This volume contains the most comprehensive collection of scholarly sources on Indian poetics and aesthetics (the Alaṃkāraśāstra ever published in ancient India. Entries are divided into three sections and a detailed index is provided. Reference to primary sources from several languages range from about the 5th to the 19th centuries. Secondary sources in two dozen languages are divided into two sections, viz., books and articles. These begin in the mid-19th century and continue to the present. Annotations are usually brief and descriptive.

Illuminates the centrality of courtliness in the political and cultural life of the Deccan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.