Comparative Religion
Subject: Urvaśī and Purūravas: A cultural Biography of a Traditional Indian Narrative
Supervisor: Prof. David Shulman
Abstract: Among the ancient narratives of the Indian tradition, the famous legend of human king Purūravas and the celestial nymph Urvaśī stands out as one of the very few that have been repeatedly re-told and re-worked from Vedic times to this day, for over three thousand years, both in Sanskrit, the language of the premodern South Asian “cosmopolis”, and in the various Indian vernaculars. The first section of my dissertation provides a holistic interpretation for the narrative’s known Sanskrit versions, while examining the transformations in orthodox “brahmanic” world view expressed by them. The second section presents on the Purūravas narratives in the Tamil language, all of which unknown to modern scholarship. Through a comparative reading of the Tamil texts in relation to the Sanskrit versions of the narrative, my research addresses the question of how traditional narratives cross socio-lingual borders, and attempts to deduce the characteristics of narrative transformation processes in the Indian subcontinent.
Presidential Stipend 2013/14