Pushing the Boundaries of South Asian History is a tribute to Professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha’s skill and craftsmanship as a historian. He was an outstanding scholar, who constantly reinvented himself and kept abreast of changes in historical perspectives and methodology. In this volume, a wide range of historians, whose works have made significant contributions to the understanding of South Asian history, have come together to pay homage to him through their work; in doing so they attempt to redefine the existing spatial, chronological and conceptual boundaries relating to the history of the region. The chapters herein, organized into four sections, focus on new aspects of South Asian history, drawing attention to liminal areas, filling intermittent spaces, and retrieving histories that sometimes slip through the gaps created by chronological boundaries of ancient versus early medieval, medieval vis-à-vis the modern. This demonstrates the fluid and nebulous nature of ‘boundaries’ and how ‘connected’ histories are. It also showcases the deeply entangled and intersecting layers of past societies and the new ways through which historians can attempt to retrieve the past. In doing so, this volume pushes at the boundaries of our existing knowledge of Indian history and underlines the dynamic nature of history as a discipline.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction by Jaya S. Tyagi, Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri, and Amar Farooqui

Professor D.N. Jha, 1940–2021 by Irfan Habib

Remembering Professor D.N. Jha (1940–2021) by Vishwa Mohan Jha

Part I: Reading Against the Grain: Propriety and Pragmatics

1. Dharma in the Borderlands by Aloka Parashar Sen
2. The Custodians of ‘Dhamma/Dharma’: Revisiting Asoka’s Edicts and the Manava Dharmasastra by Jaya S. Tyagi
3. The State and the Everyday: Some Reflections on Food and Drink in the Arthasastra by Kumkum Roy
4. Visuals of Drinking. From Gandhara to Mathura, First to Third Centuries CE by Suchandra Ghosh
5. Culture on a Platter: The Social Basis of Food Practices in the Periyapuranam by R. Mahalakshmi

Part II: Contesting Symbols and Stereotypes: Regional Expressions of Syncretic Traditions

6. A Multireligious and Multicultural Kashmir under Sultan Zain ul-Abidin, 1418–1470 CE by Michael Witzel
7. A Vihara for Allhabhattarakasvami in Vanga: Gleanings from an Inscription of 1145 CE by Ranabir Chakravarti
8. A Twelfth-century Malayali Reads the Arthasastra by Kesavan Veluthat
9. Marauding Soldiery to Munificent Divinity: Changing Profile of Pallavan Kingship by T.K. Venkatasubramanian
10. Community Relations, City Space, and Social Identity in Mughal India by Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi

Part III: Mind, Matter, and Mentalities: Cross-Cultural Transmission and Exchanges

11. In the Margins and beyond Boundaries: Early Indian Medical Tradition in the Light of Perso-Arabic Sources by Nupur Dasgupta
12. South India’s Ottoman Connection: Evidence from the Ottoman Archives by N.R. Farooqi
13. Ethno-history and Settlement of Shansabanis of Ghur Central Asia: A Study based on Rajasthani Records by Ghanshyam Lal Devra
14. Cosmopolitan World of Jain Merchants in Early Modern South Asia by Shalin Jain
15. Linkages, Adaptations and Exchanges: Transmission of Knowledge in India and the ‘Islamic East’ by Saiyid Zaheer Husain Jafri

Part IV: Colonialism, Ideology, ‘Modernizaton’, Resistance

16. Cooperative Networks and Handloom Weaving in Early Twentieth-century North India by Santosh Kumar Rai
17. Shaheed Bhagat Singh: A Revolutionary Thinker by S. Irfan Habib
18. Communalism in Modern India: A Historiographical Overview by Salil Misra
19. Colonialism and Knowledge Transformation: A Study of Victorian India by Deepak Kumar

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Index