Tag: Lineage

Free Download Uma Chakravarti, "The Dying Lineage: The Crisis of Political Power in the Mahabharata"
English | ISBN: 9358527382 | 2024 | 262 pages | PDF | 37 MB
The Dying Lineage has at its core the crises of reproduction that underwrite Vyasa’s Mahabharata, a text that best exemplifies the transitional moment from kin-based chiefdoms to monarchical kingdoms in the Indo-Gangetic doab in the mid-first millennium bce. However, lineage building and putting orderly norms of succession into place was a fraught process. The Bharata patriline stared at its imminent extinction at least once every generation, barely perpetuating itself, and always faced with anxiety over its future. This feminist reading ‘peoples’ this story by bringing into its frame those who are on the margins of the royal household but cannot claim kingship. Reading against the grain, the book explores the link between caste, class and gender in a varna-ordered society. It examines how all three colluded with the patriarchs (and the occasional matriarch) to ensure the survival of the lineage. The fallout was the denial of women’s sexual autonomy and the reifying of their wombs to create a field for the seeds of the Bharata men or their proxies. Consequently, an already imperilled and blighted Kuru lineage is torn asunder by fratricidal contradictions, leading to death and destruction, and the end of an era.

Free Download Simon Brodbeck, "Krishna’s Lineage: The Harivamsha of Vyasa’s Mahabharata"
English | ISBN: 0190279176 | 2019 | 462 pages | AZW3 | 2 MB
Forming the final part of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, the Harivamsha’s main business is to supply narrative details about the great god Vishnu’s avatar Krishna Vasudeva, who has been a comparatively minor character in the previous parts of the Mahabharata, despite having taken centre stage in the Bhagavad Gita.

Free Download Science, Medicine, and Aristocratic Lineage in Victorian Popular Fiction
English | 2023 | ISBN: 3031411404 | 354 Pages | PDF EPUB (True) | 2.4 MB
Science, Medicine, and Lineage in Popular Fiction of the Long Nineteenth Century explores the dialogue between popular literature and medical and scientific discourse in terms of how they represent the highly visible an pathologized British aristocratic body. This books explores and complicates the two major portrayals of aristocrats in nineteenth-century literature: that of the medicalised, frail, debauched, and diseased aristocrat, and that of the heroic, active, beautiful ‘noble’, both of which are frequent and resonant in popular fiction of the long nineteenth century. Abigail Boucher argues that the concept of class in the long nineteenth century implicitly includes notions of blood, lineage, and bodily ‘correctness’, and that ‘class’ was therefore frequently portrayed as an empirical, scientific, and medical certainty. Due to their elevated and highly visual social positions, both historical and fictional aristocrats were frequently pathologized in the public mind and watched for signs of physical excellence or deviance. Using popular fiction, Boucher establishes patterns across decades, genres, and demographics and considers how these patterns react to, normalise, or feed into the advent of new scientific and medical understandings.