Heidrun Brückner Book order

This volume examines three oral epic traditions in the Tulu language, a Dravidian language, that continue to thrive in the Tulu-speaking coastal districts of Karnataka. It gathers Indian, European, and American scholars, including folklorists, anthropologists, and Indologists, to explore these living performance traditions. The texts discussed belong to the indigenous Tulu genre known as pāḍdana, which includes everything from short invocations of local deities to epic narratives. Due to their exclusive oral transmission until the 19th century, assigning a specific historical period to their composition is challenging, though some may reflect a late medieval social context. One epic tradition has been collected over nearly 150 years, from the mid-19th century to the early 2000s, with two papers focusing on this oldest collection. The popular epic of the Baṇṭ heroine, Siri, gained scholarly attention only from the 1970s, and its tradition is analyzed by several contributors. Additionally, Peter J. Claus introduces Kōḍdabbu, a champion of a Dalit community. This volume enables systematic comparisons of different texts within the same tradition and explores narrative elements and cultural concepts across traditions, while linguistic analysis begins to uncover unique textual features.

„Between Fame and Shame“ edited by Heidrun Brückner, Hanne de Bruin, and Heike Moser presents twelve essays dealing with the role of women in various Indian performance traditions and in different social contexts. The volume’s contributions are intended to convey a better understanding of the – often troubled – relation between women and public performances. The cultural performances studied range from possession performed by women as a religious service to a deity, to on-stage performances by professional actresses representing different performance genres. The regional focus is on South India, especially Kerala and Karnataka. A special feature of the book is the simultaneous internet publication of the audio, audio-visual, and visual materials referred to in the articles. Some of the audio provide for the first time samples of oral literary genres recorded, in some cases as early as the 1970s. The authors of the essays are anthropologists (Claus, Schömbucher, Guillebaud), folklorists (Rai), Indologists (Brückner, de Bruin, Moser, Johan, Griebl/Sommer) sociologists (Schulze), and theatre scholars (Daugherty, Pitkow) from India, Europe, and the USA.

The book consists of a collection of essays on aspects of Tulu oral literature and its cultural and religious context. Taking sung poetic ritual texts from the west coast of South India (coastal Karnataka) as her starting point, the author addresses the relationship between text structure and the social and geographical distribution of particular local and subregional cults; questions of gender and genre, of the correlation between narrative and ritual dramatization especially with respect to death, and of success and failure of rituals in the local perception. One essay studies features of South Indian popular cults in a wider perspective. Two of the nine essays discuss historical material relating to Basel Mission activities in the area and compare texts collected in the 19th century with versions collected by the author in the 1980s. The last paper provides a short synopsis of the author’s 1995 German monograph on the topic.