25 July, 2012

Sikh Ideology, Polity and Social Order: From Guru Nanak to Maharja Ranjit Singh


Sikh Ideology, Polity and Social Order: From Guru Nanak to Maharja Ranjit Singh

By- J.S. Grewal

This book is the fourth ‘incarnation’ of essays published in 1972. A slightly revised edition appeared in 1982, and an enlarged one in 1996. The present edition is much enlarged and thoroughly revised.

In many of these essays the author has analysed contemporary works of history and literature and all other essays are based strictly on contemporary evidence. In the volume as a whole Sikh ideology, polity and social order are seen from various perspectives to illuminate their inter-relationship in all its richness and complexity.

A variety of sources in Punjabi, Persian and English are used in these essays with reference to the ‘received wisdom’. The volume, thus, is likely to provide the best introduction to the precolonial Sikh tradition for young researchers. The professional historians may find it useful for comparison in the light of their own understanding. The general reader would find it interesting especially as it brings out the essential significance of several contemporary works of literature.

Indispensable for the teachers and students of Sikh history, this book has equal relevance for scholars of social sciences, religion and literature.


J.S. Grewal is well known to the scholarly world as the author of a large number of books and articles on historiography, medieval India, the Punjab region and the Sikh tradition.



ISBN  81-7304-737-5    2007   304p.   Rs.750/ pounds 50

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Religion and Law in Independent India


Religion and Law in Independent India
By- Robert D. Baird

This important volume is a major contribution to the interface between religion and law in independent India. This multidisciplinary volume includes essays by eminent jurists, legal scholars, historians of religions, political scientists and Sanskritists from India and abroad. This revised and updated edition has essays on subjects such as the structure of religion and law in India; legal issues affecting the Sikh community; public endowments; and issues relating to caste and conversions.

Robert D. Baird is Professor Emeritus History of Religions, University of lowa. He has also contributed articles in the areas of methodology and the study of religion, modern Indian religious movements, and religion and law.

ISBN  81-7304-588-7    2005   362p.   Rs.518

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Pramana: Dharmakirti and the Indian Philosophical Debate



Pramana: Dharmakirti and the Indian Philosophical Debate

By- Lama Doboom Tulku and Maya Joshi (eds.)


Indian philosophical thought on Pramana (Valid Cognition) is a rich achieve that merits attention not only for its technical brilliance and variety but also for the ways in which it reverberates with contemporary discussions in science: arguably the ‘master discourse’ of the modern world. In a spirit of free and open enquiry, characteristic of His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s preferred mode of engaging with the world, Tibet House collaborated with the Drepung Monastic University at Mundgod, Karnataka to organize a Monastic Debate that was both traditional and contemporary.

Tibetan Buddhism has a long tradition of Monastic Debates. This Debate was special in that it grew upon the pre-Buddhist traditions of thought on this critical question on Logic while also incorporating a perspective that leapt across the centuries: that of contemporary Physics. While the different schools such as Vedanta, Sankhya, Nyayavaisesika, Purvuamimamsa, and Jaina were represented by scholars from academia, there was a lively interaction with monks being trained in traditional Tibetan philosophy at monasteries across India.

The seminar was multilingual – with presentations and queries in Tibetan, Hindi, Sanskrit and English. While this book presents lightly edited versions of the key papers presented there, the lively debates in Tibetan could not be transcribed due to logistical difficulties. Hence, this bi-lingual volume, attempts to make available to the scholarly community and curious students a valuable resource for understanding this crucial issue in Logic from a rich, multifaceted, compariatist perspective.



Lama Daboom Tulku was born in Tibet in 1941 and recognized as the incarnation of the previous Doboom Tulku at the age of three by Ven. Lama Phurchog Jamgon Rinpoche. Since 1981 Lama Daboom Tulku has been Director of Tibet House, Cultural Centre of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in New Delhi, working for the promotion of Tibetan cultural heritage to a wide audience. He is the author of Buddhist Translations: Problems and Perspectives; Buddhist Path to Enlightenment and Gyalwai Chostsul.

Maya Joshi has inherited an interest in Buddhist studies which she keeps alive with her active association with Tibet House and the World Buddhist Culture Trust, of which she is a Trustee. She edits the Tibet House Bulletin and is on the Faculty of English, Lady Sri Ram College for Women, New Delhi.


