The New India is the unforgettable account of the struggle between modern forces and ancient ideas to shape the young country's destiny. It reveals a picture of a nation on the precipice of dramatic change.

'Remarkable... fascinating... brilliant' Guardian

Based on six years of detailed research and on-the-ground reporting, the book builds - authoritatively, vividly, indelibly - to become the story of post-colonial India. Using hundreds of interviews, and letters, diary entries, Partition-era police reports, and an astonishing range of sources, Bhatia shows how history plays a recurring role in the present: in politics, in the minds of citizens, in notions of justice and corruption.

Bhatia examines the connections between the Delhi riots of 2020 and the emergence of nineteenth-century revolutionary secret societies, the rise of Hindu nationalism, whose early advocates drew lessons from Hitler and Mussolini, the political use of misinformation and religious targeting, and the Hindu fundamentalist ideology that sparked the creation of the world's largest biometric project. As Bhatia shows, the evolution of this citizen database, in the hands of the BJP, now threatens to deny vast numbers of India's 200 million Muslims their Indian citizenship. Electorates in democracies used to choose their government. Now, in India, the government is choosing its electorate.

India has rarely been seen as in The New India, a monumental work of narrative reportage that illuminates the ways in which a supremacist ideology remade the country over decades, resulting in the prodigious rise of Narendra Modi, and forcing many to ask what they truly understood about their neighbours and themselves.

"The books line up on my shelf like bright Bodhisattvas ready to take tough questions or keep quiet company. They stake out a vast territory, with works from two millennia in multiple genres: aphorism, lyric, epic, theater, and romance."
--Willis G. Regier, "The Chronicle Review"

"No effort has been spared to make these little volumes as attractive as possible to readers: the paper is of high quality, the typesetting immaculate. The founders of the series are John and Jennifer Clay, and Sanskritists can only thank them for an initiative intended to make the classics of an ancient Indian language accessible to a modern international audience."
--"The Times Higher Education Supplement"

"The Clay Sanskrit Library represents one of the most admirable publishing projects now afoot. . . . Anyone who loves the look and feel and heft of books will delight in these elegant little volumes."
--"New Criterion"

"Published in the geek-chic format."
--"BookForum"

"Very few collections of Sanskrit deep enough for research are housed anywhere in North America. Now, twenty-five hundred years after the death of Shakyamuni Buddha, the ambitious Clay Sanskrit Library may remedy this state of affairs."
--"Tricycle"

aNow an ambitious new publishing project, the Clay Sanskrit Library brings together leading Sanskrit translators and scholars of Indology from around the world to celebrate in translating the beauty and range of classical Sanskrit literature. . . . Published as smart green hardbacks that are small enough to fit into a jeans pocket, the volumes are meant to satisfy both the scholar and the lay reader. Each volume has a transliteration of the original Sanskrit texton the left-hand page and an English translation on the right, as also a helpful introduction and notes. Alongside definitive translations of the great Indian epics -- 30 or so volumes will be devoted to the Maha-bharat itself -- Clay Sanskrit Library makes available to the English-speaking reader many other delights: The earthy verse of Bhartri-hari, the pungent satire of Jayanta Bhatta and the roving narratives of Dandin, among others. All these writers belong properly not just to Indian literature, but to world literature.a
--"LiveMint"

aThe Clay Sanskrit Library has recently set out to change the scene by making available well-translated dual-language (English and Sanskrit) editions of popular Sanskritic texts for the public.a
--"Namarupa"

In India's great epic the Maha-bharata, the eighth book, aKarna, a recounts the events that occurred during the mighty hero Karna's two days as general of the Kaurava army. This second volume resumes on the war's seventeenth and penultimate day. This will be a momentous day for the Bharata clans and especially for a number of their most distinguished heroes, with some of the epic's most telegraphed events reaching their climax. Not only will the epic's most anticipated duel between its greatest champions Arjuna and Karna be played out to its cruel and tragic end, but one of the more gruesome episodes in the epic will also take place with Duhshasana meeting the fate that has long waited him since his brazen maltreatment of Draupadi in the assembly hall.

