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Politics, Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 327

Politics, Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India

Whitney Cox presents a fundamental re-imagining of the politics of pre-modern India through a revisionist reading of the Chola dynasty, a medieval South Asian superpower. Utilizing a series of textual sources, this innovative study poses comparative and conceptual questions about politics, history, agency and representation in the pre-modern world.

South Asian Texts in History
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 403

South Asian Texts in History

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2011
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  • Publisher: Unknown

South Asian Texts in History charts the contours of a reenvisioned and revitalized field of Indology in the light of the groundbreaking research of Sheldon Pollock. One of the many exciting aspects of Pollock's work is its unprecedented combination of classical textual study with cutting edge theoretical and social scientific inquiry--a combination which this book sets out to emulate. Pollock has trained and inspired a new generation of scholars, many of whom have contributed to this volume. The essays are organized into five groups that reflect the major domains of Pollock's immense contributions to the field: the epic Ramayana, Sanskrit literature and literary theory, systematic thought in...

A Lasting Vision
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 561

A Lasting Vision

A Lasting Vision is dedicated to the Mirror of Literature (Kavyadarsa), a Sanskrit treatise on poetics composed by Dandin in south India (c. 700 CE), and to the treatise's remarkable career throughout large parts of Asia. The Mirror was adapted and translated into several languages spoken on the southern Indian peninsula (Kannada, Tamil) and on the Island of Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Pali), as well as in the Tibetan plateau far to the north (Tibetan, Mongolian). In all these receiving cultures it became a classical text and a source of constant engagement and innovation, often well into the modern era. It also travelled to Burma and Thailand, where it held a place of honor in Buddhist monastic edu...

Tamil
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 417

Tamil

Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil—language, literature, and civilization—emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography. Two stories animate Shulman’s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil’s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. ...

Modes of Philology in Medieval South India
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 210

Modes of Philology in Medieval South India

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2021-04-05
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  • Publisher: Primus Books

Philology was everywhere and nowhere in classical South Asia. While its civilizations possessed remarkably sophisticated tools and methods of textual analysis, interpretation, and transmission, they lacked any sense of a common disciplinary or intellectual project uniting these; indeed they lacked a word for 'philology' altogether.

Didn't We Almost Have It All
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 282

Didn't We Almost Have It All

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2022-02-01
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  • Publisher: Abrams

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR... SO FAR by The New Yorker Named a BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH by The Washington Post A candid exploration of the genius, shame, and celebrity of Whitney Houston a decade after her passing On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. In the decade since, the world has mourned her death amid new revelations about her relationship to her Blackness, her sexuality, and her addictions. Didn’t We Almost Have It All is author Gerrick Kennedy’s exploration of the duality of Whitney’s life as both a woman in the spotlight and someone who often had to hide who she was. This is the story of Whitney’s...

Rewriting Buddhism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 286

Rewriting Buddhism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020-03-17
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  • Publisher: UCL Press

Rewriting Buddhism is the first intellectual history of premodern Sri Lanka’s most culturally productive period. This era of reform (1157–1270) shaped the nature of Theravada Buddhism both in Sri Lanka and also Southeast Asia and even today continues to define monastic intellectual life in the region. Alastair Gornall argues that the long century’s literary productivity was not born of political stability, as is often thought, but rather of the social, economic and political chaos brought about by invasions and civil wars. Faced with unprecedented uncertainty, the monastic community sought greater political autonomy, styled itself as royal court, and undertook a series of reforms, most notably, a purification and unification in 1165 during the reign of Parakramabahu I. He describes how central to the process of reform was the production of new forms of Pali literature, which helped create a new conceptual and social coherence within the reformed community; one that served to preserve and protect their religious tradition while also expanding its reach among the more fragmented and localized elites of the period.

Dust on the Throne
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 314

Dust on the Throne

Received wisdom has it that Buddhism disappeared from India, the land of its birth, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, long forgotten until British colonial scholars re-discovered it in the early 1800s. Its full-fledged revival, so the story goes, only occurred in 1956, when the Indian civil rights pioneer Dr. B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his Dalit (formerly "untouchable") followers. This, however, is only part of the story. Dust on the Throne reframes discussions about the place of Buddhism in the subcontinent from the early nineteenth century onwards, uncovering the integral, yet unacknowledged, role that Indians played in the making of mod...

The Making of Early Kashmir
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 200

The Making of Early Kashmir

What is history? How does a land become a homeland? How are cultural identities formed? The Making of Early Kashmir explores these questions in relation to the birth of Kashmir and the discursive and material practices that shaped it up to the 12th century CE. Reinterpreting the first work of Kashmiri history, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, this book argues that the text was history not despite being traditional Sanskrit poetry but because of it. It elaborated a poetics of place, implicating Kashmir’s sacred geography, a stringent critique of local politics, and a regional selfhood that transcended the limits of vernacularism.Combined with longue durée testimonies from art, material culture, script, and linguistics, this book jettisons the image of an isolated and insular Kashmir. It proposes a cultural formation that straddled the Western Himalayas and the Indic plains with Kashmir as the pivot. This is the story of the connected histories of the region and the rest of India.