Ute Hüsken Bücher

South Asia is one of the richest areas with regard to its festivals. We find an immense variety of performance traditions: theater, plays, recitations and enactments of oral epics, ritual performances, healing or shamanistic rituals, games and sportive competitions, performances of itinerant or sedentary musicians and religious specialists, pilgrimages, and much more. In many cases, these festivals, their agents and participants are “on the move” – they are changing, but they are also literally on the move and since long also took roots beyond South Asia. They developed specific forms, in constant creative exchange with their setting in the new homelands, but also in continuous reference to what is imagined as “original” South Asian tradition. These festival traditions, along with their material cultures, clearly are of major importance for creating and sustaining individual and group identity. This holds especially true in situations of rapid changes, caused for example by situations of crisis, such as war, ecological crisis, economic change, rapid globalization and modernization. With dramatic changes taking place in South Asia and beyond, some festivals will disappear or already have vanished; others undergo radical transformations; some traditions manage to preserve their practices within a new and very different social setting; and new festivals come into being. The miscellany edited by Ute Hüsken and Axel Michaels traces these radical changes in South Asian festival traditions within the context of voluntary or enforced mobility of the performing agents and their traditions. Especially this aspect of mobility – of ideas, of people and their actions – and its consequences is a central concern of the volume.

Rituals, as universal modes of human action, are always evaluated and criticized. Humans seem to need rituals, but they also reject them. Criticism is an inevitable part of ritual traditions, and is often even part of a ritual itself. Denial and critique are forms of relation, albeit defined in negative terms: even new or renewed traditions always strongly relate to the old and rejected. A ritual then becomes an ideal ground to negotiate and fight over ideologies, modernity and backwardness, tradition and innovation, and diverging ideologies. This volume deals with different forms of denial and the critique of rituals, and uses the denial of rituals to learn more about the role of rituals in their performers’ lives, and about the ambivalences this denial uncovers. The ambivalence, complexity, and processuality of denial are consequences of the fact that there is usually not only one, but a chain of denials, one responding to the other.

The Vaikhanasas, Brahmanic priests in south Indian Visnu temples, have a complex history marked by their struggle for status against competing priestly factions. This monograph focuses on a long-standing controversy regarding eligibility for performing rituals in these temples: is it determined by birth or initiation? Since the 14th century CE, debates in Sanskrit texts have revolved around whether Vaikhanasas priests need an initiation that includes branding on their upper arms, or if their prenatal life-cycle ritual, visnubali, suffices for temple service. As hereditary priests, the Vaikhanasas assert their identity as Visnu’s children, destined for this role before birth. The study includes analyses of three local conflicts from the 19th and 20th centuries concerning the initiation requirement, contextualizing these disputes. Additionally, it presents three contemporary performances of the visnubali ritual, examining the interplay between text and performance and the ritual competence of the priests involved. The publication also features a DVD with video coverage of the visnubali performances, enriching the exploration of this intricate religious tradition.