Critical study of the Bhaṭṭikāvya, a śāstra-kāvya poem on the Rāmāyaṇa epic illustrating the rules of Sanskrit grammar.

This bilingual (English-French) anthology of early modern fictitious catalogues presents a multitude of texts, from the genre’s beginnings (Rabelais’s satirical catalogue of the Library of St.-Victor (1532)) to its French and Dutch specimens from around 1700.

This book is intended to facilitate access to the amazing wealth of documents written in the five major South Indian scripts. It focusses on the South Indian Sanskrit tradition, but also takes into account the modern alphabets of the respective Dravidian languages. The sometimes bewildering variety of the five scripts is mapped out in altogether c. 5200 basic characters, ligatures (i.e., vocalizations), conjuncts/consonant clusters, numerals, abbreviations etc. Special care has been taken to break down the complexity of Grantha Tamil in a system of graphic classification.The material surveyed comprises Sanskrit manuscripts as well as the Southern tradition of Sanskrit printing, and books in Dravidian languages (including Tranquebar prints).

Describing one of the most important practices of hathayoga (khecarimudra), the Khecarividya of Adinatha is presented here to an English-speaking readership for the first time. The author, James Mallinson, draws on thirty Sanskrit works, as well as original fieldwork amongst yogins in India who use the practice, to demonstrate how earlier tantric yogic techniques developed and mutated into the practices of hathayoga. Accompanied by an introduction and an extensively annotated translation, the work sheds light on the development of hathayoga and its practices.

Sanātana Gosvāmin’s Haribhaktivilāsa (ca. 1540) describes the normative ritual life of a Vaiṣṇava devotee. As it is one of the first Sanskrit texts of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava tradition begun by Śrī Kṛṣṇa Caitanya (1486–1533) it presents a fascinating meeting between this ecstatic new religious movement and older, Brahminical tradition. On the basis of eleven manuscripts, this important text has now been for the first time been critically edited. In his extensive introduction, Måns Broo engages with many of the questions that have vexed earlier scholars of this text (such as who really was the author?) by exploring its extensive intertextualities.