Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000365670
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India by : Daud Ali

Download or read book Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre-colonial India written by Daud Ali and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials. The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.

Delights and Disquiets of Leisure in Premodern India

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Author :
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9394701281
Total Pages : 390 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (947 download)

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Book Synopsis Delights and Disquiets of Leisure in Premodern India by :

Download or read book Delights and Disquiets of Leisure in Premodern India written by and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-30 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. Essays in this historical exploration trace how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, from the ancient to the precolonial period. This book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in the projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature. The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies such as Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces such as the elite, women, the king in the bed chamber, the court with dancing girls, public areas such as orchards and gardens and performance spaces.

A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350259292
Total Pages : 249 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era by : Alain Touwaide

Download or read book A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era written by Alain Touwaide and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-12-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era covers the period from 500 to 1400, ranging across northern and central Europe to the Mediterranean, and from the Byzantine and Arabic Empires to the Persian World, India, and China. This was an age of empires and fluctuating borders, presenting a changing mosaic of environments, populations, and cultural practices. Many of the ancient uses and meanings of plants were preserved, but these were overlaid with new developments in agriculture, landscapes, medicine, eating habits, and art. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Alain Touwaide is Scientific Director at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, D.C., USA. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Plants set. General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.

Iran and the Deccan

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Author :
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 025304894X
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (53 download)

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Book Synopsis Iran and the Deccan by : Keelan Overton

Download or read book Iran and the Deccan written by Keelan Overton and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

Eloquent Spaces

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000007200
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Eloquent Spaces by : Shonaleeka Kaul

Download or read book Eloquent Spaces written by Shonaleeka Kaul and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eloquent Spaces adopts the twin analytic of meaning and community to write a fresh history of building in early India. It presents a new perspective on the principles and practices of early Indian architecture. Defining it broadly over a range of space uses, the book argues for architecture as a form of cultural production as well as public consumption. Ten chapters by leading archaeologists, architects, historians and philosophers, examining different architectural sites and landscapes, including Sanchi, Moodabidri, Srinagar, Chidambaram, Patan, Konark, Basgo and Puri, demonstrate the need to look beyond the built form to its spirit, beyond aesthetics to cognition, and thereby to integrating architecture with its myriad living contexts. The volume captures some of the semantic diversity inherent in premodern Indian traditions of civic building, both sacred and secular, which were, however, unified in their insistence on enacting meaning and a transcendent validity over and above utility and beauty of form. The book is a quest for a culturally rooted architecture as an alternative to the growing crisis of disembededness that informs modern praxis. This volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of architecture, ancient Indian history, philosophy, art history and cultural studies.

A Place for Utopia

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295806125
Total Pages : 221 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (958 download)

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Book Synopsis A Place for Utopia by : Smriti Srinivas

Download or read book A Place for Utopia written by Smriti Srinivas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-11-02 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early twentieth century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope. From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging “Indian New Age” of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190990821
Total Pages : 407 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India by : Margrit Pernau

Download or read book Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India written by Margrit Pernau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this pioneering project, Margrit Pernau brings the ‘history of emotions’ approach to South Asian studies. A theoretically sophisticated and erudite investigation, Emotions and Modernity in Colonial India maps the history of emotions in India between the uprising of 1857 and World War I. Situating the prevalent experiences, interpretations, and practices of emotions of the time within the context of the major political events of colonial India, Pernau goes beyond the dominant narrative of colonial modernity and its fixation with discipline and restrain, and traces the contemporary transformation from a balance in emotions to the resurgence of fervor. The current volume is based on a large archive of sources in Urdu, many being explored for the first time. Pernau grounds her work on such diverse sources as philosophical and theological treatises on questions of morality, advice literature, journals and newspapers, nostalgic descriptions of courtly culture, and even children’s literature. This close look into individual experiences, practices, and interpretations reveals the myriad emotions of the day, and the importance of these micro-histories in presenting an alternative account of colonial India.

The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190632925
Total Pages : 689 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (96 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice by : Kevin Trainor

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Practice written by Kevin Trainor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art exploration of several key dynamics in current studies of the Buddhist tradition with a focus on practice. Embodiment, materiality, emotion, and gender shape the way most Buddhists engage with their traditions, in contrast to popular representations of Buddhism as spiritual, disembodied, and largely devoid of ritual. This volume highlights how practice often represents a fluid, dynamic, and strategic means of defining identity and negotiating the challenges of everyday life. Essays explore the transformational aims of practices that require practitioners to move, gesture, and emote in prescribed ways, including the ways that scholars' own embodied practices are integral to their research methodology. The chapters are written by acknowledged experts in their respective subject areas and taken together offer an overview of current thinking in the field. The volume is of particular value to scholars who seek an orientation to current perspectives on important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological concerns that are shaping the field in areas outside their primary expertise. The inclusion of substantial, up-to-date bibliographies also makes the volume an important guide to current scholarship"--

Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present

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Author :
Publisher : UCL Press
ISBN 13 : 1911576690
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (115 download)

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Book Synopsis Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present by : Mark Altaweel

Download or read book Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present written by Mark Altaweel and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today our societies face great challenges with water, in terms of both quantity and quality, but many of these challenges have already existed in the past. Focusing on Asia, Water Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present seeks to highlight the issues that emerge or re-emerge across different societies and periods, and asks what they can tell us about water sustainability. Incorporating cutting-edge research and pioneering field surveys on past and present water management practices, the interdisciplinary contributors together identify how societies managed water resource challenges and utilised water in ways that allowed them to evolve, persist, or drastically alter their environment. The case studies, from different periods, ancient and modern, and from different regions, including Egypt, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Southwest United States, the Indus Basin, the Yangtze River, the Mesopotamian floodplain, the early Islamic city of Sultan Kala in Turkmenistan, and ancient Korea, offer crucial empirical data to readers interested in comparing the dynamics of water management practices across time and space, and to those who wish to understand water-related issues through conceptual and quantitative models of water use. The case studies also challenge classical theories on water management and social evolution, examine and establish the deep historical roots and ecological foundations of water sustainability issues, and contribute new grounds for innovations in sustainable urban planning and ecological resilience.

Banaras Reconstructed

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Publisher : University of Washington Press
ISBN 13 : 0295741619
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (957 download)

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Book Synopsis Banaras Reconstructed by : Madhuri Desai

Download or read book Banaras Reconstructed written by Madhuri Desai and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-06-27 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues. In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

Shifting Ground

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019908937X
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (99 download)

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Book Synopsis Shifting Ground by : Mahesh Rangarajan

Download or read book Shifting Ground written by Mahesh Rangarajan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental history of India has developed as an important field of inquiry in the last twenty-five years. While providing major insights, the existing scholarship has primarily focused on drawing sharp lines of distinction - those between geographical spaces (forest, rivers, farms), people (herders, farmers, townspeople), eras (colonial, post-colonial) and so on. The limitations of these sharp divides are brought to the forefront when there is a critical engagement with the region's contested environmental past. Shifting Ground brings together an array of essays that pose critical questions regarding India's environmental past and the way it has been approached by scholars. From debunking the idea of a primeval, pristine forest cover, to analysing the dynamics that shape human-animal relations, to examining the conflicts created by post-Independence projects of rural development and conservation - this volume touches upon the various aspects of environmental studies and juxtaposes them with social history, history of science and technology and history of trade and culture. Drawing on original case studies the book not only explores the past, but also portrays how its traditions are often invoked to be deployed in contemporary conflicts - those that are often aggravated by the pressures on natural assets created by the recent prosperity and the vaulting aspirations of a rapidly expanding Indian middle class.

Power, Presence and Space

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Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1000168808
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Power, Presence and Space by : Henry Albery

Download or read book Power, Presence and Space written by Henry Albery and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-07-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patterns of ritual power, presence, and space are fundamentally connected to, and mirror, the societal and political power structures in which they are enacted. This book explores these connections in South Asia from the early Common Era until the present day. The essays in the volume examine a wide range of themes, including a genealogy of ideas concerning Vedic rituals in European thought; Buddhist donative rituals of Gandhara and Andhra Pradesh in the early Common Era; land endowments, festivals, and temple establishments in medieval Tamil Nadu and Karnataka; Mughal court rituals of the Mughal Empire; and contemporary ritual complexes on the Nilgiri Plateau. This volume argues for the need to redress a historical neglect in identifying and theorising ritual and religion in material contexts within archaeology. Further, it challenges existing theoretical and methodological forms of documentation to propose new ways of understanding rituals in history. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South Asian history, religion, archaeology, and historical geography.

Jinnealogy

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Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 1503603954
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Jinnealogy by : Anand Vivek Taneja

Download or read book Jinnealogy written by Anand Vivek Taneja and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they write out requests as if petitioning the state. At a time when a Hindu right wing government in India is committed to normalizing a view of the past that paints Muslims as oppressors, Anand Vivek Taneja's Jinnealogy provides a fresh vision of religion, identity, and sacrality that runs counter to state-sanctioned history. The ruin, Firoz Shah Kotla, is an unusually democratic religious space, characterized by freewheeling theological conversations, DIY rituals, and the sanctification of animals. Taneja observes the visitors, who come mainly from the Muslim and Dalit neighborhoods of Delhi, and uses their conversations and letters to the jinns as an archive of voices so often silenced. He finds that their veneration of the jinns recalls pre-modern religious traditions in which spiritual experience was inextricably tied to ecological surroundings. In this enchanted space, Taneja encounters a form of popular Islam that is not a relic of bygone days, but a vibrant form of resistance to state repression and post-colonial visions of India.

Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000331490
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (3 download)

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Book Synopsis Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia by : István Keul

Download or read book Spaces of Religion in Urban South Asia written by István Keul and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores religion in various spatial constellations in South Asian cities, including religious centres such as Varanasi, Madurai and Nanded, and cities not readily associated with religion, such as Mumbai and Delhi. Contributors from different disciplines discuss a large variety of urban spaces: physical and imagined, institutional and residential, built and landscaped, virtual and mediatised, historical and contemporary. In doing so, the book addresses a wide range of issues concerning the role of religion in the dynamic interplay of factors which characterise complex urban social spaces. Chapters incorporate varying degrees and forms of the religious/spiritual, ranging from invisible and incorporeal to material and explicit, embedded in and expressed as spatial politics, works of fiction, mission, pilgrimage, festivals and everyday life. Topics examined include conflictual situations involving places of worship in Delhi, inclusive religious practices in Kanpur, American Protestant mission in Madurai, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in Lahore, gardens as imaginative spaces, the politics of religion in Varanasi and many others. Illustrating and analysing ways and forms in which religion persists in South Asian urban contexts, this book will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of cultural studies, the study of religions, urban studies and South Asian studies.

Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700

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Author :
Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN 13 : 0300211104
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700 by : Navina Najat Haidar

Download or read book Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700 written by Navina Najat Haidar and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2015-04-13 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vast Deccan plateau of south-central India stretches from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the region was home to several major Muslim kingdoms and became a nexus of international trade — most notably in diamonds and textiles, through which the sultanates attained remarkable wealth. The opulent art of the Deccan courts, invigorated by cultural connections to the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, developed an otherworldly character distinct from that of the contemporary Mughal north: in painting, a poetic lyricism and audacious use of color; in the decorative arts, lively creations of inlaid metalware and painted and dyed textiles; and in architecture, a somber grandeur still visible today in breathtaking monuments throughout the plateau. The first book to fully explore the history and legacy of these kingdoms, Sultans of Deccan India elucidates the predominant themes in Deccani art—the region’s diverse spiritual traditions, its exchanges with the outside world, and the powerful styles of expression that evolved under court patronage—with fresh insights and new scholarship. Alongside the discussion of the art, lively, engaging essays by some of the field’s leading scholars offer perspectives on the cycles of victory and conquest as dynasties competed with one another, vied with Vijayanagara, a great empire to the south, and finally succumbed to the Mughals from the north. Featuring some 200 of the finest works from the Deccan sultanates, as well as spectacular site photographs and informative maps, this magnificently illustrated catalogue provides the most comprehensive examination of this world to date and constitutes a pioneering resource for specialists and general readers alike.

The City and the Wilderness

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Author :
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520964268
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The City and the Wilderness by : Arash Khazeni

Download or read book The City and the Wilderness written by Arash Khazeni and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The City and the Wilderness recounts the journeys and microhistories of Indo-Persian travelers across the Indian Ocean and their encounters with the Burmese Kingdom and its littoral at the turn of the nineteenth century. As Mughal sovereignty waned under British colonial rule, Indo-Persian travelers and intermediaries linked to the East India Company explored and surveyed the Burmese Empire, inscribing it as a forest landscape and Buddhist kingdom at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia. Based on colonial Persian travel books and narratives in which Indo-Persian knowledge and perceptions of the wondrous edges of the Indian Ocean merged with Orientalist pursuits, The City and the Wilderness uncovers fading histories of inter-Asian crossings and exchanges at the ends of the Mughal world.

Local States in an Imperial World

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Author :
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474436099
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (744 download)

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Book Synopsis Local States in an Imperial World by : Roy S. Fischel

Download or read book Local States in an Imperial World written by Roy S. Fischel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the Deccan Sultanates of 16th- and 17th-century central India, Local States in an Imperial World promotes the idea that some polities of the time were not aspiring to be empires. Instead of the universalist and hierarchical vision typical of the language of empire, the sultanates presented another brand of state - one that prefers negotiation, flexibility and plurality of languages, religions and cultures. Building on theories of early modernity, empire, cosmopolitanism and vernaculars, Roy Fischel considers the components that shaped state and society: people, identities and idioms. He presents a frame for understanding the Deccan Sultanates as a rare case of the early modern non-imperial state, shedding light both on the region and on the imperial world surrounding it.