General

Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and...

Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits ("untouchables") and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist...

Nearly a century after his death, the image of Sai Baba, the serene old man with the white beard from Shirdi village in Maharashtra, India, is instantly recognizable to most South Asians (and many Westerners) as a guru for all faiths-Hindus, Muslims, and...

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and...

Intensifying droughts and competing pressures on water resources foreground water scarcity as an urgent concern of the global climate change crisis. In India, individual, industrial, and agricultural water demands exacerbate inequities of access and...

For centuries, people from Mustang, Nepal, have relied on agriculture, pastoralism, and trade as a way of life. Seasonal migrations to South Asian cities for trade as well as temporary wage labor abroad have shaped their experiences for decades. Yet,...

Whether from the perspective of Islamic law's advocates, secularism's partisans, or communities caught in their crossfire, many people see the relationship between Islamic law and secularism as antagonistic and increasingly discordant. In the United...

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bombay was beset by crises such as famine and plague. Yet, rather than halting the flow of capital, these crises served to secure it. In colonial Bombay, capitalists and governors, Indian and British...

In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the...

Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with...

Tibetan Buddhism teaches compassion toward all beings, a category that explicitly includes animals. Slaughtering animals is morally problematic at best and, at worst, completely incompatible with a religious lifestyle. Yet historically most Tibetans-both...

After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered territories governed by the French imperial state. It was not until 1962 that France fully relinquished control. Once decolonization took hold across the...

For over five hundred years, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of northern and central India, starting with the Ghurids in the 1190s through the fracturing of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Scholars have long drawn upon works written in...

In today's world of unequal globalization, Bangladesh has drawn international attention for the spate of factory disasters that have taken the lives of numerous garment workers, mostly young women. The contemporary garment industry-and the labor...

The essays in this volume, which lie at the intersection of the study of literature, social theory, and intellectual history, locate serious reflections on modernity's complexities in the vibrant currents of modern Indian literature, particularly in the...

Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions,...

Writing Resistance is the first close study of the growing body of contemporary Hindi-language Dalit (low caste) literature in India. The Dalit literary movement has had an immense sociopolitical and literary impact on various Indian linguistic regions,...

Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped...

10/13/201010/13/2010Book InformationISBN 9780231157353Author A. K. RamanujanFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Columbia University PressPublisher Columbia University Press

The figure of Sakuntala appears in many forms throughout South Asian literature, most famously in the Mahabharata and in Kalidisa's fourth-century Sanskrit play, Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection. In these two texts, Sakuntala undergoes a critical...

The Sathya Sai global civil religious movement incorporates Hindu and Muslim practices, Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences, and "New Age"-style rituals and beliefs. Shri Sathya Sai Baba, its charismatic and controversial leader,...

When we understand that something is a pot, is it because of one property that all pots share? This seems unlikely, but without this common essence, it is difficult to see how we could teach someone to use the word "pot" or to see something as...

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the...

The Lotus Sutra proclaims that a unitary intent underlies the diversity of Buddhist teachings and promises that all people without exception can achieve supreme awakening. Establishing the definitive guide to this profound text, specialists in Buddhist...

Philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God have been crucial to Euro-American and South Asian philosophers for over a millennium. Critical to the history of philosophy in India, were the centuries-long arguments between Buddhist and...

Through extensive field research, Elora Shehabuddin explores the profound implications of women's political and social mobilization for reshaping Islam. Specifically, she examines the lives of Muslim women in Bangladesh who have become increasingly...

For more than fifty years, students and teachers have made the two-volume resource Sources of Indian Traditions their top pick for an accessible yet thorough introduction to Indian and South Asian civilizations. Volume 2 contains an essential selection...

The idea of social capital allows scholars to assess the quality of relationships among people within a particular community and show how that quality affects the ability to achieve shared goals. With evidence collected from sixty-nine villages in India,...

The Making of the Dalit Public in North India is a detailed commentary on politics and political consciousness, participation, and mobilization among the Dalits in northern India. Based on extensive fieldwork at the village level in eastern Uttar...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143102748Author Gopa SabharwalFormat PaperbackPage Count 392Imprint Penguin Books IndiaPublisher Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd

Friend or foe? Pakistan was extremely instrumental in supplying guns to Afghanistan to fight Russia. On the other hand, some of the world's worst terrorists live seemingly in peace in Pakistan with little if any threat to their activities. Pakistan has...

The works presented in this collection take environmental scholarship in South Asia into novel territory by exploring how questions of national identity become entangled with environmental concerns in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and India. The essays...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447107075Author Elisa FreschiFormat PaperbackPage Count 372Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 5670g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447102018Author Istvan KeulFormat HardbackPage Count 283Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 5670g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447062657Author Gyula WojtillaFormat PaperbackPage Count 144Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 2260g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447112741Author Klaus KoschorkeFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 349g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783447108737Author Heidrun BrucknerFormat PaperbackPage Count 184Imprint HarrassowitzPublisher HarrassowitzWeight(grams) 395g

A vibrant example of living literature, the Bhagavata Purana is a versatile Hindu sacred text written in Sanskrit verse. Finding its present form by the tenth century C.E., the work inspired several major north Indian devotional (bhakti) traditions as...

This pictorial history of the Indian Air Force features some colour photographs of its plans and helicopters on active service and rescue operations and some rare black and white photographs from its earlier days.Book InformationISBN 9781862270978Author...

Indian Philosophy: An Introduction helps readers discover how the many and varied schools of Indian thought can answer some of the great questions of life: Who are we? How can we live well? How do we tell truth from lies? Accessibly written for readers...