Co-published by New York University Press and the JJC Foundation

For more on this title and other titles in the Clay Sanskrit series, please visit http: //www.claysanskritlibrary.org

Since its discovery and the initial efforts toward its critical edition, the Paippaladasamhita of the Atharvaveda (PS) has attracted the attention of Vedic scholars and Indologists for several reasons. It constitutes a precious source for the study of the development of the earliest language. The text contains important information about various rites and magical practices, and hints about the oldest Indo-Iranian and Indo-European myths. All of this makes the PS a text of inestimable value for the study of Indian language and culture.

How does the soul relate to the body? Through the ages, innumerable religious and intellectual movements have proposed answers to this question. Many have gravitated to the notion of the "subtle body," positing some sort of subtle entity that is neither soul nor body, but some mixture of the two. Simon Cox traces the history of this idea from the late Roman Empire to the present day, touching on how philosophers, wizards, scholars, occultists, psychologists, and mystics have engaged with the idea over the past two thousand years. This study is an intellectual history of the subtle body concept from its origins in late antiquity through the Renaissance into the Euro-American counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. It begins with a prehistory of the idea, rooted as it is in third-century Neoplatonism. It then proceeds to the signifier "subtle body" in its earliest English uses amongst the Cambridge Platonists. After that, it looks forward to those Orientalist fathers of Indology, who, in their earliest translations of Sanskrit philosophy relied heavily on the Cambridge Platonist lexicon, and thereby brought Indian philosophy into what had hitherto been a distinctly platonic discourse. At this point, the story takes a little reflexive stroll into the source of the author's own interest in this strange concept, looking at Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical import, expression, and popularization of the concept. Cox then zeroes in on Aleister Crowley, focusing on the subtle body in fin de siecle occultism. Finally, he turns to Carl Jung, his colleague Frederic Spiegelberg, and the popularization of the idea of the subtle body in the Euro-American counterculture. This book is for anyone interested in yogic, somatic, or energetic practices, and will be very useful to scholars and area specialists who rely on this term in dealing with Hindu, Daoist, and Buddhist texts.

This review is from: Sudden Awakening: Into Direct Realization (Paperback) Amazon: For anyone who sincerely wants to have the truth laid out clearly, and concisely, leaving no traps of the mind unexposed, and who wants to receive a transmission of silence that your heart will recognize from every page - this book will be deeply satisfying. Eli Jaxon-Bear is able to transmit the truth in person and by the written word. Reading this book is being with your own self, not in any kind of New Age dream of enlightenment that just pleases the ego with a spiritual story, but in a real, tangible way that can give you the taste of what is actually possible for humanity, here and now. It is a very timely book, because when we look around and see that so many people are fed up with the results of business as usual, this book offers a real alternative, a radical shift of consciousness, that is so needed. I am very grateful that this book was written, and that it's so freely available.

An ancient conversation for a modern audience - anyone who has ever asked 'what is the purpose of life? or 'who am I?' will find something in this book. The Bhagavad Gita has been around a long time, but remains little known outside India. This edition sets out to change that. The ancient Gita is a world text dealing with the mysteries of life. At its heart is a conversation between the soul and God. Ranchor Prime's version adopts a non-sectarian approach, making the Gita relevant to those of all religions or none, and emphasising the link between religion and self-development. It is distinguished by its easy accessibility. His section-by-section commentary opens the text to the spiritual seeker. He never loses sight of the audience for his book, and that he wants his readers to understand the Gita in a personal way.

The Samkhyayoga institution of Kapil Math is a religious organisation with a small tradition of followers which emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the renunciant and yogin Hariharananda Aranya. This tradition developed during the same period in which modern yoga was born and forms a chapter in the expansion of yoga traditions in modern Hinduism. The book analyses the yoga teaching of Hariharananda Aranya (1869-1947) and the Kapil Math tradition, its origin, history and contemporary manifestations, and this tradition's connection to the expansion of yoga and the Yogasutra in modern Hinduism. The Samkhyayoga of the Kapil Math tradition is based on the Patanjalayogasastra, on a number of texts in Sanskrit and Bengali written by their gurus, and on the lifestyle of the renunciant yogin living isolated in a cave. The book investigates Hariharananda Aranya's connection to pre-modern yoga traditions and the impact of modern production and transmission of knowledge on his interpretations of yoga. The book connects the Kapil Math tradition to the nineteenth century transformations of Bengali religious culture of the educated upper class that led to the production of a new type of yogin. The book analyses Samkhyayoga as a living tradition, its current teachings and practices, and looks at what Samkhyayogins do and what Samkhyayoga is as a yoga practice. A valuable contribution to recent and ongoing debates, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Religious Studies, Anthropology, Asian Studies, Indology, Indian philosophy, Hindu Studies and Yoga Studies.

