A new English translation of Raghuvaṃśa by the celebrated Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, who inspired such modern writers as Goethe and Tagore. For a millennium and a half, Kalidasa’s works—from The Cloud Messenger to The Recognition of Shakuntala—have delighted audiences in India and beyond. Although the renowned poet and dramatist inspired many literary works over the centuries, little is known about his life. He likely lived in central India in the late fourth or early fifth century. Kalidasa’s The Lineage of the Raghus, or Raghuvaṃśa, belongs to the Sanskrit literary tradition of mahākāvya, or court poem. It recounts the lives of ancient kings in the sūryavaṃśa, the Solar Dynasty who ruled from the capital city of Ayodhya. The poem describes, among other episodes, the quest for offspring by Dilipa, a descendant of the primordial king Manu; the world conquest of his son Raghu, which offers a panorama of the Indian subcontinent; the exploits of the famous Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu; and the debaucheries of Agnivarna, which jeopardize the future of the lineage. This volume presents a new edition of the Sanskrit text in the Devanagari script alongside a fresh English translation of this enduring epic.

Academic study of the tantric traditions has blossomed in recent decades, in no small measure thanks to the magisterial contributions of Alexis G. J. S. Sanderson, until 2015 Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. This collection of essays honours him and touches several fields of Indology that he has helped to shape (or, in the case of the Saiva religions, revolutionised): the history, ritual, and philosophies of tantric Buddhism, Saivism and Vaisnavism; religious art and architecture; and Sanskrit belles lettres. Grateful former students, joined by other experts influenced by his scholarship, here offer papers that make significant contributions to our understanding of the cultural, religious, political, and intellectual histories of premodern South and Southeast Asia. Contributors are: Peter Bisschop, Judit Toerzsoek, Alex Watson, Isabelle Ratie, Christopher Wallis, Peter-Daniel Szanto, Srilata Raman, Csaba Dezso, Gergely Hidas, Nina Mirnig, John Nemec, Bihani Sarkar, Jurgen Hanneder, Diwakar Acharya, James Mallinson, Csaba Kiss, Jason Birch, Elizabeth Mills, Ryugen Tanemura, Anthony Tribe, and Parul Dave-Mukherji.

The very earliest Indian literature to survive is that of the Vedas. This diverse body of polytheistic hymns, prose treatises on sacrifice, and speculation about the soul of the universe has long been revered by orthodox Hindus as primary scriptural revelation. The hymns, which form its most ancient stratum, were handed down orally for centuries, even long after the development of writing in India. In this new edition of Hindu Scriptures R. C. Zaehner's original selection of hymns from the Rg-Veda and Atharva-Veda has been enlarged. This is followed by Zaehner's translations of five of the earliest Upanishads, the seminal scriptures for the monist doctrine of Sankara, the belief that the world we experience is a cosmic illusion that we project upon the one, unchanging undefinable reality, brahman. From the vast corpus of other texts revered by Hindus are drawn the Bhagavad-Gita; portions of the Law Book of Yajnavalkya, a treatise that attempts to codify every aspect of the life of the orthodox Hindu; chapters from the Kirana-Tantra, translated for the first time into English, which expound the doctrines of an early tantric cult of Siva; and the chapters from the Bhagavata-Purnana, which describe the dalliance of Krsna and the cowherd women of Vraja.