Rethinking a Millennium : Perspectives on Indian History from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Century
Contents: Preface. Introduction. I. Politics, legitimacy and political culture: 1. A millennium of stateless Indian history?/Dirk H.A. Kolff. 2. Aristocratic body techniques in early medieval India/Daud Ali. 3. From Kalyana to Talikota: culture, politics, and war in the Deccan, 1542-1565/Richard Eaton. 4. Literary tropes and historical settings: a study from Southern India/Sumit Guha. 5. Nau Ruz in Mughal India/Stephen P. Blake. II. Community, gender and cultural transmission: 6. Politics, the Muslim community and Hindu-Muslim relations reconsidered: North India in the early thirteenth century/Sunil Kumar. 7. On Islam and Kufr in the Delhi Sultanate: towards a re-interpretation of Ziya\' al-Din Barani\'s Fatawa-i Jahandari/Raziuddin Aquil. 8. Images of women from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century: a study of Sufi Premakhyans/Madhu Trivedi. 9. Excavating communalism: Kachhwaha Rajadharma and Mughal sovereignty/Catherine B. Asher. III. Commerce, crafts and the countryside: 10. Visiting faraway ports: India\'s trade in the Western Indian Ocean, ca. 800-1500 CE/Ranabir Chakravarti. 11. Traditional crafts, technology, and society in pre-colonial peninsular India/Vijaya Ramaswamy. 12. Contesting hegemony: state and peasant in late medieval Rajasthan/Dilbagh Singh. 13. Worthies and the worth of their land: revenue farmers and the company\'s state in early colonial Bengal/Ujjayan Bhattacharya. 14. Was there capitalism in early modern India?/Prasannan Parthasarathi. Harbans Mukhia: a historian\'s journey through a millennium/Rajat Datta. Selected publications of Professor Harbans Mukhia.
"This book is a collection of essays by eminent historians exploring a millennium of India\'s history between the eighth and the eighteenth century, conventionally understood as early medieval and medieval India. Though these terms are subjected to critical scrutiny by various contributors, they do not foreground the discussion because they tend to straitjacket perspectives in one or the other direction. The idea is to use as many entry points as possible to develop perspectives with which to study this vital period of Indian history.
The volume is organised under three thematic components in order to make a wide and comprehensive assessment of the salient trends that emerged and were transformed during this millennium. The first looks at politics, legitimacy, and political culture; the second examines community, gender, and cultural transmission; and the third deals with commerce, crafts, and the countryside. These have been so organised because each rubric raises a problematic instead of arguing for a definitive view on the theme. What emerge are pictures of tensions, negotiations and accommodations through the long term. The volume shows that the paths taken by Indian society, economy and culture to reach higher and more complex levels were multi-tracked as were the pressures being exerted on them. Taken together, these provide new entry points beyond the standardised and monochromatic views of medieval Indian history and allow us to take a more nuanced and interconnected look at the millennium." (jacket)
