. Bhoga is the most explicit priority in the latter portions (viṃśatis) of the Mānasollāsa, while, problematically, it scarcely appears in the Nala Pākadarpaṇa. What can account for the vastly different visibility and import of bhoga as a royal concern in these two cookery collections? Pivoting between these two culinary texts and works from the surrounding milieux, I bring to light some of the less visible expressions of bhoga in Nala’s Mirror as well as clarifying aspects of royal enjoyment in the Mānasollāsa, including a close look at its description of royal dining. Finally, I will make some speculative suggestions concerning the relation of bhoga to royal cooking and dining in the broader historical sphere, as discourses of enjoyment and pleasure in kingly contexts.
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Nala’s Mirror on Cooking (the Nala Pākadarpaṇa), a single-standing cookbook in Sanskrit of unknow... more Nala’s Mirror on Cooking (the Nala Pākadarpaṇa), a single-standing cookbook in Sanskrit of unknown provenance that I date to the twelfth–fifteenth centuries CE, is no doubt the most extraordinary example of culinary writing from India’s past, hopelessly understudied and yielding more mysteries than it resolves. It was the most imaginative of historical cookbooks of South Asia, and not only for its contrived ‘clever deceptions,’ visual trompe l’oeils that ended up in the stomach. Nala’s Mirror on Cooking was the only cookbook from India, historical or modern, to utilize a narrative framework to showcase its cookbook author’s creativity in offering tasteful royal entertainment and promoting the palace chef’s skills. This medieval manual’s explanations of innovative culinary technologies appear presented in playful passages of narrative originality. While the frame story providing the context and raison d’être of the cookbook directly paraphrases verses from the famous Indian epic the Mahābhārata (MBh.), the unconventional techniques that do not feature in other historical South Asian cookbooks are explained in passages of the author’s own invention. These imagined dialogues account for, I suggest, regionally- and historically-contingent practices of cooking and service. The cookbook author, in fact, had to rely on his own narrative invention to account for these practices because they diverged from conventional usage as described in other manuals. To illustrate my argument I utilize two short excerpts from Nala’s Mirror: one recipe for a ‘clever deception’ and one dialogue that rejects the normative use of gold and silver vessels for serving kings in favor of betel leaf wraps for storing and serving dainty individual portions while also protecting food from contamination and imparting a delightful fragrance. Building from my lengthy study and translation of this medieval cookbook alongside other South Asian culinary texts, this paper sheds light on one facet of non-western culinary history: a cookbook largely ignored by food historians yet one which markedly influenced the later Indian culinary and medical writing in its wake.
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The handful of nineteenth-century print cookbooks in Tamil are not entirely what they appear to b... more The handful of nineteenth-century print cookbooks in Tamil are not entirely what they appear to be. On the surface, these “new” culinary works reconstructed the “classical” tradition of the culinary literature of India. But this group of cookbooks, which I have identified as the first gendered rendering of the classical Indian cooking tradition, often had, I suggest, unexpected nationalizing motivations in their presentation of social reform. They address and feature women but largely do not present women’s voices. What, then, were the intentions of the male authors writing these cookbooks? My study, the first on the early print cookbook tradition in South India, attempts to understand the position of women in this corpus as well as correct the scholarly misunderstanding that the “national cuisine” of India is a twentieth-century phenomenon.
Combining textual study, culinary history, and a spattering of visual cultural support when possible, I posit that these cookbooks were meant to educate women, but that such projects during the colonial era contain varying degrees of covert nationalistic sentiments. The authors aimed to protect indigenous boundaries around the hearth and home—the domain of women and the preserve of traditional cultural capital—in the face of colonizing influences which were felt to be a threat to local practices. As the colonizers “brought the global” to the South Indian local, the response was, I argue, to re-locate and super-localize the culinary cultures of the region. Here we find no boundary-crossing but rather a re-establishment of boundaries for women’s bodily practices.