ISBN  978-81-7304-855-5    2010   126p.   Rs.350/ pounds 35
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Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India



Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India

By- Pallabi Chakravorty nd Scott Kugle (eds.)


The religious ideal of ecstasy is central to the cross-fertilization between Hinduism and Islam in South Asia. That is the basic theme of this volume, which explores how mysticism associated with rapture, ecstasy, eroticism, longing, and suffering were the human emotions which held the key to knowing the divine in both Hinduism and Islam. The performing arts (such as dance, music, poetry or the abstract concept of performativity) offer a potent lens to examine ecstasy and the ecstatic body.

By foregrounding the performing body in religious devotion, the essays in this volume reorient the discourse of the body as it emerged in scholarly disciplines such as anthropology and sociology. The essays draw from new theoretical research into the nature and importance of performance in imagining the cultural and religious life of South Asia.

From a South Asian perspective, these essays enhance the engagement of performance studies with the intellectual idea of embodiment. One common thread that ties together these essays is the linked concepts of sringara-rasa (erotic emotion) and bhakti (loving devotion). All of them draw from new theoretical research into the nature and importance of the body through evidence drawn from architecture, painting, drama, poetry, qawwali singing, dance, yoga, and religious texts.


Pallabi Chakravorty teaches kathak dance and academic courses related to the anthropology of performance in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College. Founder and artistic director of Courtyard Dancers, she is an anthropologist, dancer, choreographer, and cultural worker.

Scott Kugle is a Research Fellow at the Henry Martyn Institute for Research, Interfaith Relations and Reconciliation in Hyderabad, India, after having taught for several years in the Department of Religion at Swarthmore College.


ISBN  978-81-7304-814-2    2009   256p.   Rs.650/ pounds 45


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Negotiating Religion: Perspectives from Indian History



Negotiating Religion: Perspectives from Indian History

By- Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna , Ranjeeta Dutta, Farhat Nasreen


The essays collected in this book present recent scholarly thinking about religious texts, beliefs and practices in various epochs of Indian history. A comprehensive historiographical introduction is followed by contributions from thirteen scholars who in their different ways examine the complex relationship between the religious phenomena and their historical contexts. The collection seeks to explore the history of India’s religious traditions and cultures through three themes: Texts, Traditions and Discourse; Divinity and the Feminine and Religious Identities.
By relating the religious processes in Indian history to such issues as caste and gender, identity and community formation, and domination and resistance, the essays interrogate many commonly held assumptions of colonial, nationalist and communal histories in regard to the issues of religious conflicts, interactions and syncretism.
Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, the articles in the volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of the history of Indian religious movements and cultures.


Rameshwar Prasad Bahuguna: taeches Medieval Indian History at the Dept. of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
Ranjeeta Dutta: teaches Medieval Indian History at the Dept. of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She was a fellow at the Indian Inst. of Advanced Study. Shimla from 2009-11.
Farhat Nasreen: teaches Medieval Indian History at the Dept. of HIstory and Culture, Jamia MIllia Islamai, New Delhi. She has researched on the Braj region in the medieval period.


ISBN  978-81-7304-924-8    2012   398p.   Rs.995/ pounds 55

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Love, Eroticism and Female Sexuality in Classical Sanskrit Literature: Seventh-Thirteenth Centuries



Love, Eroticism and Female Sexuality in Classical Sanskrit Literature: Seventh-Thirteenth Centuries

By- Shalini Shah


This book is an attempt to analyse the conception of kama in the early-medieval classical Sanskrit literary tradition from a gender perspective. By reading against the grain, the author has tried to illuminate the sexual status of women within the different genres of these classical Sanskrit sources. The book highlights that far from being a unitary homogeneous category with only a certain kind of sexual status, women and their sexuality have been conceived differently in different philosophical schools, be they dharmasastra, kamasastra, Lokayata, tantric, ayurvedic and the asceptic philosophies.

The author has further made a case for seeking the prostitute sexuality diiferently from that of a kulavadhu, i.e. a household woman. The treatment of the sexual desire of mayavinis, raksasis, dakinis, and svairins too places them in an all-together different category from the other women of patriarchy..


This book also argues in favour of the validity of talking in terms of love (prema) tradition in contra-distinction to an erotic (srngari) tradition in the classical Sanskrit sources of the early-medieval period. The basis for this binary division is predicated on the fact that in the love tradition, in which we include the poetry of the female poets, Bhavabhuti’s and Jayadeva’s work deals with reciprocity and emotions in the sexual relations between man and woman, while the masculine erotic tradition authored by the srngari poets is marked by hegemonic masculinity in which women exist solely as fetishized objects for exclusively male erotic stimulation.


Shalini Shah is Reader in the Department of History, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi.


Her publications include The Making of Womanhood: Gender Relations in the Mahabharata (Manohar 1995). She has also published many research papers in prestigious journals and edited volumes, focussing on gender relations.




ISBN  978-81-7304-831-9    2009   248p.   Rs.625/ pounds 40


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Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History



Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History
By-Sheldon Pollock (ed.)

Epic and Argument in Sanskrit Literary History celebrates the distinguished career of the American Indologist Robert P. Goldman. The essays on Sanskrit literary history, which range from the danastuti in the Rgveda (Romila Thapar) to the transformation of literary theory in ninth century Kashmir (Sheldon Pollock) to the practice of philology in seventeenth-century Varanasi (Christopher Minkowski), reflect the wide range of interests of Professor Goldman himself, and the wide influence he has exerted on the field. Eight of the essays (by such leading scholars as Greg Bailey, John Brokington, James Fitzgerald, luis Gonzalez-Reimann, Phyllis Granoff, Alf Hiltebeitel, Adheesh Sathaye, and Sally Sutherland Goldman), concentrate on the epics and Puranas, and as an ensemble make for essential reading on the genre of Sanskrit literature to which Goldman, as editor-in-chief of the Ramayana Translation Project, has devoted the greater part of his career. The scholarly essays are bookended by the survey of Professor Goldman’s scholarly contributions (Deven Patel) and a lively personal reminiscence (Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason).


Sheldon Pollock is Ransford Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University. He is the general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India (Harvard University Press), and author of, among other books, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press). He is currently working on Liberation Philology (Harvard University) and Reader on Rasa: An Historical Sourcebook in Indian Aesthetics, for a new series of sourcebooks in classical Indian thought that he is editing for Columbia University Press. In 2009 he received the President’s Award for Sanskrit from the Government of India.



ISBN  978-81-7304-865-4    2010   282p.   Rs.795/ pounds 60


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Biographical Dictionary of Sufism in South Asia



Biographical Dictionary of Sufism in South Asia

By- Mohammad Ishaq Khan


A Sufi’s quest for spiritual identity is distinguishable from the external scholars (‘ulama-i zahiri), radical reformers, politico-religious activists and average Muslims whose belief in the fundamentals of Islam in a given religious environment is simply literal or even superficial in certain cases. Central to this difference of approach is the Sufi’s life-long concern to conquer his self for the greater spiritual and ethical good for humankind than the mere pragmatic and worldly concerns of the ‘ulama in relation to the Shari’ah.

Without dramatizing divide between Shari’ah and Sufism, unlike Orientalism, this dictionary intrinsically portrays the abiding contribution of numerous Sufis of South Asia to Islam and history. Definitive and interpretative, it lends a certain degree of objectivity to the supernatural role that characterizes the historical personalities listed in it.

The work is based on research spanning a period of 27 years, both in India and abroad. Besides Persian sources, in manuscript and printed form, their Urdu translations, wherever available, have been used carefully in conjunction with the original. This dictionary may, then, be the first to provide succinctly and objectively a fairly comprehensive account of the Sufis, recorded in various historical sources, in just one volume. The author takes special care to highlight how certain religious traditions were adapted by the Sufis to the larger framework of Sufism without violating the Qur’an and the Sunnah.

This work is an antidote to the tarnished image of Islam in the aftermath of 9/11.





Mohammad Ishaq Khan is former Professor of History and Shaikhu’l-‘Alam Chair at Kashmir University. His publications inclue Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis (3rd edn. 2003) and Experiencing Islam (1997).



ISBN  81-7304-681-6    2009   524p.   Rs.2500/ pounds 120


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