Indologist Ronald Inden has in the past raised questions about the images of a "traditional" or "medieval" India deployed by colonial scholars and rulers -- "Orientalists" -- and has also argued that a history of "early medieval" India very different from both the colonial and nationalist accounts could be written. This volume is designed as an important first step towards that goal. The authors look closely at three genres of texts that have been crucial to the representations of precolonial India. All three essays challenge not only colonialist scholarship but the attempts by religious nationalists to identify Hinduism as the essence of national identity in Idia and Buddhism as the essence of nationality in Sri Lanka.

This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials.

The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.

This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials. The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.

The neglected study of pre-colonial India is now currently undergoing a revival. Daud Ali views courtly life, through the prism of the famous Kama Sutra, in exploring the culture and polity of medieval India. Ali's analysis is meaningful to literary, religious, historical and cultural studies.

Scholars have long studied classical Sanskrit culture in almost total isolation from its courtly context. This book focuses exclusively on the royal court as a social and cultural institution. Using both literary and inscriptional sources, it begins with the rise and spread of royal households and political hierarchies from the Gupta period (c.350-750), and traces the emergence of a coherent courtly worldview which would remain stable for almost a millennium to 1200. Later chapters examine key features of courtly life such as: manners, ethics, concepts of personal beauty, and theories of disposition. The book ends with a sustained examination of the theory and practice of erotic love in the context of the wider social dynamics and anxieties which faced the people of the court.

Breaking from prevailing conceptions of ethics and morality as matters of moral rule or principle, this volume calls attention to ethical life in South Asia--the moral dispositions at work in lived experience, and the embodied practices of ethical engagement through which such dispositions may be cultivated and shared. Taking up themes such as the transmission of tradition, ethical engagements with modernity, ethical practices of the self, and moral relations between self and others, this volume puts South Asian traditions of ethical life into conversation with the Aristotelian, Christian, and liberal traditions that have been so consequential for ethical life in the West.