General History
Today the number of native speakers of Indo-European languages across the world is approximated to be over 2.6 billion—about 45 percent of the Earth’s population. Yet the idea that an ancient, prehistoric population in one time and place gave rise to a wide variety of peoples and languages is one with a long and troubled past. In this expansive …
Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures (Oxford UP, 2025) examines some of the most well-known and widely circulated narratives in the history of Sanskrit literature, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Visnusarman's famed animal stories (the Panchatantra), Somadeva's labyrinthine Ocean of Rivers of Stories …
Reframing India in World History breaks the stereotypical portrayal of India based on misconstrued historical theories. Prevalent constructions of Indian history are tinged with colonial historical frameworks and presentation. It is important to understand India for what it is in the past based on self-determined frameworks derived from Indian …
The Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram: Co-Creator of the Integral Yoga (Lexington Books, 2024) analyzes the contributions of the Mother (née Mirra Alfassa, 1878-1973) to the Integral Yoga that she and Sri Aurobindo (né Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950) co-created for his ashram. Scholars have ignored Mirra for Aurobindo, which prevents a full …
Handbook of Indian History (Springer, 2024) comprehensively examines the extensive history of India by focusing on the unifying themes of history. The profound analysis of special events and impactful personalities of Indian history form the core of the book. Handbook of Indian History includes articles on cultural, social, and political history …
Where is the "life" in scholarly life? Is it possible to find in academic writing, so often abstracted from the everyday? How might religion bridge that gap? In Love in the Time of Scholarship: The Bhagavata Purana in Indian Intellectual History (Oxford UP, 2024), author Anand Venkatkrishnan explores these questions within the intellectual …
In If All the World Were Paper: A History of Writing in Hindi (Columbia UP, 2024), Tyler W. Williams puts questions of materiality, circulation, and performance at the center of his investigation into how literature comes to be defined and produced within a language, specifically, premodern Hindi. Williams proposes new methods for working with …
Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for South Asian Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800 (Brill, 2023) situates manuscript illustrations and album paintings within …
Mirabai, an iconic sixteenth-century Indian poet-saint, is renowned for her unwavering love of God, her disregard for social hierarchies and gendered notions of honor and shame, and her challenge to familial, feudal, and religious authorities. Defying attempts to constrain and even kill her, she could not be silenced. Though verifiable facts …
Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King (Yale UP, 2024) is the first biography of the great Emperor Ashoka relying solely on his own words. Ashoka sought not only to rule his territory but also to give it a unity of purpose and aspiration, to unify the people of his vastly heterogeneous empire not by a cult of personality but by the cult of an …