Robert Dankoff has culled passages from Evliya Celebi's Book of Travels that deal directly with the life and times of Celebi's patron, Melek Ahmed Pasha, an outstanding seventeenth-century military and administrative leader.

Celebi's account is sensitive to all the currents of his age and reflects them in his narrative. His wry comments and observations extend from the intimate details of daily life, and the attitudes of the lower classes, to the deeds of the mighty, the ideals of the age, and the fate of the empire. He concentrates on the later phase of Pasha's career, beginning with his...

Modern Western approaches to India often have focused on metaphysics at the expense of ethics, leading many to see Hinduism as only concerned with the esoteric and the otherworldly. The chapters of this book offer case study explorations that are selected and presented to invite comparisons with the modern West. Such comparisons will help to remove the apparent otherworldly nature of Hindu thought from the minds of Western readers, as well as give depth and new significance to Indian ideas in the areas of medical ethics, social ethics, and human rights. The case studies demonstrate that...