Author Description

This Omnibus brings together two of distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan's books on the concept of the householder in Hinduism. A common thread running through the Omnibus is the focus on life and society amongst the Hindu Kashmiri Pandit community.One of the books discussed in this Omnibus is Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, a pioneering and ethnographically rich account of the Indian family. It is considered to be a classic kinship study and is probably the only study of its kind of traditional Pandit life in the Kashmir Valley. The second book is Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture, which draws attention away from the ideas of caste and renunciation and focuses instead on the 'householder' in Hindu society. Beginning with an analysis of the ideology of the householder among Kashmiri Pandits the author deals with asceticism, eroticism, altruism and death as elaborations of the householder tradition.The Omnibus also includes a new Preface; a Prologue which introduces the reader to the concept of the householder tradition in Hinduism; an Epilogue-the author's memories of growing up in a Kashmiri Pandit household in Srinagar; and three appendices on related themes.