The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays

The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays PDF Author: B. D. Chattopadhyaya
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438471750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This exploration of key terms related to social and political order, found in early Indian texts, challenges the idea of a unified ancient India and a unified national identity at that time. This collection explores what may be called the idea of India in ancient times. Its undeclared objective is to identify key concepts which show early Indian civilization as distinct and differently oriented from other formations. The essays focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key terms—such as janapada, desa, var?a, dharma, bh?va—in their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are “given entities,” but that they evolved historically. Professor Chattopadhyaya examines these texts to unveil historical processes. Without denying comparative history, he stresses that the internal dynamics of a society are best decoded via its own texts. His approach bears very effectively on understanding ongoing interactions between India’s “Great Tradition” and “Little Traditions.” As a whole, this book is critical of the notion of overarching Indian unity in the ancient period. It punctures the retrospective thrust of hegemonic nationalism as an ideology that has obscured the diverse textures of Indian civilization. Renowned for his scholarship on the ancient Indian past, Professor Chattopadhyaya’s latest collection only consolidates his high international reputation.

The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays

The Concept of Bharatavarsha and Other Essays PDF Author: B. D. Chattopadhyaya
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438471750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
This exploration of key terms related to social and political order, found in early Indian texts, challenges the idea of a unified ancient India and a unified national identity at that time. This collection explores what may be called the idea of India in ancient times. Its undeclared objective is to identify key concepts which show early Indian civilization as distinct and differently oriented from other formations. The essays focus on ancient Indian texts within a variety of genres. They identify certain key terms—such as janapada, desa, var?a, dharma, bh?va—in their empirical contexts to suggest that neither the ideas embedded in these terms nor the idea of Bharatavarsha as a whole are “given entities,” but that they evolved historically. Professor Chattopadhyaya examines these texts to unveil historical processes. Without denying comparative history, he stresses that the internal dynamics of a society are best decoded via its own texts. His approach bears very effectively on understanding ongoing interactions between India’s “Great Tradition” and “Little Traditions.” As a whole, this book is critical of the notion of overarching Indian unity in the ancient period. It punctures the retrospective thrust of hegemonic nationalism as an ideology that has obscured the diverse textures of Indian civilization. Renowned for his scholarship on the ancient Indian past, Professor Chattopadhyaya’s latest collection only consolidates his high international reputation.

Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age

Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age PDF Author: Gregory Maertz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791435601
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Charts the interactive contours of European culture of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, extending the chronological limits of Romanticism by identifying fresh links among works, authors, contexts, and institutions across national and linguistic borders.

The Making of Early Medieval India

The Making of Early Medieval India PDF Author: Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
These essays explore the processes of change in Indian society over the period from about the seventh to the thirteenth century. Departing radically from the current historiography on the period, the author posits change as represented by processes of progressive transformation, not by the breakdown of an earlier social order. Within this framework, he discusses such diverse themes as irrigation, urbanization, the formation of a dominant ruling caste, and the structure of polity in general.

Heaven Is Empty

Heaven Is Empty PDF Author: Filippo Marsili
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143847203X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
Offers a new perspective on the relationship between religion and the creation of the first Chinese empires. Heaven Is Empty offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE) and shows how the unification of the Central States was possible without a unitary and universalistic conception of religion. The cohesive function of the ancient Mediterranean cult of the divinized ruler was crucial for the legitimization of Rome’s empire across geographical and social boundaries. Eventually reelaborated in Christian terms, it came to embody the timelessness and universality of Western conceptions of legitimate authority, while representing an analytical template for studying other ancient empires. Filippo Marsili challenges such approaches in his examination of the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han (141–87 BCE). Wu purposely drew from regional traditions and tried to gain the support of local communities through his patronage of local cults. He was interested in rituals that envisioned the monarch as a military leader, who directly controlled the land and its resources, as a means for legitimizing radical administrative and economic centralization. In reconstructing this imperial model, Marsili reinterprets fragmentary official accounts in light of material evidence and noncanonical and recently excavated texts. In bringing to life the courts, battlefields, markets, shrines, and pleasure quarters of early imperial China, Heaven Is Empty provides a postmodern and postcolonial reassessment of “religion” before the arrival of Buddhism and challenges the application of Greco-Roman and Abrahamic systemic, identitary, and exclusionary notions of the “sacred” to the analysis of pre-Christian and non-Western realities. Filippo Marsili is Associate Professor of History at Saint Louis University.