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A legend told in the Mahābhārata and elsewhere explains that elephants used to have the ability t... more A legend told in the Mahābhārata and elsewhere explains that elephants used to have the ability to speak until, cursed by Agni, elephant tongues were turned backwards and the animal was thus rendered inarticulate in speech. But what have been the historical languages of use for human-elephant communication in India? Classical Tamiḻ sangam literature suggests that elephants in early India were trained in—and hence understood—Sanskrit, the language assumed to be the reserve of Brahmans. Other texts refer to Sanskrit, Prakrits, and other vernaculars for elephant training, indicating the pachyderm’s multilingual capacities. This study is an examination of the verbal and nonverbal modes of communication used to train royal elephants as laid out in the twelfth-century Mānasollāsa (Mānas.), a work widely considered to contain on-the-ground information representing actual practice of the day. I explore the various classes of communication used by mahouts with their elephants as detailed in the Mānasollāsa and the Mātaṅgalīlā (ML) in order to make linguistic sense of the material. I further aim to reveal how the particularly gifted abilities of elephants in haptic (touch-sensory) and seismic modes of communication mean that even the “less” violent modes of training elephants described in these texts might actually have been more violent forms of manipulation than they appear on the surface.
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Countless technical terms appear in texts on pākaśāstra (culinary science) to describe techniques... more Countless technical terms appear in texts on pākaśāstra (culinary science) to describe techniques such as fermenting (āmlī bhū, etc.), making pickles (śalāṭu, etc.), and marinating (vi + √pac). Among this lexicon, the notion of saṃbhāra appears significant for Indian cuisine as well as for ethnic and regional identity. With the intention of revising the modern attribution of sambhar as a late dish of Maratha invention, I trace food references involving the term saṃbhāra from its earliest usages in the Arthaśāstra and the Pāli Jātakas up to the modern era. Early occurrences are consistent with the scope of the term as used in medieval literary and pākaśāstra texts, including the Pākadarpaṇa and the Mānasollāsa. After reviewing past scholarly interpretations of this term, I enhance our understanding by proposing a basic semantic range for saṃbhāra as the requisite spice mixture, often prepared ahead of time, somewhat like mise en place. I suggest that this term might at times approach our modern-day understanding and usage of “masala” or even “curry powder.” With this in-depth lexical examination, I shed light on one facet of the technical knowledge contained in the cooking śāstra and establish consistencies between this genre and other Sanskrit literature. Overall, the study continues to advance our understanding of this long overlooked pāka corpus.
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Pākaśāstra texts often include a list of doṣas (mistakes) caused by the improper preparation and ... more Pākaśāstra texts often include a list of doṣas (mistakes) caused by the improper preparation and cooking of foods. The first attested list of these doṣas appears in the Sanskrit Pākadarpaṇa, a royal cookbook, but reappears in pākaśāstra cookbooks until the nineteenth century CE. This list has a few commonalities with food doṣas in āyurveda and duṣṭa foods recorded in dharmaśāstra as unfit for eating (abhojya). However, as I elucidate the Pākadarpaṇa’s list of mistakes that are specifically culinary and procedural in nature, I aim to demonstrate that the list establishes a technical discourse of pākaśāstra with the unique priorities of this genre. I also trace this culinary list in its transmissions into the modern period in texts that claim the authority of being pākaśāstra. The list’s presence in modern-era cookbooks lends credence to my argument of the Pākadarpaṇa as a culinary text and a primary mūla for the śāstra of cooking.
Appreciating this list’s culinary ambit helps us revise previous scholarly assumptions of the Pākadarpaṇa as a text of āyurveda and dietetics. This paper sheds light on an under-explored text and may also expand our understanding of courtly culture in terms of the textual production of culinary literature involving royal practices of consumption (bhoga). Further, a reconsideration of details from the pākaśāstra genre can move our academic exploration of Sanskrit food discourses beyond the lens of treating food medicinally, as in āyurveda, and beyond the basic structural categorization of food as (a)bhakṣya, (a)bhojya, peya, lehya, and so on.
