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The book explores the social, cultural, and religious history of the Tamang, an indigenous ethnic community primarily found in Nepal, with significant populations in India and other countries. The Tamang are known for their rich cultural heritage, language, and traditions. They practice Bon, the ancient religion of Tibet, and Lamaist Buddhism, embodying values from both belief systems. This Tamang tribe, part of the Tibeto-Mongoloid stock, is considered socially and culturally primitive. However, due to the lack of a written script, there is limited historical evidence to reconstruct the history of the Tamang community. Despite this scarcity of recorded information, the Tamang has a wealth of alternative sources such as folklore, folktales, songs, genealogical stories, and some Buddhist accounts. Some of the best examples of these alternative sources come from the roles of Tamba and Ganba.

This book provides a critical assessment of how Dharamsing Teron’s writings and philosophical ideas form the foundation of Karbi Studies, a field shaped by his academic scholarship. Teron’s philosophical writings and critical ideas challenge conventional scholarly frameworks, offering a fresh indigenous perspective through which to understand Karbi history, culture and identity. His organic experiences of ‘being’ a Karbi, along with the influence of Karbi ontology (ancestral position in worldview), have shaped his perspective. This has in turn influenced his way of thinking and his approach to knowledge production, ultimately leading to the foundation of Karbi Studies. Thus, the book seeks to illuminate these contributions while addressing a key question: does Karbi Studies represent a theoretical framework or a metaphorical construct within broader academic discourse of Northeast India?

Within an imperialism-centred paradigm, A History of Intoxi­cation: Opium in Assam, 1800-1959 is an attempt to unearth a critical relationship between a crucial lever of colonialism in Asia and a frontier province filled with tea gardens and on a route laden with opium poppy. The present volume is premised on explaining several queries that revolve around the emerging pattern of consumption of opium in colonial Assam and the creation of drug-dependency in a social context. It analyses in a comprehensive manner the competing forces of the empire which played a key role in the production and distribution of opium.

This book by a well-known Englishman E.B. Havell discusses various issues related to the revival of art, craft and industry in India. Havell spent a life time in this country teaching and writing on Indian art. First published in 1912, this book was originally written in the form of letters to the Hindu of Madras. The author believes that a slavish imitation of the West is positively harmful to the development of Indian art and crafts. He feels that a true Indian renaissance will come only after India wakes up to her old spiritual heritage. According to him, Indian art must be given back its old place in Indian art and religion and at the same time adapt itself to the modern ways of life. He totally distrusts the commercialism of the West and pleads that the moral factor should not be ignored in India’s industrial organisation. And he believes that home or domestic industries should be revived and be given a key position in the new Indian industrial system.

It is difficult to capture the flavor of Indian daily life without experiencing the richness of the traditions which permeate people’s lives. Daily worship of household deities, local shrines, the tulsi plant, mother earth, the rising sun, God’s names, ceremonies of the human life cycle, festivals of the Hindu year, pilgrimages, visiting sadhus and folk theater, keep life varied and colorful and raise spirits despite a physically hard existence. This book, informed by actual fieldwork, contains folk stories that are an inseparable part of Hindu feasts and festivals. Festivals studied are those which are celebrated solely or mainly by women and in which stories and paintings are important.

Bengalis have been great travellers for centuries and are famous for recreating their way of life wherever they go. This book critically analyses skilled Bengali migration within and beyond India and looks at landscapes created by the Bengali diaspora beyond the terrain of their homeland, ranging from those of nostalgia and imagination (Durga Puja/Saraswati Puja) to those of subjugation and loss of identity. This book demonstrates the relationship between landscape and diaspora in terms of perception, imagination, space and place, ethnicity, race, caste, and class. With case studies from Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Dehra Dun, Oxford, Aberdeen, New York, and the Bay Area (USA), it brings together themes like evolution of the Bengali diaspora, transnationalism and identity, stratification and segregation, urban social space, adaptation and assimilation, and questions of discrimination from other communities.

The most influential work on Buddhism to be published in the nineteenth century, Introduction a l’histoire du Buddhisme indien, by the great French scholar of Sanskrit Eugene Burnouf, set the course for the academic study of Buddhism—and Indian Buddhism in particular—for the next hundred years. First published in 1844, the masterwork was read by some of the most important thinkers of the time, including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in Germany and Emerson and Thoreau in America. Katia Buffetrille and Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s expert English translation, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism, provides a clear view of how the religion was understood in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

Today people all over the globe invoke the concept of culture to make sense of their world, their social interactions, and themselves. But how did the culture concept become so ubiquitous? In this ambitious study, Andrew Sartori closely examines the history of political and intellectual life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal to show how the concept can take on a life of its own in different contexts. Sartori weaves the narrative of Bengal’s embrace of culturalism into a worldwide history of the concept, from its origins in eighteenth-century Germany, through its adoption in England in the early 1800s, to its appearance in distinct local guises across the non-Western world. The impetus for the concept’s dissemination was capitalism, Sartori argues, as its spread across the globe initiated the need to celebrate the local and the communal.

