By analyzing the Arthaśāstra's early history, Mark McClish overturns prevailing beliefs that ancient India was governed by religion, not politics.

First Published in 2000. This title is Volume 10 in the 14-volume series titled India: Language and Literature, one of the Trüber's Oriental Series. The lectures in this volume were presented to the narrow circle fellows in this field of study. This publication will now reach the wider circle of those interested and those researchers of the history of literature generally. The form in which these lectures appear is essentially the same in which they were delivered while incidental remarks are given as footnotes and new matter has been added.

First Published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Looking at the roots of contemporary political theory, this three-volume set examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, and provides concise, to-the-point definitions of key concepts, ideas, schools and figures.

The book is a selected portion of my Ph.D. dissertation entitled ‘A Critical Study of Abhilasitarthacintamani (otherwise known as Manasollasa) by Somesvara submitted for Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit in the University of Calcutta in the year 2000. The encyclopaedic Sanskrit text Manasollasa authored by South Indian Karnataka king Bhulokamalladeva Somesvara of 12 th century CE., contains 100 chapters on different topics. Among them 50-60 chapters enumerate different types of social festivals and rituals, foods, poetics, different types of sports and games, animal sports, gemology hunting sex-sport etal of a king. Manasollasa or Abhilasitarthacintamani of King Somesvara III displays a unique structural composition of five units each again being a composite of the numeral twenty (vimsati). Each of the five sections (prakaranas) are again classified in twenty chapters (adhyayas). Among those five prakaranas or sections the third vimsati or Upabhogavimsati of Manasollasa describes twenty types of enjoyments or upabhogas to fulfill the king’s desire. The last two vimsatis are Vinoda vimsati and Krida vimsati. In these two vimsatis different types of amusements, sports and games are narrated. Vinoda vimsati deals with different movements and sports of elephants and horses which are named as gajavahyalivinoda and vajivahyalivinoda respectively. Other vinodas enumerate amusements, the sports of cocks, quail, ram, buffalos, pigeons, dogs, falcons and fishes. The fifteenth chapter of Vinodavimsati is Mrigayavinoda, which deals with king’s sport of hunting. And this special type of sport is of various kinds.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book is a collection of some of the published papers of the author, published mostly abroad, and unravels some significant yet hitherto neglected aspects of history, culture and religion of Bihar and Bengal: two areas that were connected through an intricate network of rivers. Themes looked into are: early historic urbanisation in the Mithilā plains of North Bihar; the social history of Brahmanical religious institutions (temples and Mathas) in early medieval Bihar and Bengal; the social history of Buddhist monasticism in early medieval Bihar and Bengal; the integration of a local goddess into the institutional fabric of Mahayana Buddhism; the survival of Buddhism in the thirteenth and fourteenth century AD; pilgrimage from Central India and Deccan to a Hindu pil grimage centre of Bihar in the medieval period; and the debate on the Islamisation of medieval eastern Bengal. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

This book accounts for the origin and evolution of the nature and roles of women within the Hindu belief system. It explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and texts of codes of conduct and how particular models of conduct for mortal women have been created. Hindu religious culture correlates philosophical speculation and social imperatives to situate femininity on a continuum from divine to mortal existence. This creates in the Hindu consciousness multiple - often contradictory - images of women, both as wielders and subjects of authority. The conception and evolution of the major Hindu goddesses, placed against the judgments passed by texts of Hindu sacred law on women’s nature and duties, illuminate the Hindu discourse on gender, the complexity of which is compounded by the distinctive spirituality of female ascetic poets. Drawing on a wide range of Sanskrit texts, the author explains how the idea of the goddess has been derived from Hindu philosophical ideas and also from the social roles of women as reflected in, and prescribed by, texts of codes of conduct. She examines the idea of female divinity which gave rise to models of conduct for mortal women. Instead of a one-way order of ideological derivation, the author argues that there is constant traffic between both ways the notional and the actual feminine. This book brings together for the first time a wide range of material and offers fresh stimulating interpretations of women in the Hindu Tradition.

Mercury's Wings: Exploring Modes of Communication in the Ancient World is the first-ever volume of essays devoted to ancient communications. Comparable previous work has been mainly confined to articles on aspects of communication in the Roman empire. This set of 18 essays with an introduction by the co-editors marks a milestone, therefore, that demonstrates the importance and rich further potential of the topic. The authors, who include art historians, Assyriologists, Classicists and Egyptologists, take the broad view of communications as a vehicle not just for the transmission of information, but also for the conduct of religion, commerce, and culture. Encompassed within this scope are varied purposes of communication such as propaganda and celebration, as well as profit and administration. Each essay deals with a communications network, or with a means or type of communication, or with the special features of religious communication or communication in and among large empires. The spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries of the volume take in the Near East as well as Greece and Rome, and cover a period of some 2,000 years beginning in the second millennium BCE and ending with the spread of Christianity during the last centuries of the Roman Empire in the West. In all, about one quarter of the essays deal with the Near East, one quarter with Greece, one quarter with Greece and Rome together, and one quarter with the Roman empire and its Persian and Indian rivals. Some essays concern topics in cultural history, such as Greek music and Roman art; some concern economic history in both Mesopotamia and Rome; and some concern traditional historical topics such as diplomacy and war in the Mediterranean world. Each essay draws on recent work in the theory of communications.