This is a collection of previously unpublished essays exploring the meanings of marriage in South Asian Hindu culture: its practices, assumption, sensibilities and discontents. The authors use new understandings of gender to study local practices, attitudes, folk narratives, ritual symbols, and religious sensibilities as they bear on religion, gender, and social life in the Hindu world.

This extraordinary treatise explores parallel passages from the Bible and the Hindu scriptures to reveal the essential unity of all religions. Swami Sri Yukteswar is renowned as the revered guru of the great pioneer of yoga in the West, Paramahansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi). In this remarkable work - composed in the year 1894 at the request of the great Indian sage, Mahavatar Babaji - Sri Yukteswar outlines the universal path that every human being must travel to enlightenment.

This extraordinary treatise explores parallel passages from the Bible and the Hindu scriptures to reveal the essential unity of all religions. Swami Sri Yukteswar is renowned as the revered guru of the great pioneer of yoga in the West, Paramahansa Yogananda (author of Autobiography of a Yogi). In this remarkable work - composed in the year 1894 at the request of the great Indian sage, Mahavatar Babaji - Sri Yukteswar outlines the universal path that every human being must travel to enlightenment.

This book examines historical changes in the grammar of the Indo-Aryan languages from the period of their earliest attestations in Vedic Sanskrit (around 1000 bc) to contemporary Hindi. Uta Reinoehl focuses specifically on the rise of configurational structure as a by-product of the grammaticalization of postpositions: while Vedic Sanskrit lacks function words that constrain nominal expressions into phrasal units - one of the characteristics of a non-configurational language - New Indo-Aryan languages have postpositions which organize nominal expressions into postpositional phrases. The grammaticalization of postpositions and the concomitant syntactic changes are traced through the three millennia of Indo-Aryan attested history with a focus on Vedic Sanskrit, Middle Indic Pali and Apabhramsha, Early New Indic Old Awadhi, and finally Hindi. Among the topics discussed are the constructions in which the postpositions grammaticalize, the origins of the postpositional template, and the paradigmatization of the various elements involved into a single functional class of postpositions. The book outlines how it is semantic and pragmatic changes that induce changes on the expression side, ultimately resulting in the establishment of phrasal, and thus low-level configurational, syntax.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind thousands of short inscriptions in a forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the other key urban cultures of the time, in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. What language did the Indus people speak? How might we decipher the exquisitely carved Indus inscriptions? What deities did they worship? Are the roots of contemporary Hinduism to be found in the religion of the Indus civilization as well as in the Vedic religion? Since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s, these questions have been debated with increasing animosity, colored by the history of modern colonialism in India. This is especially true of the enigmatic Indus script, which is at the hub of the debates, and a particular focus of this book. Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions. In this pioneering book, he traces the Indo-Iranian speakers from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea through the Eurasian steppes to Central, West, and South Asia. Among many other things, he discusses the profound impact of the invention of the horse-drawn chariot on Indo-Aryan religion, and presents new ideas on the origin and formation of the Vedic literature and rites, and the great Hindu epics.

