This exploration of key terms related to social and political order, found in early Indian texts, challenges the idea of a unified ancient India and a unified national identity at that time. This collection explores what may be called the idea of India in ancient times. Its undeclared objective is to identify key concepts which show early Indian civilization as distinct and differently oriented from other formations. The essays focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key terms—such as janapada, desa, var?a, dharma, bh?va—in their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are “given entities,” but that they evolved historically. Professor Chattopadhyaya examines these texts to unveil historical processes. Without denying comparative history, he stresses that the internal dynamics of a society are best decoded via its own texts. His approach bears very effectively on understanding ongoing interactions between India’s “Great Tradition” and “Little Traditions.” As a whole, this book is critical of the notion of overarching Indian unity in the ancient period. It punctures the retrospective thrust of hegemonic nationalism as an ideology that has obscured the diverse textures of Indian civilization. Renowned for his scholarship on the ancient Indian past, Professor Chattopadhyaya’s latest collection only consolidates his high international reputation.

Enemies of Civilization is a work of comparative history and cultural consciousness that discusses how "others" were perceived in three ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. Each civilization was the dominant culture in its part of the world, and each developed a mind-set that regarded itself as culturally superior to its neighbors. Mu-chou Poo compares these societies' attitudes toward other cultures and finds differences and similarities that reveal the self-perceptions of each society. Notably, this work shows that in contrast to modern racism based on biophysical features, such prejudice did not exist in these ancient societies. It was culture rather than biophysical nature that was the most important criterion for distinguishing us from them. By examining how societies conceive their prejudices, this book breaks new ground in the study of ancient history and opens new ways to look at human society, both ancient and modern.

Charts the interactive contours of European culture of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, extending the chronological limits of Romanticism by identifying fresh links among works, authors, contexts, and institutions across national and linguistic borders.

These essays explore the processes of change in Indian society over the period from about the seventh to the thirteenth century. Departing radically from the current historiography on the period, the author posits change as represented by processes of progressive transformation, not by the breakdown of an earlier social order. Within this framework, he discusses such diverse themes as irrigation, urbanization, the formation of a dominant ruling caste, and the structure of polity in general.

Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China's early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome's empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of "religion" before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the "sacred" to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities.

Composed of autobiographical sketches by a number of eminent comparatists, chiefly of the generation that has either recently retired or is approaching retirement, it anchors the intellectual and scholarly aspirations of the post-War period, through the personal narratives of those who shared in them and promoted them, in the experience of war, uprooting, racial and religious intolerance or persecution, and a deep longing for peaceful exchange and international understanding.

This handbook presents a multilayered and multidimensional history of state formation in premodern India. It explores dense and rich local and subregional historiography from the mid-first millennium BC to the eighteenth century in South Asia. Shifting the focus away from economic and political factors, this handbook revises the conventional understanding of states and empires and locates them in their quotidian conduct and activity on socio-cultural and concomitant factors. Comprehensive in scope, this handbook addresses a range of themes connected with the idea of state formation in the subcontinent. It includes discussions and debates on ritual practices and the Brahmanical order in early India; the Delhi Sultanate and role of Sultans among the Hindu kings; the cosmopolitan ‘Islamicate’ cultural influences on Puranic Hinduism; cultural background of the Mughal state. The handbook examines new questions and ideologies of state formation, such as: · facets of violence and resistance; · the significance of the autonomous spaces and forests; · regional elites, including ‘Little kings’; tribal background of some famous cults; · trade and maritime commerce; · royal patronage, courtly manners, lineage formation; · imperial architecture, monuments, and temple, among others. Featuring case studies from different part of the India subcontinent, and with contributions by renowned historians, this authoritative handbook will be an indispensable reading for teachers, scholars, and students of early India, medieval India, premodern India, South Asian history, Asian history, historiography, economic history, historical sociology, and South Asia studies.

The deeply entrenched image of the interaction between Hindus and Muslims in India's past--as indeed in the present-- has generally been that of two aggressively antagonistic religious communities, with the superior political power wielded by one community defining its dominance over the other. This original colonial notion has often been contested by positing the thesis of syncretism at the religious level; by citing evidence of patronage across religious establishments, and of participation of both communities in the country's administration. Neither approach, however, took up the critical task of examining the viability of the premise of homogeneity in the composition of the two communities, or how contemporary perceptions may be used as a touchstone for 'othering' in heterogeneous societies of the past. Chattopadhyaya's Representing the Other?, originally published almost two decades ago, makes an attempt to construct perceptions of new ethnic groups in India in an important phase of its history, from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The evidence though insufficient, reveals not homogenous religious communities, but ethnic groups of diverse origins, located in different socio-political contexts as traders, raiders and plunderers, as well as rulers and administrators. The contexts define the characterization of these different categories by either invoking terminologies from the past for others or by coining ethnic terms. Based mainly on contemporary Sanskrit epigraphic and textual sources, this book is expected to be a major corrective to the way students are generally taught to read the history of our country of this period and of what followed.

The Sogdian Traders were the main go-between of Central Asia from the fifth to the eighth century. From their towns of Samarkand, Bukhara, or Tashkent, their diaspora is attested by texts, inscriptions or archaeology in all the major countries of Asia (India, China, Iran, Turkish Steppe, but also Byzantium). This survey for the first time brings together all the data on their trade, from the beginning, a small-scale trade in the first century BC up to its end in the tenth century. It should interest all the specialists of Ancient and Medieval Asia (including specialists of Sinology, Islamic Studies, Iranology, Turkology and Indology) but also specialists of Medieval Economic History.

With a curation of objects from the prehistoric ages through twenty-first century India, Sudeshna Guha provides a panoramic view of the rich histories of the subcontinent. The incisive essays in this collection detail not just the objects but the histories of their reception: examining how changing times and attitudes cast their shadow on the ways in which the past is interpreted and narrated. In doing so, A History of India through 75 Objects inspires us to interrogate our own notions of a knowable past and fixed national history. Teeming with thought-provoking insights and surprising anecdotes, the essays instill a sense of wonder about the continuous processes by which histories are constructed.