caa a22 4500 386403880 CHVBK 20180307112211.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198905 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/2057378 doi S0021911800057740 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/2057378 Lutgendorf Philip The View from the Ghats: Traditional Exegesis of a Hindu Epic [Elektronische Daten] [Philip Lutgendorf] The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion? Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1989 The Journal of Asian Studies Cambridge University Press 48/2(1989-05), 272-288 0021-9118 48:2<272 1989 48 JAS https://doi.org/10.2307/2057378 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/2057378 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Lutgendorf Philip NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- The Journal of Asian Studies Cambridge University Press 48/2(1989-05), 272-288 0021-9118 48:2<272 1989 48 JAS CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge