Selected Titles on
Making Modern South Asia
A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia
“A Book of Conquest is an important study that joins a growing conversation about precolonial India, moving beyond both colonial and nationalist tropes concerning the place and origins of Muslims in Indian society. Manan Ahmed Asif’s radical re-reading of the Chachnama aims to correct portrayals of the Muslims of India as descendants of foreign conquerors.”—Richard Eaton, University of Arizona
Ashoka in Ancient India
“Fascinating.”—Chandrahas Choudhury, The Wall Street Journal
“Where Lahiri really scores is in the field of Ashokan archaeology, where she brings together all the work that has been undertaken in the years since 1997… These advances have all been woven seamlessly into Lahiri’s narrative, so as to give the clearest chronology yet assembled of the life of Ashoka and what Lahiri calls ‘his trajectory as a communicator’ and his ‘intellectual evolution,’ most notably the quite extraordinary change of heart that followed Ashoka’s conquest of Kalinga and how this transformed his concept of kingship.”—Charles Allen, Literary Review
Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants
2014 John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History, American Historical Association • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, 2013 • A Lowy Institute for International Policy Book of the Year, 2013
Fascinating… Although several books have been written about the strategic and geopolitical significance of the Indian Ocean…there is little awareness of the cultural and historical ties that bind diverse nations bordering the bay. Amrith’s signal achievement is to bring these ties to light. In doing so, he gives voice—and an identity—to one of the most complex and culturally interesting regions of the world… Amrith’s excavation of this culture is painstaking and meticulous. He digs deep into the archives, drawing on journals, letters and official colonial records to assemble an account that dates back to the first millennium… The result of all this research is a textured biography of a region… This is a formidable work of scholarship… It is the sheer accumulation of information, and the multiple, interwoven strands in this profoundly interdisciplinary work, that yield such an impressive, multifaceted portrait… [A] remarkable book.”—Akash Kapur, The New York Times Book Review
The Triumph of the Snake Goddess
“Both an impeccable scholarly venture and a sparklingly imaginative literary work in its own right, Kaiser Haq’s composite edition—and brilliant translation—of Manasamangal tells the gripping (and frequently hilarious) story of Manasa, the snake-goddess, and the contestation of a minor deity’s rights and privileges by a human. Manasa reminds us of the stubborn immortality of the folk and the non-canonical when faced with the literary and canonical. This is a revelatory, fascinating, and compelling book.”—Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
“In this comprehensive book, Hawley traces the 20th-century history of the notion of the bhakti movement—the idea that there was a significant, unified, pan-Indic turn to devotional religiosity in medieval India. The author argues that the invention and promotion of this idea was a key aspect of nation building in that it offered a narrative of Hindu unity despite the vast and disparate set of religious processes ranging over different vernacular languages, regions, and time periods. Hawley also shows how Muslim contributions to affective, devotional bhakti religiosity were often marginalized in this narrative. He covers in detail the primary intellectual forces behind the idea of the bhakti movement (for example V. Raghavan), arguing that it was a conception constructed largely by Indian intellectuals (although European scholars had a hand in shaping the idea). He also considers at length pre-modern conceptions of how bhakti as a historical phenomenon was viewed… This book is a model of meticulous intellectual history of modern India.”—M. Heim, Choice
The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
“[An] important book… Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]… The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date… She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.”—Ahmed Rashid, The New York Review of Books
“Jalal offers a clear, chronological account of how the army, in competition with civilians, has misruled Pakistan.”—The Economist
Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation
“Like the blockbuster from which it borrows its vitality, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation uses a cocktail of humor and irony, magic and just a touch of madness to analyze one of the major blockbusters of Hindi cinema. Elison, Novetzke, and Rotman have produced a version of fan writing that fans will actually want to read. In light, sparkling prose, they bring formidable interdisciplinary gifts to remind us what made Manmohan Desai’s film the legend it is, and why it continues to matter now more than ever.”—Priya Joshi, author of Bollywood’s India: A Public Fantasy
The Technological Indian
“In just fifty years, the technological emblem of India went from the hand-operated spinning wheel to the computer. Bassett explains how this happened with historical and human insight. This fascinating book is not just about India, but about the role of technology in social, economic, and political progress.”—Rosalind Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Makers of Modern Asia
“[An] entertaining and illuminating collection of essays… The chapters on Sukarno, by James Rush, and on Bhutto, by Farzana Shaikh, are exceptional.”—The Economist
“Biographies of 11 galvanizers of modern Asian nationalism, from Gandhi to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, underscore the importance of politics before economics… Composed by various Western and Asian scholars and writers, these essays offer pithy highlights of each individual’s early life and political development, followed by delineation of how each applied his or her beliefs (for good or ill) to anti-colonial campaigns.”—Kirkus Reviews
Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India
2013 Tata Literature Live! First Book Award, Non-Fiction Category, Mumbai LitFest/The Tata Group • Co-Winner, 2013 Crossword Book Award, Non-Fiction Category, Crossword Bookstores & Partners • A Guardian “Authors’ Favourites” Book of the Year, 2012 • A New Republic Best Book of 2012 • 2011 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize, Harvard University Press
“Ananya Vajpeyi’s Righteous Republic is quite simply the most important interpretation of the evolution of India’s contemporary nationhood since Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, and a useful antidote to the revisionist Imperialism of rising British star-historians like Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson… Fluently written, cogent in argument, studded with penetrating insights, telling aphorisms, with complete mastery of her material, consistently brilliant expression and exposition, this young philosopher-historian takes her definitive place as a commentator and synthesizer of the often varied and contradictory approaches to the idea of India.”—Mani Shankar Aiyar, Financial Express
The Essential Tagore
A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2011
“This new anthology…is so welcome, because it starts the process of freeing Tagore for a contemporary audience. The first thing that strikes you about The Essential Tagore is the diversity of its subject’s talents: In a career that stretched over seventy-three years (he finished his first poem when he was seven, and was composing a story on his deathbed), Tagore wrote novels, plays, literary criticism, political essays on the iniquities of the British Raj, and descriptions of his travels in Persia and Japan… The experience of living in today’s India—a country that is agrarian, industrializing, and postindustrial, all at once—still forces a multiplicity of viewpoints on the individual, and Tagore must have some claim to being the prototypical modern Indian.”—Aravind Adiga, Bookforum
Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library
I Tatti Renaissance Library
Loeb Classical Library
Murty Classical Library of India