Alberico Crafa

This paper examines the mantras against the wedding lament recorded in the Atharvaveda shedding light on the socio-cultural, emotional, and gender dynamics that are at play during this female ritual. Ritual lamentation addresses a broad range of threats, and its performance has been considered as a subversive outpouring of emotions that potentially undermines social and gender order. Therefore, I propose to approach these mantras from a multidisciplinary perspective, considering historic-ethnographical data to reappropriate the anthropological and normative dimension. Actually, religious authorities regulated and stigmatized women’s performances of grief through linguistic and ritual devices.

This article discusses the nineteenth-century debate between German and British Indologists on ancient Indian commentators, shedding light on how Italian Indologists received and responded to this discussion. It reveals why Italian scholars, although trained under the most eminent German philologists, often disagreed on the status of native commentaries, sometimes viewing them as an unreliable guide to interpreting the Vedas and other texts. Moreover, Italian criticisms of the German approach to ancient Indian texts reflected differences in the ideological concerns underpinning the hegemonic discourses between Europe and India. Because of both transnational reception and nation-building concerns, the history of Italian Indological studies represents a unique perspective in the context of European approaches to the subcontinent.

From the 16th century onwards missionaries played a key role in documenting and fostering the knowledge of ‘Asian’ languages which long predates their academic counterpart. In the 19th century, within different historical and epistemic coordinates, missionaries still contributed in preserving ‘Asian linguistic culture’ through their translations from ancient and modern languages, the compilation of grammars, the collection and acquisition of manuscripts ecc. However, in the 19th century the new framework of positivist science challenged the Catholic perspective: Oriental languages became independent from the theological perspective, the Sacred Scriptures were approached from a historical perspective and the Orient was no more regarded as the homeland of the Old Testament. Starting from these important turning points in European intellectual history, I will focus my attention on the works of the Jesuit Orientalist Cesare Antonio De Cara S. J. (1835-1905), who in the country of the Pope sought to defend Catholicism from the challenge represented by what an Intransigent Catholic of that time could be considered in partibus infidelium’s science: Comparative Indo-European linguistics, from which stemmed Comparative Mythology and Science of Religions. Regarded as the outcome of the Rationalist and Positivist thought, the science of language – involving on various degrees the origins of man and culture – inevitably raised theological issues undermining the Catholic authority, the dogmas and the veracity of the Revelation. De Cara was one among the most prominent contributors of the Catholic intransigent journal La Civiltà Cattolica, which could be considered one of the most important journals devoted to Oriental disciplines in Nineteenth century Italy. De Cara gave his contribution to the Journal by publishing many articles. In spite of his role, De Cara’s magnum opus on Comparative linguistic and philology (De Cara 1884; 1887) has been relegated to the margins, as well as the history of the Catholic response to the rise of Oriental Studies. Nonetheless, De Cara represented a fundamental point of reference for the Catholic’s defence against secularism and positivism. Moreover, from his unpublished correspondence, emerges his transnational and interpersonal networks with the most prominent European scholars in the field of linguistics and philology which sheds light on the activities of the Jesuit scholar, against the bias of Catholic chauvinism.

Ritual wailings could be considered as powerful devices for the acceptance of and resignation to loss, tools for reacting to crisis and an attempt to reconcile with it through the means provided by a cultural and religious discourse. Although during the last decades this subject has gained increasing relevance among scholars from a wide range of disciplines, little attention has been paid to the sub-genre of the funerary lament (vilāpa) as attested in South Asian literature. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to approach the theme from a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, and secondly to shed light on several funerary episodes taken from the Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. Starting from the framework provided by Ernesto De Martino’s ethnohistorical study of funeral laments, this paper will focus on various aspects related to the narrative persona’s mourning for the loss of a loved one or kinsman as attested in Sanskrit text. In considering these episodes as “texted performances of grief”, I will examine several standard and formalized expressions of grief, standard gestures and psychophysical responses textually described in Sanskrit epics. We will note, then, that lamenters – wives and husbands, mothers or fathers, heroes, maidens or a city and its citizens – try to cope with a critical situation through all those ways and performances well attested in textual resources involving either ancient or contemporary societies.