Reveals how imperial power and local resistance have shaped landscapesThe perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demons...

Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable, these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from Siberia...

Every literate person today will encounter the word “tribe” in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable, these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from Siberia...

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational...

In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imaginati...

Michael Carrithers guides us through the complex and sometimes conflicting information that Buddhist texts give about the life and teaching of the Buddha. He discusses the social and political background of India in the Buddha's time, and traces the development of his thought. He also assesses the rapid and widespread assimilation of Buddhism and its contemporary relevance. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in alm...

In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology’s most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major de...

Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cover such issues as Deepa Mehta's rec...

This study identifies paganism as a viable religion, exploring its practices and theology as they are expressed in religious communities across the world.Long dismissed as a miscellany of fringe ideas and practices, Paganism is one of the fastest-growing spiritual orientations in the West. In Pagan Theology, Michael York reframes Paganism as a world religion. He provides an overview of pagan theology and practice while expanding on the concept of paganism ...

The origin of world civilization can be traced to the Indus Valley cradle, where brilliant and original thinkers made groundbreaking discoveries. The history of these discoveries is recorded in the vast Sanskrit literature.In this study, author M. K. Agarwal explores the cultural and historical significance of the region. He explores Indus Valley culture, which encouraged creative thoughtas opposed to the Abrahamic faiths, which herded followers into dogmatic thinking. He holds tha...

Everyone has a past: the question is what one does with it. If earlier scholars are to be believed, South Indian society before colonial rule showed an indifference to its past - or approached the past through myth, legend and phantasmagoria. This book sets out not merely to disprove this idea, but to demonstrate the complex forms of historiography produced in South India between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. It argues that the usual division between Indo-Persian and vernacul...

In the contemporary world the meeting of Buddhism and Islam is most often imagined as one of violent confrontation. Indeed, the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 seemed not only to reenact the infamous Muslim destruction of Nalanda monastery in the thirteenth century but also to reaffirm the stereotypes of Buddhism as a peaceful, rational philosophy and Islam as an inherently violent and irrational religion. But if Buddhist-Muslim history was simply repeated instances of...