Cave of My Ancestors

Kirin Narayan

University of Chicago Press

Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (Contemporary Ethnography) (English and Hindi Edition)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

University of Pennsylvania Press

Believing her aunt's predictions, Gita, a young Indian graduate student, is certain that she will meet her jori, or Mr. Right, in March of 1984. By the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. 25,000 first printing.

Love, Stars, and All That

Literature & Fiction

United States

Atria

Believing her aunt's predictions, Gita, a young Indian graduate student, is certain that she will meet her jori, or Mr. Right, in March of 1984. By the author of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. 25,000 first printing.

Love, Stars and All That

Romance

Piatkus Books

Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching

University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Swamiji, a Hindu holy man, is the central character of Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels. He reclines in a deck chair in his modern apartment in western India, telling subtle and entertaining folk narratives to his assorted gatherings. Among the listeners is Kirin Narayan, who knew Swamiji when she was a child in India and who has returned from America as an anthropologist. In her book Narayan builds on Swamiji's tales and his audiences' interpretations to ask why religious teachings the world over are so often couched in stories.
For centuries, religious teachers from many traditions have used stories to instruct their followers. When Swamiji tells a story, the local barber rocks in helpless laughter, and a sari-wearing French nurse looks on enrapt. Farmers make decisions based on the tales, and American psychotherapists take notes that link the storytelling to their own practices. Narayan herself is a key character in this ethnography. As both a local woman and a foreign academic, she is somewhere between participant and observer, reacting to the nuances of fieldwork with a sensitivity that only such a position can bring.
Each story s reproduced in its evocative performance setting. Narayan supplements eight folk narratives with discussions of audience participation and response as well as relevant Hindu themes. All these stories focus on the complex figure of the Hindu ascetic and so sharpen our understanding of renunciation and gurus in South Asia.
While Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels raises provocative theoretical issues, it is also a moving human document. Swamiji, with his droll characterizations, inventive mind, and generous spirit, is a memorable character. The book contributes to a growing interdisciplinary literature on narrative. It will be particularly valuable to students and scholars of anthropology, folklore, performance studies, religions, and South Asian studies.

Religion & Spirituality

Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching

Motilal Banarsidass

In 1969, young Kirin Narayan’s older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone— especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.A touching, funny, and always affectionate memoir, My Family and Other Saints traces the reverberations of Rahoul's spiritual journey through the entire family. As their beachside Bombay home becomes a crossroads for Westerners seeking Eastern enlightenment, Kirin’s sari-wearing American mother wholeheartedly embraces ashrams and gurus, adopting her son’s spiritual quest as her own. Her Indian father, however, coins the term “urug”—guru spelled backward—to mock these seekers, while young Kirin, surrounded by radiant holy men, parents drifting apart, and a motley of young, often eccentric Westerners, is left to find her own answers. Deftly recreating the turbulent emotional world of her bicultural adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, Narayan presents a large, rambunctious cast of quirky characters. Throughout, she brings to life not just a family but also a time when just about everyone, it seemed, was consumed by some sort of spiritual quest.“A lovely book about the author's youth in Bombay, India. . . . The family home becomes a magnet for truth-seekers, and Narayan is there to affectionately document all of it.”—Body + Soul “Gods, gurus and eccentric relatives compete for primacy in Kirin Narayan's enchanting memoir of her childhood in Bombay.”—William Grimes, New York Times

My Family & Other Saints

New Delhi HarperCollins Publishers India. a joint venture with The India Today Group

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Books by Kirin Narayan