Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the dynamic tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice over twelve hundred years. Political Violence in Ancient India looks at representations of kingship and political violence in epics, religious texts, political treatises, plays, poems, inscriptions, and art from 600 BCE to 600 CE. As kings controlled their realms, fought battles, and meted out justice, intellectuals debated the boundary between the force required to sustain power and the excess that led to tyranny and oppression. Duty (dharma) and renunciation were important in this discussion, as were punishment, war, forest tribes, and the royal hunt. Singh reveals a range of perspectives that defy rigid religious categorization. Buddhists, Jainas, and even the pacifist Maurya emperor Ashoka recognized that absolute nonviolence was impossible for kings. By 600 CE religious thinkers, political theorists, and poets had justified and aestheticized political violence to a great extent. Nevertheless, questions, doubt, and dissent remained. These debates are as important for understanding political ideas in the ancient world as for thinking about the problem of political violence in our own time.

Alexander Cunningham, India's first professional archaeologist, became the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1871. This volume contains a collection of 193 letters he wrote between 1871 and 1888 to his Archaeological Assistant, J. D. M. Beglar. The letters, published here for the first time, edited and with an introduction by Upinder Singh, offer exciting, new insights into Cunningham's life and career, telling the story of the birth of Indian archaeology and some of its greatest discoveries in real time, in Cunningham's own words. The letters provide a unique perspective on the construction of Indian history in the nineteenth century. They reveal the evolution of Cunningham's ideas and methods, his interventions in debates on conservation and restoration, and his interactions with textual scholars in India and Europe. They throw light on the place of archaeology in the politics of colonial India, the role of the princely states, and the growing rivalry between Indians and Europeans over the right to interpret India's past. They also show the friendship between Cunningham and Beglar, based on a shared passion for archaeology. In doing all this, these letters bring alive the history of Indian archaeology in its crucial, formative phase.