The History of Janakpurdham

Description

The History of Janakpurdham
Richard Burghart
2016, pp. xxx+528 (hardbound)

The History of Janakpurdham: A Study of Asceticism and the Hindu Polity is a major contribution to the understanding of three important social persona in Hindu societies of South Asia: the ascetic, the Brahman and the king. Deviating from earlier discussions that focused on the binary opposition between the Brahman and the king, Burghart introduces a model of a trinity that included the ascetic. Besides being a rich ethnography of the Ramanandi order of ascetics, the book also provides a very detailed ethnohistory of Janakpurdham in the Nepal Tarai and its religious significance in what was then the Hindu kingdom of Nepal. Based on a rich and largely unpublished corpus of historical documents, it reconstructs the complex dealings and inter-relationships between the royal centre and the Ramanandi ascetics at the periphery. At the same time, the book is also a study of the coming of modernity to Nepal and the rich and detailed analysis of the political and historical context in which the Ramanandis operated helps question the prevalent image of Hindu ascetics as figures epitomising disembodied spirituality.
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Born in the United States in 1944, Richard Burghart studied political science for his BA at Williams College, Massachusetts. He joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, from where he received his MPhil in social anthropology on the anthropology of religion in 1969. Following a stint as a journalist in South Asia for Le Soir, Burghart undertook 26 months’ fieldwork in Janakpur in 1973-76 for his PhD, which he received in 1978 from SOAS. He taught for a year at the London School of Economics before joining SOAS. In 1988, he moved to the University of Heidelberg as professor of anthropology and head of the Department of Ethnology, where he stayed until his death in 1994 of brain tumour.

Burghart was a founding member of the British Medical Anthropology Society (BMAS) and Honorary Reviews Editor of Man and he also founded the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research. He published a number of articles in various journals, of which most of the influential ones were published in a posthumous collection titled The Conditions of Listening: Essays on Religion, History and Politics in South Asia (1996). This book is his only full-length monograph.