State, Power and Legitimacy

EDITOR : Kunal Chakrabarti and Kanad Sinha

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  • EDITOR : Kunal Chakrabarti and Kanad Sinha
  • HB ISBN : 978-93-5290-280-4
  • PB ISBN : 978-93-5290-279-8
  • Year : 2019
  • Extent : 972 pp.
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Tagore

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INFORMATION

  • AUTHOR –
  • ISBN – 978-93-84082-78-9
  • Year – 2016
  • Extent: 400 + 40 coloured illustrations
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State, Power & Legitimacy: The Gupta Kingdom presents a comprehensive account of the Gupta state, with particular emphasis on its strategies of legitimizing its power. The political strategies that characterized this crucial juncture of early Indian history, termed ‘threshold times’ by Romila Thapar, employed certain features of ancient Indian polity even as new political mechanisms were emerging. This volume argues that this unique combination of political strategizing was a part of the process of legitimizing royal authority, in which religion, literature and art were essential tools. The volume also includes a large selection of prepublished essays which provide the reader with a comprehensive idea of how the Gupta state has been studied by earlier historians together with recent articles which help us to look at the Gupta state and the manner in which it exercised and legitimized its power. A substantive introduction suggests the need to move beyond the nationalist perspective that views the rule of the Guptas as the ‘Golden Age’ or the Marxist model of ‘Indian feudalism’.

Kunal Chakrabarti is Professor of Ancient Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He had also been a Visiting Professor to Colorado College and to the University of Chicago. His research interests include social history of religion, regional histories with special reference to Bengal, history of the environment with special reference to the forest, early Indian political ideas and institutions, and early Indian textual traditions. He is the author of Religious Process: The Puranas and the Making of a Regional Tradition (2000) and Historical Dictionary of the Bengalis (2013).

Kanad Sinha is Assistant Professor of History, Udaynarayanpur Madhabilata Mahavidyala, Howrah. He has published several articles in important journals like Medieval Worlds, The Journal of Bengal Art, Studies in History, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences and International Journal of Hindu Studies, on various aspects of social and cultural History of early India, especially early Indian historical traditions.

As a global figure, Tagore transcends the boundaries of language and reaches out to people distant both in time and space. His art took inspiration from contemporary Western trends and became a powerful means to connect with people beyond Bengal. Word, image, song, and text were his tools of communication, as also his extraordinary presence in a sartorial garb of his own design. A littérateur in many genres, the impact of his work was determined both by the material he presented, and by its simultaneously local and global contexts. Now, when his international reputation has spanned over more than a hundred years, it is important to revisit the sites of Tagore’s eminence, and ask to what extent he was a ‘living text’ in the century that witnessed him as a global intellectual.
Accordingly, this volume investigates how Tagore’s writings and art are linked to the metalinguistic domains of the psychological, medical and mythical; how he was received in various cultures outside India; how his art was determined by individual circumstances and global aspirations; and how he acted as an inspiration to his contemporaries and subsequent generations including modern Indian writers and artists.

The Editor
Imre Bangha studied in Budapest and Santiniketan and at present is Associate Professor of Hindi at the University of Oxford. He has published books and essays in English, Hindi, and Hungarian on literature in Brajbhasha and other forms of old Hindi and has also prepared Hungarian translations from various South Asian languages. His work on the international reception of Bengali culture includes Rabindranath Tagore: Hundred Years of Global Reception (2014, co-edited with M. Kämpchen) and Hungry Tiger: Encounter between India and Central Europe (2007).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