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Recently, elephants have been removed from a prominent Hindu temple site, spurred by animal right... more Recently, elephants have been removed from a prominent Hindu temple site, spurred by animal rights organizations like PETA, drawing attention to problems concerning the Asian elephant in captivity in temple and royal complexes across South India. The cultural value of this animal developed over two millennia in India, in complex animal-human relations. How were these relations expressed historically, in Sanskrit texts such as the Arthaśāstra and the Mānasollāsa? What can these ancient and medieval texts on elephant language, training, and care inform us about elephants’ religious role today in temple culture and practices?
Utilizing participant observation, interviews, and philological study, I attempt a holistic view of the elephant’s involvement in present-day Hindu temple life and how this came to be from past ritual and traditional practices, largely from royal contexts involving this animal. My emphasis on the elephant’s activities and on interactions between elephant and religious practitioners present the elephant herself as sacred site, religious mediator, and agent. At some temple institutions, care and reverence for the elephant allow her to have vastly better conditions than at palace complexes in contemporary India. In some cases, this might present a less dismal possibility for the large captive population of this complex social and intelligent animal who also often suffers in human-animal conflicts in the “wild.”
Recent ethnographies have focused on human mahouts and have dealt with human- elephant relations in other countries. Scholarship on the elephant has not sufficiently addressed the Asian elephant’s training, language, or participation in South Indian life past or present, nor the animal’s involvement in Hindu worship and religious life. My presentation bridges historical elephant care, activities, and language to her present roles as religious mediator, participant, agent, and god, shedding new light on this beautiful animal.
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I address the phenomenon of species-blurring and species transposition observable in certain Vedi... more I address the phenomenon of species-blurring and species transposition observable in certain Vedic and Brahmanical literary traditions. Such species shifts warrant an examination of ideas about “human” and “animal” in pre-modern South Asia that moves beyond the standard anthropocentric paradigm. In this paper I focus on the idea of the partridge (tittiri) as the contested origin of the Taittirīya lineage. Previous scholarship on the Taittirīya is extensive, of course, treating both the Vedānta philosophy and Vedic studies more broadly, but has not considered what the question of the animal within animal studies can contribute to assessments of human and in particular Brahmin identity within these texts.
I explore explanations of “taittirīya” informed by Pāṇini, the Taittirīya Saṃhitā’s Anukramaṇī, and later commentary, and I examine the Taittirīya’s mythologized origins as recorded in euhemeristic tales from the Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata, and Vāyu Purāṇas. These etiologies reveal contextual information concerning the community’s identity and anxieties, embodied in their understandings of species and enacted via human-animal transpositions. I posit a “Brahmin- bird entanglement” in order to help account for these transpositions and for bird names used for ascetic practices, hymns, and Vedic lineages. In the case of the Taittirīya tradition, envisioning birds (tittiris) as retainers of their knowledge systems is a figurative means of reflecting the values of such Brahmanical communities. These values include: 1) correct, “parroted” recitation, necessary for efficacious results from the ritual performance of mantras from the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, 2) delicate attention to the minutia and musicality of the sung text, and 3) the absorption and regurgitation of recited text by both guru and śiṣya for the preservation of the lineage’s knowledge systems. Tittiris articulate all of these values in their bodily practices and production.
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Considering that animal studies can contribute to our current understanding and methodologies in ... more Considering that animal studies can contribute to our current understanding and methodologies in Asian Studies, I explore species shifting in a number of pre-modern South Asian story traditions, primarily Buddhist and Brahmanical religious traditions. I reconsider the Brahmanical Taittirīya Upaniṣad’s mythologized origins in the light of a Buddhist Jātaka tale that utilizes similar imagery and metaphors, which are also observable in several Purāṇas, the Mahābhārata, and one sangam poem. I propose that what scholars often call textual appropriation (usage of material from one story or tradition in other traditions’ tales) should be treated as “iterations” of stories that communicate contextual information important for a religious group or community’s identity and anxieties.
