Whitney Cox presents a fundamental re-imagining of the politics of pre-modern India through a revisionist reading of the Chola dynasty, a medieval South Asian superpower. Utilizing a series of textual sources, this innovative study poses comparative and conceptual questions about politics, history, agency and representation in the pre-modern world.

Philology was everywhere and nowhere in classical South Asia. While its civilizations possessed remarkably sophisticated tools and methods of textual analysis, interpretation, and transmission, they lacked any sense of a common disciplinary or intellectual project uniting these; indeed they lacked a word for ‘philology’ altogether. Arguing that such pseudepigraphical genres as the Sanskrit purāṇas and tantras incorporated modes of philological reading and writing, Cox demonstrates the ways in which the production of these works in turn motivated the invention of new kinds of śāstric scholarship. Combining close textual analysis with wider theoretical concerns, Cox traces this philological transformation in the works of the dramaturgist Śāradātanaya, the celebrated Vaiṣṇava poet-theologian Veṅkaṭanātha, and the maverick Śaiva mystic Maheśvarānanda.

The author discusses the tragi-comic aspect of Chola kingship in relation to other Indian expressions of comedy, such as the Vidiisaka of Sanskrit drama, folk tales of the jester Tenali Rama, and clowns of the South Indian shadow-puppet theaters. The symbolism of the king emerges as part of a wider range of major symbolic figures--Brahmins, courtesans, and the tragic" bandits and warrior-heroes. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Minor Majesties studies the small ancient kingdom of Pa?uvūr, active between the ninth and the eleventh centuries C.E. in the modern South-Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Author Valérie Gillet extensively surveys four temples dedicated to the god Śiva that were built during this period, combining in-depth analyses of their materiality, their location, and their epigraphy. Through these, Gillet provides a better understanding of the complexities related to temple sponsorship, organisation, and functioning as well as how these religious monuments became a place for the fabrication of political discourses and powers, specific social configurations, and religious practices.Â

Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. Essays in this historical exploration trace how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, from the ancient to the precolonial period. This book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in the projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature. The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies such as Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces such as the elite, women, the king in the bed chamber, the court with dancing girls, public areas such as orchards and gardens and performance spaces.

This conference volume unites a wide range of scholars working in the fields of history, archaeology, religion, art, and philology in an effort to explore new perspectives and methods in the study of primary sources from premodern South and Southeast Asia. The contributions engage with primary sources (including texts, images, material artefacts, monuments, as well as archaeological sites and landscapes) and draw needed attention to highly adaptable, innovative, and dynamic modes of cultural production within traditional idioms. The volume works to develop categories of historical analysis that cross disciplinary boundaries and represent a wide variety of methodological concerns. By revisiting premodern sources, Asia Beyond Boundaries also addresses critical issues of temporality and periodization that attend established categories in Asian Studies, such as the “Classical Age” or the “Gupta Period”. This volume represents the culmination of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project Asia Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, a research consortium of the British Museum, the British Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies, in partnership with Leiden University.

"Regardless of terminology, the use of padya and gadya in Telugu literary works is invariably linked to Nannaya (early to mid-11th century), traditionally considered the first poet of Telugu literature. The style that Nannaya inaugurated in his Telugu retelling of the Mahābhārata is regarded as the paradigm for later poets. His mixing of padya and gadya-an element not present in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata-became the preferred mode of poetic composition, even when translating a Sanskrit counterpart that used padya exclusively"--