Of Ascetics and Emperors: Teachings of an Indian Sage is an English translation of Saralabala Mitra's book, Katha Prasanga (Spiritual Discourses). Here one can find the spiritual discourses of the renowned Indian sage, Balananda Brahmachari. His monastery in India was a place of pilgrimage for innumerable spiritual seekers. Attracted by his presence, people from all walks of life came to him. To each and every one, the great sage gave generously and poured out all the precious wealth that lay in his spiritual treasure chest. Through the ages, India has maintained a tradition of spiritual teachers giving Dharma talks to all who care to listen. Listening to a good teacher can be extremely helpful; however, in the busy world of modern times, it is hard to find such sages and even harder for people to make time for them. This book overcomes the hurdles of time and space by transporting readers to a world where great seers taught the basic tenets of the spiritual path to all seekers. To make the extremely profound, complex, and esoteric ideas of Hinduism accessible to people from all backgrounds, Balananda Brahmachari used a variety of stories, anecdotes, parables, and quotations from real life experiences and the Hindu scriptures. Sometimes the discussions are highly philosophical and sometimes they are delightfully simple. What he says pours forth straight from his heart-the heart of an enlightened one who has practiced and realized what is written in the scriptures. If he could be present, in flesh and blood, before his devotees today and they asked him to say a few words of wisdom to them, here's what he would probably say: "Ulat Jao." This phrase literally means "turn yourself upside down," but the deeper meaning is "turn inwards." This has been the advice of all sages and all religions of all ages; they have all asked seekers to turn their gaze from the outside to the inside, from the mortal to the immortal, from the untrue to the true.

A compelling history of radical transformation in the fourth-century--when Christianity decimated the practices of traditional pagan religion in the Roman Empire. The Final Pagan Generation recounts the fascinating story of the lives and fortunes of the last Romans born before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Edward J. Watts traces their experiences of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes, when heated confrontations saw the Christian establishment legislate against pagan practices as mobs attacked pagan holy sites and temples. The emperors who issued these laws, the imperial officials charged with implementing them, and the Christian perpetrators of religious violence were almost exclusively young men whose attitudes and actions contrasted markedly with those of the earlier generation, who shared neither their juniors’ interest in creating sharply defined religious identities nor their propensity for violent conflict. Watts examines why the "final pagan generation"—born to the old ways and the old world in which it seemed to everyone that religious practices would continue as they had for the past two thousand years—proved both unable to anticipate the changes that imperially sponsored Christianity produced and unwilling to resist them. A compelling and provocative read, suitable for the general reader as well as students and scholars of the ancient world.

Jainism is aside from Buddhism, the only surviving example of India`s ancient non-Vedic religious traditions celebrated for its systematic practice of non-violence and for the rigor of the asceticism it promotes. It sheds light on a little known religious tradition and demonstrates that divine absence.

"This book focuses on the attempts of three seventh-century Palestinian intellectuals--John Moschos, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus the Confessor--to determine the Church's power and place during a period of profound crisis, as the eastern Roman empire suffered serious reversals in the face of Persian and then Islamic expansion. Through their stories, Booth documents nothing less than a profound change in the very nature of the self-perception of a religious society. Although focused on the first half of the seventh century, this book throws bright light both behind itself--on the nature of the role of the holy man in late antiquity--and in front of itself--on the nature of the Byzantine Orthodoxy that would emerge in the middle ages, and which is still central to the churches of Greece and Eastern Europe"--

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent. Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

This 2006 book is an innovative study of warrior asceticism in India from the 1500s to the present.

Fifty leaves that form the sumptuous Kevorkian Album, one of the world's greatest assemblages of Mughal art. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.