In my analysis, animal transposition occurs between non-human animals (birds) and human animals (human Vedic gurus or the human/superhuman Buddha). These species shifts warrant an examination of ideas about “human” and “animal” that moves beyond the standard anthropocentric paradigm. I explore the role of species in revealing information about a tradition or people. For example, relations between one species (human) and another species (the Other) can at times parallel the process of religious othering on a micro-level. At other times, interspecies transposition and species blurring in stories can reveal the values and priorities of a tradition. By studying story variants in numerous traditions’ texts and languages (Pāli and Sanskrit) I can elaborate explanations and theorize meanings that are not apparent while working within only one religious tradition or language.
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Parrot’s Voice: An Exploration of Animal Language and the Languaging of Animals in Early Indian ... more Parrot’s Voice: An Exploration of Animal Language and the Languaging of Animals in Early Indian Texts
Language about animals reveals how we humans envision ourselves, animals, and human-animal relations; writing from pre-modern India is no different. How have early authors of South Asia modeled human animals and non-human animals? Beyond a few brief analyses of anthropomorphized animals in India’s fables, there are no studies of the liminality shared by human animals and non-human animals in subcontinental literature. My research explores the shared spaces occupied by animals and humans in India and the ways that early authors transposed humans with animals and vice versa. In this paper, I investigate these ideas using the lens of bird speech. I focus on one literary work, Kādambarī, the earliest Sanskrit novel, and one philosophical discussion that attempted to define human speech and the extent of animal speech capacities, taken from the grammatical Mahābhāṣya commentary on Sanskrit language. Building from recent theory in new materialism, I posit a “Brahmin-bird entanglement” in both of these textual traditions as a way of describing how ancient Indian writers dealt with their identities. I argue that Brahmins entangled their traditions and practices with birds, and that these texts challenge our preexisting notions of subjectivity, authorship, and agency via speech acts. The new model I develop for approaching subjectivity and agency has potential application in numerous literary and philosophical traditions.
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In this keynote lecture I discuss two features of the Yogasūtras: 1.) notions of language compreh... more In this keynote lecture I discuss two features of the Yogasūtras: 1.) notions of language comprehension and paradigms of language as presented in sūtra 3.17 and its commentaries, and 2.) commonalities between Buddhist doctrine and ideologies and those of the Yogasūtras. For the topic of language, I detail how the sūtra's commentaries describe language reception, perception, comprehension, language convention, the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of speech acts, and the sound units that convey meaning. Further, this analysis of language occurs in a sūtra with application to understanding animal language, hence I discuss the implications of animal language and voice as presented in this sūtra and commentaries. For the second topic of my presentation, I parallel ideology and lexicon in different Yogasūtras with similar ideologies, phrases, and values in Buddhism (Theravāda and Mahāyāna), along with lexical similarities in both yogic and Buddhist ideologies' structures and forms of practice.
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The betel leaf roll (today known as pān) is an iconic Indic food item which appears again and aga... more The betel leaf roll (today known as pān) is an iconic Indic food item which appears again and again in Sanskrit legal literature, religious works, royal encyclopedias, and food manuals. Temple ritual sometimes involved offering betel to deities and priests, Indian marriage rituals included it, the Āyurvedic texts and Kāmasūtra extolled its use, and ascetics resolutely avoided it. Despite betel’s role in marking religio-social identity, research on this and other historical dietary practices in South Asia is lacking. Through an analysis of largely pre-modern Sanskrit texts supported by visual material where possible, my paper attempts to shed light on the seemingly conflicting modes of consumption of and abstention from pān, a stimulant, digestive, and aphrodisiac prominent in South Asian foodways for two millennia. I argue that within Brāhmaṇical religious traditions, ideologies surrounding pān consumption, including its erotic, householder, and royal modes of use, resulted in its proscription for renunciates. At the same time, I contextualize betel’s continued use in temples and by the religious elite in India, past and present. In sum, I examine ways in which pān consumption has demarcated social and religious identities in South Asia by placing this food within its surrounding culture.
