Cultural elaborations of eternal polarities: travels of heroes, ascetics and lovers in early modern Hindi narratives

In this essay I argue that the use of the polarity principle as a heuristic tool can reveal embedded or structural continuities throughout the history of Indian civilization. To substantiate this hypothesis, I analyse how the polarity constituted by elements such as movement, nomadism, mobility, and homelessness, on the one hand, and immobility, settlement, domesticity, and stationariness, on the other, has been culturally elaborated and, more specifically, variously translated in narrative terms. More than in the details of the specific narrations, however, I am interested in a semiotic analysis of the texts on the basis of the above-described methodological approach. While the focus is primarily on early modern literatures in North Indian languages, a few references are also made to Vedic, Epic and Buddhist contexts, which can offer evidence for the persistence of the mentioned polarity in a diachronic perspective.