The earlier chapters of the present volume deal with a large number of topics relating to kingship, landlordism (sometimes mistaken as feudalism), tenancy, royal, charter, Pancayat system etc. Some of the following chapters contain discussions on certain royal officers the functions of some of them or their departments a few aspects of the judicial system some land measures and taxes etc. The third group of topics mostly concerns the interpretation of technical expressions found in epigraphical records. The last section of the work consists of several appendices which are really some of the author`s recently published studies.

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).

A focal study of the methodological changes that confront historians of pre-colonial India.

The holy places associated with the Mother Goddess and spread over various parts of the indian subcontinent have been popular pilgrim spots for a long time. According to some late Tantric texts ascribable to Eastern India, the number of such Sakta-Tirthas is fifty-one and the present monograph is a dissertation on the origin and development of this conception. Thus it is at the same time the study of a number of Tantric and other texts as well as of certain problems of Tantric religion and of historical geography. It is unique in its approach because Tantra Studies have not progressed satisfactorily so far on scientific lines.

In the introduction the importance of the study of the socio-economic condition of vih