Love may be a universal feeling, but culture and language play a crucial role in defining it. Idioms of love have a long history, and within every society there is always more than one discourse, be it prescriptive, religious, or gender-specific, available at any given time. This book explores the idioms of love that have developed in South Asia, those words, conceptual clusters, images and stories which have interlocked and grown into repertoires. Including essays by literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, film historians and political theorists, the collection unravels the interconnecting strands in the history of the concept (shringara, 'ishq, prem and "love") and maps their significance in literary, oral and visual traditions. Each essay examines a particular configuration and meaning of love on the basis of genre, tellers and audiences, and the substantial introduction sets out the main repertoires, presenting the student of South Asia with an important cultural history.

Like many societies across the world, the region of Awadh in North India has been bilingual throughout its history. But literary histories of the region often indicate otherwise. In the early twentieth century, colonists recodified literary histories separately according to language, detached written literature from oral literature, and reimagined the entangled literary past according to their own ideas about language, literature, and Indian history. At the same time, multilingualism remained resilient and acquired new uses. East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature examines literature produced, practiced, and circulated in and out of North India, focusing on the region of Awadh, from the beginning of recorded vernacular literature in the late fourteenth century to the colonial era of the early twentieth century. This book considers texts in a wide range of genres-courtly, devotional, and popular-composed in the main languages of the region: Hindavi, Persian, Brajbhasha, Urdu. Individual chapters focus on narratives, devotional song-poems and didactic works, local courtly literary practices, and multilingual education as recorded in biographical dictionaries-anthologies. Author Francesca Orsini suggests that this multilingual and multi-genre approach is better suited to capturing the texture, complexity, and dynamics of literature in the world, and of literary history, than approaches that focus only on global circulation or models that draw centers and peripheries on a single global map.

What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historical methods do the different sources and material objects require? Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.