Rejuvenating Karayala: An Endangered Folk Theatrical Form of Himachal Pradesh

This paper deals with karayala, a folk theatrical form of Himachal Pradesh. This form is basically a ritual, performed in the name of a local deity called Biju/Bijeshwar. It is a night long ritual consisting of minimum three and maximum four episodes (swaangs) and each one is followed by a musical interlude comprising singing and dancing. Karyala is an impromptu theatrical form. There are no women actors and only men play female roles. Surprisingly, till date women are not allowed to play female roles. It deals with range of themes and most of them aim at reforming society by employing techniques like mimicry, caricature, satire, paradox, pun and word play. The paper seeks to introduce karayala to larger audience. In the crisis of the present context and particularly owing to onslaught of media multiplicity, we have lost karayala’s past as none for a long while cared to document it due to urbanization, people’s indifference and media charged environment that has threatened its existence. At present it is alive in people’s memory and is necessitated by rituals to avert divine wrath; nevertheless, its space stands largely invaded by media today. The future of this folk theatrical form seems bleak unless we take effective measures to revive/ retrieve it.

Natural Disasters and Time: Non-eschatological Perceptions of Earthquakes in Late Antique and Medieval Historiography

This contribution analyzes the rhetoric surrounding natural disasters in historiographic sources, challenging our assumptions about the eschatological nature of late antique and medieval historical consciousness. Contrary to modern expectations, a large number of late antique and medieval sources indicate that earthquakes and other natural disasters were understood as signs from God, relating to theophanic encounters or divine wrath in the present time. Building on recent research on premodern concepts of time and historical consciousness, the article underscores the fact that eschatological models of time and history—that is, the relentless linear, teleological progression of time towards the End of Days—was not how premodern people perceived the relationship between past, present, and future. The textual evidence presented here is supported by a fragmented and little-known illuminated historiographic text, the Ravennater Annalen, housed today in the cathedral library in Merseburg. This copy of a sixth-century illustrated calendar from Ravenna contains unique depictions of earthquakes in the form of giants breathing fire. Like the textual sources, this visual document should not be read as a premonition of the End of Days, rather it visualizes the belief that divine agency and wrath caused natural disasters.

Dissent and disparagement: Dealing with conflict and the pain of rejection in John

This article addressed the issue of how the author of the Gospel according to John portrayed dissent, in particular, how the author had his protagonists respond to the experience of rejection by those typically designated as ‘the Jews’. Research thus far has usually focused on the identity of the dissenters but rarely on the way dissent was handled. This article’s aim was to examine the range of responses to dissent. It employed a sequential reading of the text to identify the various responses and then brought these findings into comparison with the way dissent was handled in related documents of the time, Matthew and Hebrews. It found that responses included not only argument and blame, including threat of divine wrath but also, beyond these, ad hominem allegations that those who dissent were inherently bad or beholden to the devil or had not been predestined or chosen by God to respond. Such categories were, however, not absolute, because the author assumed that people could choose to respond positively and so move from one apparently fixed and predetermined category to another. They served a rhetorical function. A further ploy was to reduce Israel’s tradition to witness and foreshadowing within the tension of asserting both continuity and discontinuity.Contribution: The article concluded that such strategies served in part to comfort and reassure hearers engaged in the process of grief at rejection. As such they warranted critical reflection.

Hari the Fallen Prophet

Born into the degenerate and idolatrous line of Kābil (Cain), Hari (Kr̥ṣṇa) is the only Hindu god who punctuates the line of traditional Islamic prophets after Ādam. The narrative unit on Hari is the singular focus of this chapter. Hari’s tale exemplifies Sultan’s effort to minimize local competition to the Prophet of Islam: the inclusion of this “fallen” god-turned-prophet—one of the most popular deities of medieval Bengal, and the supreme deity of the Gauṛīya Vaiṣṇavas—appropriates and marginalizes a native rival through his demotion to human status, and his conversion to Islam. He is upheld as a warning to the people of Bengal, a false god and seductive icon, whose adultery would lead only to divine wrath and the punishments of hell. In examining the complex strategies by which Sultān simultaneously demolishes the Kr̥ṣṇa avatāra while establishing the Prophet Muḥammad as the avatāra for the Kali age, this chapter shows how missionary translation is a form of creative iconoclasm.

Samuel Fisher’s Letter to the Jews: ‘To All the House of Jacob’

In the 1650s, Samuel Fisher addressed an undated letter ‘To All the House of Jacob’, inviting Jews to attend to the light in their hearts. Composed in Hebrew, it consists almost entirely of allusions to the Jewish Scriptures or Christian Old Testament, much of it organised by clusters of images drawn from biblical sources. The letter is a call to repentance, drawing on the threats of divine wrath, particularly from the Psalms and the prophets. Since no English translation from Samuel Fisher’s time is known, one is offered here.

The Neo-Assyrian Context of First Isaiah

The Neo-Assyrian Empire expanded rapidly across the ancient Near East between the ninth and seventh centuries bce and constituted the domineering historical and political backdrop to the prophetic activities of Isaiah ben Amoz. Assyria’s military power, its extraction of vassal states’ economic resources, and its theological interpretation of these activities as the will of the Assyrian gods deeply impacted the theology of the eighth-century prophet, as well as the subsequent bearers of his traditions. The Assyrian Empire serves numerous functions in this material, ranging from Judah’s savior from the Syro-Ephraimite coalition to the epitome of terror and the earthly manifestation of Yhwh’s divine wrath. In defiance of Assyrian claims to the contrary, however, Isaiah declares that Yhwh alone is the king and ruler of world history.

“Stormy Wind Fulfilling His Word”

Chapter 3 traces the appearance of the first truly disastrous tornadoes as the new nation pushed westward into the Mississippi Valley during the nineteenth century. These calamities fueled an apocalyptic mentality among people of various religious groups, who regarded such events as the Great Natchez Tornado of 1840 as a sign of End Time tribulations. Later in the century, however, the emerging field of meteorology contributed to a Gilded Age cult of progress that presupposed a benevolent God and assumed that tornadoes could be explained and maybe even contained. Even a disaster as enormous as the St. Louis Tornado of 1896, which destroyed much of the city, was not enough to shake the optimism of some clergy and theologians, who thought that as the scientific mysteries of tornadoes were dispelled, fears of divine wrath in the storm would cease.