This book analyses engagements with non-Shia practices of Muḥarram celebrations in the past and present, in South Asia and within a larger diaspora. Breaking new ground by bringing together a variety of regional perspectives (the Deccan, the Punjab, Singapore, South Africa, and Trinidad and Tobago) and linguistic backgrounds (Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu), the chapters discuss the importance of Muḥarram celebrations in terms of their respective actors.While in s...

Chakshudana or rituals of opening the eyes are practiced across multiple South Asian communities by artists, sculptors, and priests. The ritual offers gods access to the mortal world. This practice, applied to the study of material and visual culture, offers a distinctive perspective to interrogate the complex engagements with paintings, sculptures, found objects, fragments, built environments, and ecologies.This volume takes the process of seeing as its focus—to look clos...

Taming the Oriental Bazaar examines the public market-hall as a key architectural feature of colonial South Asia. Representing a transition in the architectural programme, these buildings were meant to be monuments and markers of modernity in South Asia.The book:Explores how market-halls became an essential feature of colonial settlements from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuriesDiscusses public health policies and legislations cen...

The Deccan sultans left a grand architectural and artistic legacy. They commissioned palaces, mosques, gardens and tombs as well as decorative paintings and coins. Of these sultanates, the Nizam Shahs (r. 1490-1636) were particularly significant, being one of the first to emerge from the crumbling edifice of the Bahmani Empire (c. 1347-1527). Yet their rich material record remains largely unstudied in the scholarly literature, obscuring their cultural and historical importance. This book p...

Shaila Bhatti's immersive study of the Lahore Museum in Pakistan is one of the first books to offer an in-depth historical and ethnographic analysis of a South Asian museum. Bhatti thus presents an alternative example of visitor experience and museum practice to that of the West, which has been the dominant museological model to date. This examination of the Lahore Museum's objects, staff, and visitors (past and present) provides an informative case study that reveals local perceptions and...

Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues.I...

Comprehensive, informative and authoritative, The Penguin Handbook of the World's Living Religions is compiled by a team of leading international scholars, and is the definitive guide to the religious belief systems and practices of the world today. This in-depth survey of active religions has now been fully updated to include modern developments and the most recent scholarship. It explains the sources and history of the world's religions, includes material on the phenomenon of Bl...

From one of the world?s foremost scholars on Hinduism, a vivid reinterpretation of its historyAn engrossing and definitive narrative account of history and myth that offers a new way of understanding one of the world?s oldest major religions, The Hindus elucidates the relationship between recorded history and imaginary worlds.Hinduism does not lend itself easily to a strictly chronological account: many of its central texts cannot be reliably dated...

India, Bharat and Pakistan, the second book of the Bharat Trilogy, takes the discussion forward from its bestselling predecessor, India That Is Bharat. It explores the combined influence of European and Middle Eastern colonialities on Bharat as the successor state to the Indic civilisation, and on the origins of the Indian Constitution. To this end, the book traces the thought continuum of Middle Eastern coloniality, from the rise of Islamic Revivalism in the 1740s follow...

One of the greatest cities of the Himalaya, Kathmandu, Nepal, is a unique blend of thousand-year-old cultural practices and accelerated urban development. In this book, Thomas Bell recounts his experiences from his many years in the city—exploring in the process the rich history of Kathmandu and its many instances of self-reinvention.Closed to the outside world until 1951 and trapped in a medieval time warp, Kathmandu is, as Bell argues, a jewel of the art world, a carnival of sexu...

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Is religion a force for war, or a force for peace? Some of the most terrible wars in history have been caused and motivated by religion. Much of the violence that fills our screens today springs from the same source. Yet some of the bravest pacifists have also been deeply religious people, and many of the laws and institutions that work to soften or prevent war have deep religious roots. This Very Short Introduction pr...

In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged.No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods an...