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Book Reviews by Andrea Lorene Gutierrez
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews, Mar 2014
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Conference Presentations by Andrea Lorene Gutierrez
This is the first study to put this long-neglected passage alongside other aspects of elephant management in gajaśāstra texts and the Asian elephant’s broader history. Where it illuminates human/elephant intra-actions, I bring continental and other philosophy to my animal studies discussion. My paper provides one missing clue to the ways elephants have been used historically in South Asia, leading up to the present-day human-elephant conflict and the Asian elephant’s endangered status.
Combining textual study, culinary history, and a spattering of visual cultural support when possible, I posit that these cookbooks were meant to educate women, but that such projects during the colonial era contain varying degrees of covert nationalistic sentiments. The authors aimed to protect indigenous boundaries around the hearth and home—the domain of women and the preserve of traditional cultural capital—in the face of colonizing influences which were felt to be a threat to local practices. As the colonizers “brought the global” to the South Indian local, the response was, I argue, to re-locate and super-localize the culinary cultures of the region. Here we find no boundary-crossing but rather a re-establishment of boundaries for women’s bodily practices.
Appreciating this list’s culinary ambit helps us revise previous scholarly assumptions of the Pākadarpaṇa as a text of āyurveda and dietetics. This paper sheds light on an under-explored text and may also expand our understanding of courtly culture in terms of the textual production of culinary literature involving royal practices of consumption (bhoga). Further, a reconsideration of details from the pākaśāstra genre can move our academic exploration of Sanskrit food discourses beyond the lens of treating food medicinally, as in āyurveda, and beyond the basic structural categorization of food as (a)bhakṣya, (a)bhojya, peya, lehya, and so on.
Utilizing participant observation, interviews, and philological study, I attempt a holistic view of the elephant’s involvement in present-day Hindu temple life and how this came to be from past ritual and traditional practices, largely from royal contexts involving this animal. My emphasis on the elephant’s activities and on interactions between elephant and religious practitioners present the elephant herself as sacred site, religious mediator, and agent. At some temple institutions, care and reverence for the elephant allow her to have vastly better conditions than at palace complexes in contemporary India. In some cases, this might present a less dismal possibility for the large captive population of this complex social and intelligent animal who also often suffers in human-animal conflicts in the “wild.”
Recent ethnographies have focused on human mahouts and have dealt with human- elephant relations in other countries. Scholarship on the elephant has not sufficiently addressed the Asian elephant’s training, language, or participation in South Indian life past or present, nor the animal’s involvement in Hindu worship and religious life. My presentation bridges historical elephant care, activities, and language to her present roles as religious mediator, participant, agent, and god, shedding new light on this beautiful animal.
I explore explanations of “taittirīya” informed by Pāṇini, the Taittirīya Saṃhitā’s Anukramaṇī, and later commentary, and I examine the Taittirīya’s mythologized origins as recorded in euhemeristic tales from the Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata, and Vāyu Purāṇas. These etiologies reveal contextual information concerning the community’s identity and anxieties, embodied in their understandings of species and enacted via human-animal transpositions. I posit a “Brahmin- bird entanglement” in order to help account for these transpositions and for bird names used for ascetic practices, hymns, and Vedic lineages. In the case of the Taittirīya tradition, envisioning birds (tittiris) as retainers of their knowledge systems is a figurative means of reflecting the values of such Brahmanical communities. These values include: 1) correct, “parroted” recitation, necessary for efficacious results from the ritual performance of mantras from the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, 2) delicate attention to the minutia and musicality of the sung text, and 3) the absorption and regurgitation of recited text by both guru and śiṣya for the preservation of the lineage’s knowledge systems. Tittiris articulate all of these values in their bodily practices and production.
In my analysis, animal transposition occurs between non-human animals (birds) and human animals (human Vedic gurus or the human/superhuman Buddha). These species shifts warrant an examination of ideas about “human” and “animal” that moves beyond the standard anthropocentric paradigm. I explore the role of species in revealing information about a tradition or people. For example, relations between one species (human) and another species (the Other) can at times parallel the process of religious othering on a micro-level. At other times, interspecies transposition and species blurring in stories can reveal the values and priorities of a tradition. By studying story variants in numerous traditions’ texts and languages (Pāli and Sanskrit) I can elaborate explanations and theorize meanings that are not apparent while working within only one religious tradition or language.
