Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences. Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

"Drawing on the newest and most sophisticated historical research and scholarship in the field, Modern South Asia is written in an accessible style for all those with an intellectual curiosity about the region. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, it offers a rare depth of historical understanding of the politics, cultures and economies that shape the lives of more than a fifth of humanity." "In this comprehensive study, the authors debate and challenge the striking developments in contemporary South Asian history and historical writing, and cover the entire spectrum of modern South Asian history - social, economic, and political. The book provides new insights into the structure and ideology of the British raj, the meaning of subaltern resistance, the refashioning of social relations along the lines of caste, class, community and gender, the different strands of anti-colonial nationalism and the dynamics of decolonization." "This new second edition has been updated throughout to take account of recent historical research. It brings the story up to date and offers new insights on the last millennium in subcontinental history. There is a new chronology of key events."--Jacket.

Using a unique "old–new" treatment, this book presents new perspectives on several important topics in Southeast Asian history and historiography. Based on original, primary research, it reinterprets and revises several long-held conventional views in the field, covering the period from the "classical" age to the twentieth century. Chapters share the approach to Southeast Asian history and historiography: namely, giving "agency" to Southeast Asia in all research, analysis, writing, and interpretation. The book honours John K. Whitmore, a senior historian in the field of Southeast Asian history today, by demonstrating the scope and breadth of the scholar’s influence on two generations of historians trained in the West. In addition to providing new information and insights on the field of Southeast Asia, this book stimulates new debate on conventional ideas, evidence, and approaches to its teaching, research, and understanding. It addresses, and in many cases, revises specific, critically important topics in Southeast Asian history on which much conventional knowledge of Southeast Asia has long been based. It is of interest to scholars of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as Asian History.

This book provides a set of fresh and compelling interdisciplinary approaches to the enduring phenomenon of the guru in South Asia. Moving across different gurus and kinds of gurus, and between past and present, the chapters call attention to the extraordinary scope and richness of the social lives and roles of South Asian gurus. Prevailing scholarship has rightly considered the guru to be a source of religious and philosophical knowledge and mystical bodily practices. This book goes further and considers the social engagements and entanglements of these spiritual leaders, not just on their own (narrowly denominational) terms, but in terms of their diverse, complex, rapidly evolving engagements with 'society' broadly conceived. The book explores and illuminates the significance of female gurus, gurus from the perspective of Islam, imbrications of guru-ship and slavery in pre-modern India, connections between gurus and power, governance and economic liberalization in modern and contemporary India, vexed questions of sexuality and guru-ship, gurus' charitable endeavours, the cosmopolitanism of gurus in contexts of spiritual tourism, and the mediation of gurus via technologies of electronic communication. Bringing together internationally renowned scholars from religious studies, political science, history, sociology and anthropology, The Guru in South Asia provides exciting and original new insights into South Asian guru-ship. The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

‘This volume brings together a diversity of international scholars, unified in the theme of expanding scientific knowledge about humanity’s past in the Asia-Pacific region. The contents in total encompass a deep time range, concerning the origins and dispersals of anatomically modern humans, the lifestyles of Pleistocene and early Holocene Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, the emergence of Neolithic farming communities, and the development of Iron Age societies. These core enduring issues continue to be explored throughout the vast region covered here, accordingly with a richness of results as shown by the authors. Befitting of the grand scope of this volume, the individual contributions articulate perspectives from multiple study areas and lines of evidence. Many of the chapters showcase new primary field data from archaeological sites in Southeast Asia. Equally important, other chapters provide updated regional summaries of research in archaeology, linguistics, and human biology from East Asia through to the Western Pacific.’ Mike T. Carson Associate Professor of Archaeology Micronesian Area Research Center University of Guam

An epoch-marking alliance of laborers, students, dissident intellectuals, and ordinary citizens was at the heart of South Korea’s transformation from a dictatorship into a vibrant democracy during the 1980s. Collectively known as the minjung (“the people”), these agents of Korean democratization historically carved out an expanded role for civil society in the country’s politics. In Revisiting Minjung, some of the foremost experts in 1980s Korean history, literature, film, art, and music provide new insights into one of the most crucial decades in South Korean history. Drawing from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, post-Marxist studies, intersectional feminism, popular culture studies, and more, the volume demonstrates how an era that is often associated with radical politics was, in effect, the catalyst for the subsequent flourishing of democratic and liberal values in South Korea. Revisiting Minjung brings new themes, new subjectivities, and new theoretical perspectives to the study of the rich ecosystem of 1980s Korean culture. Treated here is a wide array of topics, including the origins of minjung ideology, its critique by the right wing, minjung art and music, workers’ literary culture, women writers and the resurgence of feminism, erotic cinema, science fiction, transnational political travels, and the representations of race and queerness in 1980s popular culture. The book thus details the origins and development of some of the movements that shape cultural life in South Korea today, and it does so through analyses that engage some of the most pressing debates in current scholarship in Korea and abroad.