With Morphology and Syntax of Old Hindī scholars and students of medieval Hindī literature acquire an essential tool for learning one of its important but difficult dialects, the so called sadhukkarī bhāshā. Based on an early Rājasthānī manuscript, the volume includes a commented edition of one hundred poems attributed to medieval mystic and thinker Kabīr, followed by a detailed treatment of morphological structure and main syntactic features of the language. The exposition is accompanied by numerous textual examples and index of all lexical...

This monograph deals with the social and political context of commercial activity in early modern India - a period during which eastern India (and Bihar) experienced the transition to British colonial rule. It uses an approach that takes into account the configuration of social relations and political connections within which, it argues, commercial activity was embedded. Using merchants and bankers as its subjects, this book deals with the structure of trade and banking, the position of merchants in the cultural order and the role of the state in perpetuating this order.

'Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.

Culture and Circulation reflects an innovative approach to early modern Indian literature. The authors foreground the complex hybridity of literary genres and social milieus, capturing elements that have eluded traditional literary history. In this book, jointly edited by Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch, Hindi authors rub shoulders with their Persian counterparts in the courts of Mughal India; the fame of Mirabai, a poetess from Rajasthan, travels to Punjab; the sayings of Kabir are found to be as difficult to pin down as the holy men who transmitted them. Drawing on new archives in...

Liberation is a fundamental subject in South Asian doctrinal and philosophical reflection. This book is a study of the discussion of liberation from suffering presented by Dharmakīrti, one of the most influential Indian philosophers. It includes an edition and translation of the section on the cessation of suffering according to Manorathanandin, the last commentator on Dharmakīrti's Pramāṇavārttika in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. The edition is based on the manuscript used by Sāṅkṛtyāyana and other sources. Methodological issues related to editing...

In Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics, and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art, Melia Belli Bose provides the first analysis of Rajput chatrīs ("umbrellas"; cenotaphs) built between the sixteenth to early-twentieth centuries. New kings constructed chatrīs for their late fathers as statements of legitimacy. During periods of political upheaval patrons introduced new forms and decorations to respond to current events and evoke a particular past. Offering detailed analyses of individual cenotaphs and engaging with art historical and epigraphic evidence,...

Text, History, and Philosophy. Abhidharma Across Buddhist Scholastic Traditions discusses Abhidhamma / Abhidharma as a specific exegetical method. In the first part of the volume, the development of the Buddhist argumentative technique is discussed. The second part investigates the importance of the Buddhist rational tradition for the development of Buddhist philosophy. The third part focuses on some peculiar doctrinal issues that resulted from rational Abhidharmic reflections. In this way, an outline of the development of the Abhidharma genre and of Abhidharmic notions and concepts in...

Urdu and Indo-Persian Thought, Poetics, and Belles Lettres, is a collection on the subject of Urdu poetics, Dastan, translation studies in Urdu, and Indo-Persian. The essays employ interdisciplinary perspectives for exploring the dynamic literary landscape of the South Asian subcontinent since the sixteenth century. The individual topics in the collection depict a plausible picture of how the development of Urdu and Indo-Persian thoughts and poetics have influenced one another for centuries. Contributors are: Satya Hedge, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Pasha M. Khan, Mehr Afshan Faruqi, David...