Language about animals reveals how we humans envision ourselves, animals, and human-animal relations; writing from pre-modern India is no different. How have early authors of South Asia modeled human animals and non-human animals? Beyond a few brief analyses of anthropomorphized animals in India’s fables, there are no studies of the liminality shared by human animals and non-human animals in subcontinental literature. My research explores the shared spaces occupied by animals and humans in India and the ways that early authors transposed humans with animals and vice versa. In this paper, I investigate these ideas using the lens of bird speech. I focus on one literary work, Kādambarī, the earliest Sanskrit novel, and one philosophical discussion that attempted to define human speech and the extent of animal speech capacities, taken from the grammatical Mahābhāṣya commentary on Sanskrit language. Building from recent theory in new materialism, I posit a “Brahmin-bird entanglement” in both of these textual traditions as a way of describing how ancient Indian writers dealt with their identities. I argue that Brahmins entangled their traditions and practices with birds, and that these texts challenge our preexisting notions of subjectivity, authorship, and agency via speech acts. The new model I develop for approaching subjectivity and agency has potential application in numerous literary and philosophical traditions.
Book Reviews by Andrea Lorene Gutierrez
This is the first study to put this long-neglected passage alongside other aspects of elephant management in gajaśāstra texts and the Asian elephant’s broader history. Where it illuminates human/elephant intra-actions, I bring continental and other philosophy to my animal studies discussion. My paper provides one missing clue to the ways elephants have been used historically in South Asia, leading up to the present-day human-elephant conflict and the Asian elephant’s endangered status.
Combining textual study, culinary history, and a spattering of visual cultural support when possible, I posit that these cookbooks were meant to educate women, but that such projects during the colonial era contain varying degrees of covert nationalistic sentiments. The authors aimed to protect indigenous boundaries around the hearth and home—the domain of women and the preserve of traditional cultural capital—in the face of colonizing influences which were felt to be a threat to local practices. As the colonizers “brought the global” to the South Indian local, the response was, I argue, to re-locate and super-localize the culinary cultures of the region. Here we find no boundary-crossing but rather a re-establishment of boundaries for women’s bodily practices.
Appreciating this list’s culinary ambit helps us revise previous scholarly assumptions of the Pākadarpaṇa as a text of āyurveda and dietetics. This paper sheds light on an under-explored text and may also expand our understanding of courtly culture in terms of the textual production of culinary literature involving royal practices of consumption (bhoga). Further, a reconsideration of details from the pākaśāstra genre can move our academic exploration of Sanskrit food discourses beyond the lens of treating food medicinally, as in āyurveda, and beyond the basic structural categorization of food as (a)bhakṣya, (a)bhojya, peya, lehya, and so on.
Utilizing participant observation, interviews, and philological study, I attempt a holistic view of the elephant’s involvement in present-day Hindu temple life and how this came to be from past ritual and traditional practices, largely from royal contexts involving this animal. My emphasis on the elephant’s activities and on interactions between elephant and religious practitioners present the elephant herself as sacred site, religious mediator, and agent. At some temple institutions, care and reverence for the elephant allow her to have vastly better conditions than at palace complexes in contemporary India. In some cases, this might present a less dismal possibility for the large captive population of this complex social and intelligent animal who also often suffers in human-animal conflicts in the “wild.”
Recent ethnographies have focused on human mahouts and have dealt with human- elephant relations in other countries. Scholarship on the elephant has not sufficiently addressed the Asian elephant’s training, language, or participation in South Indian life past or present, nor the animal’s involvement in Hindu worship and religious life. My presentation bridges historical elephant care, activities, and language to her present roles as religious mediator, participant, agent, and god, shedding new light on this beautiful animal.
