For more than half a century, T.N. Madan has been a towering influence on the sociological and anthropological studies of family and kinship, cultural dimensions of development, religion, secularism, and Hindu society and tradition. This Omnibus brings together his seminal writings on marriage, kinship, family, and the household in Hindu society. Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, first published in 1965, remains a pioneering ethnographic study of the Kashmiri Pandits, and is considered a classic in the field of world anthropology. The book presents a social history of a people and culture which is currently virtually non-existent in the Kashmir Valley. Drawing upon new theoretical and methodological perspectives, Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture provides a nuanced understanding of Hinduism as a lived tradition. It explores aspects of auspiciousness, purity, asceticism, eroticism, altruism, and death while focussing on the householder's life in Hindu society. The Omnibus also includes additional essays on the Brahmanic gotra, and the Hindu family and development, along with a short piece on aspects of traditional household culture. It features an autobiographical essay—the author's recollection of growing up in a Pandit home in Srinagar, Kashmir. In the Prologue, T.N. Madan engages with the 'householder tradition' across the cultural regions of India, analysing themes of householdership and renunciation in religious philosophy and ethnography.

Owning Land, Being Women enquires into the processes that establish inheritance as a unique form of property relation in law and society. It focuses on India, examining the legislative processes that led to the 2005 amendment of the Hindu Succession Act 1956, along with several interconnected welfare policies. Scholars have understood these Acts as a response to growing concerns about women’s property rights in developing countries. In re-reading these Acts and exploring the wider nexus of Indian society in which the legislation was drafted, this study considers how questions of family structure and property rights contribute to the creation of legal subjects and demonstrates the significance of the politico-economic context of rights formulation. On the basis of an ethnography of a village in West Bengal, this book brings the moral axis of inheritance into sharp focus, elucidating the interwoven dynamics of bequest, distribution of family wealth and reciprocity of care work that are integral to the logic of inheritance. It explains why inheritance rights based on the notion of individual property rights are inadequate to account for practices of inheritance. Mondal shows that inheritance includes normative structures of affective attachment and expectations, i.e., evaluatively-charged imaginaries of the future that coordinate present practices. These insights pose questions of the dominant resource-based conceptualisation of inherited property in the debate on women’s empowerment. In doing so, this work opens up a line of investigation that brings feminist rights discourse into conversation with ethics, enriching the liberal theory of gender justice.

Any growing discipline continuously adds to the corpus of factual knowledge about the phenomena being studied and enriches its conceptual apparatus. Over time, some themes are dropped, and new concerns incorporated. This makes older and classical texts less relevant, and necessitates a process of selection and reprioritization of themes to meet changing times. Hence the need for new textbooks, especially one as detailed and concise as Sociology: A Study of the Social Sphere. The book serves as an invitation to sociology and it helps the reader to learn the language that sociologists employ, and the way commonly used words (such as family, marriage, caste) are given distinct definitions. It follows the logic of scientific research that governs sociological analysis. The various topics covered in the book are illustrated with examples taken from everyday life, and from studies conducted in India.

This book discusses the intersections between culture, context, and aging. It adopts a socio-cultural lens and highlights emotional, social, and psychological issues of the older adults in urban India. It is set in multiple sites such as Ahmedabad, Delhi, Kolkata, and Saskatoon to indicate how different cultural practices and contextual factors play an integral role in determining the course of aging. It also focuses on different narratives such as older adults living with adult children, older adults living with spouse, and older adults living alone to demonstrate the intricate process of growing old. Drawing from various sites and living arrangements of older adults, it sheds light on cultural constructions of growing old, ideas of belonging, the inevitability of death, everyday processes of aging, perceptions associated with growing old in India, acceptance of the aging body, and intergenerational ties in later lives. Given its scope, the book is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of sociology, demography, and social scientists studying aging.

This Omnibus edition brings together four classic works on Hinduism by renowned scholars, providing the liturgical, historical, anthropological, and individualist's interpretation of the religion. With an introduction by T.N. Madan, this volume will make an excellent and very comprehensive collector's item on the subject of Hinduism.

Hinduism in the Modern World presents a new and unprecedented attempt to survey the nature, range, and significance of modern and contemporary Hinduism in South Asia and the global diaspora. Organized to reflect the direction of recent scholarly research, this volume breaks with earlier texts on this subject by seeking to overcome a misleading dichotomy between an elite, intellectualist "modern" Hinduism and the rest of what has so often been misleadingly termed "traditional" or "popular" Hinduism. Without neglecting the significance of modern reformist visions of Hinduism, this book reconceptualizes the meaning of "modern Hinduism" both by expanding its content and by situating its expression within a larger framework of history, ethnography, and contemporary critical theory. This volume equips undergraduate readers with the tools necessary to appreciate the richness and diversity of Hinduism as it has developed during the past two centuries.

Hinduism: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation explores Hinduism and the distinction between the secular and religious on a global scale. According to Ranganathan, a careful philosophical study of Hinduism reveals it as the microcosm of philosophical disagreements with Indian resources, across a variety of topics, including: ethics, logic, the philosophy of thought, epistemology, moral standing, metaphysics, and politics. This analysis offers an original and fresh diagnosis of studying Hinduism, colonialism, and a global rise of hyper-nationalism, as well as the frequent acrimony between scholars and practitioners of Hindu traditions. This text is appropriate for use in undergraduate and graduate courses on Hinduism, and Indian philosophy, and can be used as an advanced introduction to the problems of philosophy with South Asian resources.