Fall 2026
TTh 11:35am-12:50pm
Instructor: Shiva Sai Ram Urella
This course introduces students to the vast and varied world of the Purāṇas, a genre that has shaped Hindu thought, practice, and imagination for over a millennium. Encompassing cosmology, genealogy, theology, ritual performances, and narrative art, the Purāṇas defy easy classification. They have been written, recited, performed, painted, danced, engraved, sung, and translated across languages, regions, and centuries—and they continue to be living texts in contemporary South Asia. Through a combination of primary sources in translation and scholarly analyses, we examine how Purāṇic narratives construct worlds: how they organize time and space, articulate notions of power, imagine the nature of the divine, conceptualize distinct devotional theologies, advertise pilgrimages, and negotiate questions of gender, caste, and regional belonging. We move between Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, and Marathi contexts and attend to the material and performative lives of these texts as scroll paintings, temple myths, oral performances, manuscripts, and ritual repertoires that informed lived religious contexts. The course asks not only what the Purāṇas are but also how they have been used, by whom, and to what ends they have been mobilized in both pre-modern and modern times.