I explore explanations of “taittirīya” informed by Pāṇini, the Taittirīya Saṃhitā’s Anukramaṇī, and later commentary, and I examine the Taittirīya’s mythologized origins as recorded in euhemeristic tales from the Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata, and Vāyu Purāṇas. These etiologies reveal contextual information concerning the community’s identity and anxieties, embodied in their understandings of species and enacted via human-animal transpositions. I posit a “Brahmin- bird entanglement” in order to help account for these transpositions and for bird names used for ascetic practices, hymns, and Vedic lineages. In the case of the Taittirīya tradition, envisioning birds (tittiris) as retainers of their knowledge systems is a figurative means of reflecting the values of such Brahmanical communities. These values include: 1) correct, “parroted” recitation, necessary for efficacious results from the ritual performance of mantras from the Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, 2) delicate attention to the minutia and musicality of the sung text, and 3) the absorption and regurgitation of recited text by both guru and śiṣya for the preservation of the lineage’s knowledge systems. Tittiris articulate all of these values in their bodily practices and production.
In my analysis, animal transposition occurs between non-human animals (birds) and human animals (human Vedic gurus or the human/superhuman Buddha). These species shifts warrant an examination of ideas about “human” and “animal” that moves beyond the standard anthropocentric paradigm. I explore the role of species in revealing information about a tradition or people. For example, relations between one species (human) and another species (the Other) can at times parallel the process of religious othering on a micro-level. At other times, interspecies transposition and species blurring in stories can reveal the values and priorities of a tradition. By studying story variants in numerous traditions’ texts and languages (Pāli and Sanskrit) I can elaborate explanations and theorize meanings that are not apparent while working within only one religious tradition or language.
Language about animals reveals how we humans envision ourselves, animals, and human-animal relations; writing from pre-modern India is no different. How have early authors of South Asia modeled human animals and non-human animals? Beyond a few brief analyses of anthropomorphized animals in India’s fables, there are no studies of the liminality shared by human animals and non-human animals in subcontinental literature. My research explores the shared spaces occupied by animals and humans in India and the ways that early authors transposed humans with animals and vice versa. In this paper, I investigate these ideas using the lens of bird speech. I focus on one literary work, Kādambarī, the earliest Sanskrit novel, and one philosophical discussion that attempted to define human speech and the extent of animal speech capacities, taken from the grammatical Mahābhāṣya commentary on Sanskrit language. Building from recent theory in new materialism, I posit a “Brahmin-bird entanglement” in both of these textual traditions as a way of describing how ancient Indian writers dealt with their identities. I argue that Brahmins entangled their traditions and practices with birds, and that these texts challenge our preexisting notions of subjectivity, authorship, and agency via speech acts. The new model I develop for approaching subjectivity and agency has potential application in numerous literary and philosophical traditions.
In this podcast interview for "Not Even Past: 15 Minute History", I introduce epic and sangam South Asian poems from the beginning of the first millennium that pass the Bechdel test, when women’s narrative critiqued, cajoled, narrated, and provided guidance for the devout.
(Mānasollāsa’s) section on cooking called “The Enjoyment of
Food” reveals that meat dominated the royal menu in medieval
South India. The valuable recipes in this Sanskrit royal encyclopedia’s
section of 258 verses on food detail primarily how to prepare
wild fish and game, but also meat from tortoise, bandicoot, ram
(mutton), other domesticated animals, and an array of delectable
foods of the period. Consuming almost all animals that moved in
the kingdom formed part of Western Chalukyan emperor
Someśvara´s assertion of royal dominion, yet investigation into
this recipe collection’s textual history as well as that of other royal
recipe collections suggests that the once abundant meat recipes
have often been removed from the record, leaving the false impression
of more vegetarian dietary practice than really pertained to
South Asia’s past. This later “veggie-washing” concerns Hindu ideologies
of nonviolence and the disavowal of animal slaughter in ritual
sacrifice, both of which originated in Jain and Buddhist ideologies
yet have become attached to Hindu ideals of vegetarianism, forming
part of a new moral culinary imperative that has advanced over
roughly the second millennium of the Common Era. Exploring this
topic using the lens of power and politics as they relate to food and
dining allows the reader to observe shifts in royal culinary writing as
these texts became permeated with religious ideals.