A Note for the Readers xiii
Acknowledgements xv-xviii
Revisiting the Gupta Kingdom State, Power and Legitimacy Kanad Sinha 1-40
Section I Overview and Sources
The Gupta Kingdom K. Chakrabarti 43-64
Gupta History and Literature: A Bibliographic Essay Eleanor Zelliot 65-88
Archaeological Remains of the Gupta Period K.N. Dikshit 89-104
The Five Dåmodarpur Copper-plate Inscriptions of the Gupta Period Radhagovinda Basak 105-153
Problem of the Identity of King ‘Candra’ of the Meharauli Prasasti S.R. Goyal 154-162
Meharauli Iron Pillar Inscription and Candra Gupta II: A Reassessment Kanad Sinha 163-169
The Coinage A.S. Altekar 170-180
Section II Origin of the Guptas
The Origin of the Imperial Guptas B.G. Gokhale 183-188
Social Milieu of the Guptas S.R. Goyal 189-199
e Gupta Era: A Re-assessment Parmeshwari Lal Gupta 200-217
Section III The Foundation of the Empire
e Rise of the Guptas R.C. Majumdar 221-228
Kaca: A Step Brother of Samudragupta Parmeshwari Lal Gupta 229-234
Kaca Problem Solved parmeshwari Lal Gupta 235-237
Identification of the Princes and Territories Mentioned in the Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudragupta D.R. Bhandarkar 238-247
Allahabad Inscription of Samudragupta Is Not Posthumous B. Chhabra 248-257
Unification of the Ganga Valley S.R. Goyal 258-291
Section IV The Consolidation of the Empire
Candra-Gupta II (Vikramåditya) and His Predecessor K.P. Jayaswal 295-313
The Tradition of Rama Gupta and the Indian Nationalist Historians S.N. Mukherjee 313-319
Candra Gupta II Vikramaditya H.C. Raychaudhuri 320-330
The ‘Nava-Ratna’ at Vikramaís Court D.C. Sircar 331-335
Vikramaditya in Jain Tradition H.D. Velankar 336-359
Kumaragupta I and the South S.R. Goyal 360-367
Govindagupta S.V. Sohoni 368-374
The Vakatakas and Their Place in the History of India S.K. Aiyangar 375-398
A Note on the Rule of the Vakatakas B.N. Mukherjee 399-406
The Vakataka Queen Prabhavati Gupta R.C. Majumdar 407-410
The Period of Construction: Rudrasena II and Prabhavati Gupta Hans Bakker 411-419
Section V Decline of the Guptas
Skanda Gupta Vikramaditya H.C. Raychaudhuri 423-430
Budhagupta S.R. Goyal 431-432
Later Gupta History: Inscriptions, Coins and Historical Ideology Michael Willis 433-462
The Disintegration of the Empire R.C. Majumdar 463-472
Section VI The Apparatus of the Empire
Political Theory and Administrative Organisation U.N. Ghoshal 475-482
Land Ownership and Kingís Right to Taxes Dwijendra Narayan Jha 483-494
Assessment of Land Revenue in Post-Maurya and Gupta Times (c.200 BC–AD 600) Dwijendra Narayan Jha 495-500
Gupta Polity: Military Organisation V.R.R. Dikshitar 501-515
Indian Feudalism: Origins and First Phase (c. AD 300-750) R.S. Sharma 516-577
Agrarian Structure in Central India and the Northern Deccan (c. ad 300-500): A Study of Vakataka Inscriptions Krishna Mohan Shrimali 578-611
Subordinate Rulers under the Gupta Monarchs: Political Integration and State Formation in Central and Eastern India
Ashish Kumar
612-638
The Mandasor Inscription of the Silk-Weavers A.L. Basham 639-651
Section VII Religion and the State
Religious Toleration under the Imperial Guptas R.S. Tripathi 655-664
Royal Patronage and Religious Tolerance: The Formative Period of Gupta-Vakataka Culture Hans Bakker 665-683
Puranic Vaisnavism and the Guptas: A Study of Kingship, Legitimacy and Religion Kanad Sinha 684-690
The Image of the Heretic in the Gupta Puranas Wendy Doniger O’flaherty 691-710
Feudalism and Mahåyåna Buddhism A.K. Warder 711-728
Section VII Culture and the Legitimization of Royal Authority
The Power of a Poet: Kingship, Empire, and War in Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa Upinder Singh 731-759
Seeing and Hearing: Representations of Kingship in the Abhijnanasakuntalam and the Raghuvamsam of Kalidasa Kumkum Roy 760-778
History as Literature: The Plays of Visakhadatta Romila Thapar 779-801
Some Royal Poets of the Vakataka Age V.V. Mirashi 802-811
Historical and Political Allegory in Gupta Art Frederick M. Asher 812-824
List of Abbreviations 825-826
Selected Readings for All Chapters Containing Footnotes 827-872
A Select Bibliography on the Gupta Period 873-91
Index 917-951