The contributions to this book address a series of 'confrontations'--debates between intellectual communities, the interplay of texts and images, and the intersection of monumental architecture and physical terrain--and explore the ways in which the legacy of these encounters, and the human responses to them, conditioned cultural production in early South Asia (c. 4th-7th centuries CE). Rather than an agonistic term, the book uses 'confrontation' as a heuristic to examine historical moments within this pivotal period in which individuals and communities were confronted with new ideas and...