This unorthodox book is more than a story; it blends scholarship, fantasy, travelogue, and autobiography—fusing and overlapping historical accounts and newscasts, literary texts and films, dreams and nocturnal tales. Siegel uses imagination to explore the relation of real terror to horror fiction and to contemplate the ways fear and disgust become thrilling elements in stories of the macabre. This book is the product of Siegel’s deep knowledge of both Indian and Western literary and philosophical traditions. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the omnipresence of political and religious terror in contemporary India.

Whose international matters, and why? How are geographic regions constructed? What are the channels of engagement between a place, its people, its institutions, and the world? How do we understand the non-West’s influence in contemporary global interactions? From humanitarianism and activism to diplomacy and institutional networks, South Asia has been a crucial place for the elaboration of international politics, even before the twentieth century. South Asia Unbound gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars from across the world to inves­tigate South Asian global engagement at the local, regional, national, and supra-national levels, spanning the time before and after indepen­dence.

The volume provides a concise overview of the chronological tables used in the Telugu and Kannada regions, which correspond to the modern-day states of Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh. This book contains profiles of the cyclical standard tables followed in these areas during the early medieval and modern periods, from 967 to 1866 AD. It includes chapters with an index detailing the chronology of different kingdoms, starting with the Yadavas and progressing through the Konkani kingdoms, Chalukyas, Vijayanagara dynasty, Deccan Sultanates, and extending to the Mysore Rajas. Additionally, there are genealogies of the kingdoms and their political profiles, tables in Kali years alongside the Gregorian calendar (which is equivalent to 3101 BC), to determine the various phases of history in the region.

The Saint in the Banyan Tree is a nuanced and historically persuasive exploration of Christianity’s remarkable trajectory as a social and cultural force in southern India. Starting in the seventeenth century, when the religion was integrated into Tamil institutions of caste and popular religiosity, this study moves into the twentieth century, when Christianity became an unexpected source of radical transformation for the country’s ‘untouchables’ (dalits). Mosse shows how caste was central to the way in which categories of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ were formed and negotiated in missionary encounters, and how the social and semiotic possibilities of Christianity lead to a new politic of equal rights in South India. Skillfully combining archival research with anthropological fieldwork, this book examines the full cultural impact of Christianity on Indian religious, social and political life.

This volume contains essays Mostly About Bengal written by the author over a period of fifteen years: 1. The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern Indian History 2. The Partition of Bengal: A Problem in British Administration, 1830-1912 3. A Plea for the Study of the Indian Provincial Legislatures 4. The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study of the Bengal General Election, 1912-1913 5. The Forgotten Majority: The Bengal Muslims and September 1918 6. The Non-Cooperation Decision of 1920: A Crisis in Bengal Politics 7. Four Lives: History as Biography 8. Gandhi: A Twentieth-century Anomaly? 9. The Social and Institutional Bases of Politics in Bengal, 1906-1947 10. Peasant Mobilization in Twentieth-century Bengal 11. The Rural Parvenu: A Report of Research in Progress These articles were published in different journals outside India which were hard to get in India.

The Story of Integration of the Indian States by V.P. Menon was, actually, the concluding chapters of a story that began much earlier. It began as early as 1921 when the Indian National Congress entered the states arena with clear intentions of using the spontaneous, native, democratic movements in the princely states towards their own objective of integration, without, in turn, committing themselves to the states people’s own programmes for ‘responsible government’. In this, the policy of the Indian nationalists towards the states’ people’s movement was dictated, not so much by the needs and aspirations of the states people, but, by their own necessities to counter the machinations of the British Government which sought to counterpoise the princes against them. This study marks a new approach by treating the subject not as a mere projection of the national movement, nor as a study of the democratic movement in the princely states in isolation, but as an interaction of different elements – the states people, the states administration, the Indian nationalists and the British administrators – moving towards their different aims.

. Beames was a man of strong opinions and was often in trouble with the authorities because of his outspokenness. He thought little of Lieutenant-Governors as a class. But his special dislike was reserved for Sir Richard Temple, Lt. Governor of Bengal, whose vanity and self-glorification he couldn't stand. There were instances when Beames stood by the people against tyranny. But, ironically enough, he also shared the casual racism of his peers and did not recognise Indian ICS officers as his academic and cultural equals: he strongly distrusted the Bengali intelligentsia. Beames was a pioneer philologist. A magnum opus of his is the three volume Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India (1872-79). Other works of his include Outline of Indian Philology (1867) and Grammar for the Bengali Language (1891). He knew a number of languages including Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Hindi and had a working knowledge of German, French and Italian. Beames started writing his Memoirs in 1875 but completed the task only after retirement, in England. His outspokenness which held him down in his career is his chief strength as a writer and tremendously enhances the value of his estimates of men and affairs of his time.

This book explores the intellectual and literary engagements of the Indo-Persianate intelligentsia from the late-Mughal era to the early colonial period. It situates the writings of the Indo-Islamic elite within the broader context of the Mughal empire’s gradual decline and the British colonial ascendancy. Additionally, it examines Indian agency in shaping the Orientalist tradition. Two dedicated chapters explore British Romantic writers’ fascination with the poetics of ^Hafi]z Shirazi and the modern critical reception of Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusraw Dehlavi.