For countless generations families have lived in isolated communities in the Godavari Delta of coastal Andhra Pradesh, learning and reciting their legacy of Vedas, performing daily offerings and occasional sacrifices. They are the virtually unrecognized survivors of a 3,700-year-old heritage, the last in India who perform the ancient animal and soma sacrifices according to Vedic tradition. In Vedic Voices, David M. Knipe offers for the first time, an opportunity for them to speak about their lives, ancestral lineages, personal choices as pandits, wives, children, and ways of coping with an avalanche of changes in modern India. He presents a study of four generations of ten families, from those born at the outset of the twentieth century down to their great-grandsons who are just beginning, at the age of seven, the task of memorizing their Veda, the Taittiriya Samhita, a feat that will require eight to twelve years of daily recitations. After successful examinations these young men will reside with the Veda family girls they married as children years before, take their places in the oral transmission of a three-thousand-year Vedic heritage, teach the Taittiriya collection of texts to their own sons, and undertake with their wives the major and minor sacrifices performed by their ancestors for some three millennia. Coastal Andhra, famed for bountiful rice and coconut plantations, has received scant attention from historians of religion and anthropologists despite a wealth of cultural traditions. Vedic Voices describes in captivating prose the geography, cultural history, pilgrimage traditions, and celebrated persons of the region. Here unfolds a remarkable story of Vedic pandits and their wives, one scarcely known in India and not at all to the outside world.

Karen Prentiss offers an interpretive history of bhakti, an influential religious perspective in Hinduism. She argues that although bhakti is mentioned in every contemporary sourcebook on Indian religions, it still lacks an agreed-upon definition. "Devotion" is found to be the most commonly used synonym. Prentiss seeks a new perspective on this elusive concept. Her analysis of Tamil (south Indian) materials leads her to suggest that bhakti be understood as a doctrine of embodiment. Bhakti, she says, urges people towards active engagement in the worship of God. She proposes that the term "devotion" be replaced by "participation," emphasizing bhakti's call for engagement in worship and the necessity of embodiment to fulfill that obligation. The book ends with two appendices presenting translations of hymns and an important philosophical text.

Pastoralist traditions have long been extraordinarily important to the social, economic, political, and cultural life of the
region of western India called Maharashtra. The Marathi-language oral literature of the Dhangar shepherds of
Maharashtra is not only one of the most important elements of their own traditional cultural life, but also a treasure of
world literature. This volume presents two lively and well-crafted examples of the ovi, a genre typical of the oral literature of Dhangars. The two ovis in the volume narrate the stories of Biroba and Dhuloba, two of the most important gods of Dhangar shepherds. Each of the ovis tells an elaborate story of the birth of the god--a miraculous and complicated process in both cases--and of the struggles each one goes through in order to find and win his bride. The extensive introduction provides a literary analysis of the ovis and discusses what they reveal about the cosmology, geography, society, administrative structures, and economy of their performers' world, and about the performers views of pastoralistsand women.

The main subjects of analysis in the present book are the stages of initiation in the grand scheme of Theosophical evolution. These initiatory steps are connected to an idea of evolutionary self-development by means of a set of virtues that are relative to the individual's position on the path of evolution. The central thesis is that these stages were translated from the "Hindu" tradition to the "Theosophical" tradition through multifaceted "hybridization processes" in which several Indian members of the Theosophical Society partook. Starting with Annie Besant's early Theosophy, the stages of initiation are traced through Blavatsky's work to Manilal Dvivedi and T. Subba Row, both Indian members of the Theosophical Society, and then on to the Sanatana Dharma Text Books. In 1898, the English Theosophist Annie Besant and the Indian Theosophist Bhagavan Das together founded the Central Hindu College, Benares, which became the nucleus around which the Benares Hindu University was instituted in 1915. In this context the Sanatana Dharma Text Books were published. Muhlematter shows that the stages of initiation were the blueprint for Annie Besant's pedagogy, which she implemented in the Central Hindu College in Benares. In doing so, he succeeds in making intelligible how "esoteric" knowledge was transferred to public institutions and how a broader public could be reached as a result. The dissertation has been awarded the ESSWE PhD Thesis prize 2022 by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.

There is growing interest in tantric sex which this book addresses with great originality. It is the first book to focus specifically on the body in tantric sexual tradition and practice, and will attract committed audiences from students and general readers interested in mind, body, spirit and eastern religions. Tantra is the Hindu-based religion which links ecstatic sexual practice with meditation and direct spiritual experience. It originated in India some 1200 years ago, when the great sacred erotic temples were built. In the West it is best known for its inspiration of tantric yoga, and its associated ritualistic forms of sex. But is tantra just about esoteric sex or does it amount to something more? This lively and original book contributes to a more complete understanding of tantra's mysteries. Without minimising its sexual dimensions, Gavid Flood argues that within tantra the body is more than just a sexual entity.