Stories About Posts

Stories about Posts is the magnum opus of Madeleine Biardeau, one of the most influential Indologists of the twentieth century. Nearly twenty years in the making, it connects her varied studies on the Sanskrit epics, the Hindu Goddess, Vedic sacrifice, rural India, and the interpretation of Hinduism. After exploring several ethnographic facts that have escaped the notice of previous observers, Biardeau presents a variety of hunches, hypotheses, and insights building up to the provocative thesis of Stories about Posts: that the variations found in the contemporary cult of the Goddess - in both her royal and rural village aspects - reveal untraced regional histories of the Vedic sacrificial post, the yupa. Biardeau's work opens up new ways to think about Vedic sacrificial themes and elements as they recur in post-Vedic texts and iconographies. It also relates previously misunderstood wayside stones in Maharashtra that are named after the buffalo to stones, posts, and people named after a so-called Buffalo King in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Tamilnadu.