Sogdian Traders

Sogdian Traders PDF Author: Étienne de la Vaissière
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047406990
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
The Sogdian were the main traders of Central Asia from the fifth to the eighth century. Their diaspora is attested in India, China, Iran, the Turkish Steppe, but also Byzantium. This is the first attempt to describe their trade.

The Renaissance in India

The Renaissance in India PDF Author: Aurobindo Ghose
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description


Studying Early India

Studying Early India PDF Author: Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843311321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
A focal study of the methodological changes that confront historians of pre-colonial India.

Narrativizing Bharatvarsa & Other Essays

Narrativizing Bharatvarsa & Other Essays PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788182903951
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description


India, that is Bharat

India, that is Bharat PDF Author: J Sai Deepak
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9354350046
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
India, That Is Bharat, the first book of a comprehensive trilogy, explores the influence of European 'colonial consciousness' (or 'coloniality'), in particular its religious and racial roots, on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation and the origins of the Indian Constitution. It lays the foundation for its sequels by covering the period between the Age of Discovery, marked by Christopher Columbus' expedition in 1492, and the reshaping of Bharat through a British-made constitution-the Government of India Act of 1919. This includes international developments leading to the founding of the League of Nations by Western powers that tangibly impacted this journey. Further, this work also traces the origins of seemingly universal constructs such as 'toleration', 'secularism' and 'humanism' to Christian political theology. Their subsequent role in subverting the indigenous Indic consciousness through a secularised and universalised Reformation, that is, constitutionalism, is examined. It also puts forth the concept of Middle Eastern coloniality, which preceded its European variant and allies with it in the context of Bharat to advance their shared antipathy towards the Indic worldview. In order to liberate Bharat's distinctive indigeneity, 'decoloniality' is presented as a civilisational imperative in the spheres of nature, religion, culture, history, education, language and, crucially, in the realm of constitutionalism.

The Routledge Handbook of the State in Premodern India

The Routledge Handbook of the State in Premodern India PDF Author: Hermann Kulke
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000485145
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 594

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Book Description
This handbook presents a multilayered and multidimensional history of state formation in premodern India. It explores dense and rich local and subregional historiography from the mid-first millennium BC to the eighteenth century in South Asia. Shifting the focus away from economic and political factors, this handbook revises the conventional understanding of states and empires and locates them in their quotidian conduct and activity on socio-cultural and concomitant factors. Comprehensive in scope, this handbook addresses a range of themes connected with the idea of state formation in the subcontinent. It includes discussions and debates on ritual practices and the Brahmanical order in early India; the Delhi Sultanate and role of Sultans among the Hindu kings; the cosmopolitan ‘Islamicate’ cultural influences on Puranic Hinduism; cultural background of the Mughal state. The handbook examines new questions and ideologies of state formation, such as: · facets of violence and resistance; · the significance of the autonomous spaces and forests; · regional elites, including ‘Little kings’; tribal background of some famous cults; · trade and maritime commerce; · royal patronage, courtly manners, lineage formation; · imperial architecture, monuments, and temple, among others. Featuring case studies from different part of the India subcontinent, and with contributions by renowned historians, this authoritative handbook will be an indispensable reading for teachers, scholars, and students of early India, medieval India, premodern India, South Asian history, Asian history, historiography, economic history, historical sociology, and South Asia studies.