Religious imaginary is a way of conceiving and structuring the world within the conceptual and imaginative traditions of the religious. Using religious imaginary as a reference, this book analyses temporal ideologies and expressions of historicity in South Asia in the early modern, pre-colonial and early colonial period.

Chapters explore the multiple understandings of time and the past that informed the historical imagination in various kinds of literary representations, including historiographical and literary texts, hagiography, and religious canonical literature. The book...

This volume brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, religion, history, and art history, to name a few - to highlight their various findings and perspectives on different facets of Bodhgaya's past and present.

This book analyses the articulations of Tamil identity in the period of colonial modernity and beyond. It examines the development of Tamil religion by focusing on the important 19^th century Tamil Hindu reformer and saint, Ramalinga Swamigal.

The transformation of Tamil religion is mapped through the examination of specific literary/religious genres - that of hagiographies and sacred biographies.Taking as a starting point Ramalinga's own writing, the book presents him as inhabiting a -border- zone between early modernity and modernity, tradition and charisma, Hinduism...