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Epigraphy, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies and Ethnohistory. Influenced by Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies tradition, the contributors argue that oral narratives, ritual practices, pilgrimage customs, songs, and collective memory can serve as legitimate historical sources when supported by independent evidence. The chapters move logically from the political and cultural settings of first-century North-West India and South India to discussions of the Acts of Thomas, the Seven Churches, Mylapore Archaeology and Syriac, Arabic, Patristic, Portuguese and Papal sources. The loss of Syriac and Malayalam manuscripts destroyed by Portuguese colonizers during the

where the earlier generation sought structures, they seek subjectivities. These are legitimate and productive shifts. The difficulty arises only when such approaches are presented as superseding structural history. The two are inseparable. Faizi’s self-fashioning cannot be understood without imperial patronage, and Anand Ram Mukhlis cannot be understood apart from the fiscal and political fragmentation of eighteenth-century Mughal India. Diplomats existed because states existed. Munshis emerged because bureaucracies required them. The self is never autonomous

Rosen offers a critique of Eric Stokes’s 1959 classic, English Utilitarians and India. Rosen argues that Stokes went along with Élie Halévy’s interpretation of Utilitarianism, mistakenly assuming that James Mill, as a follower of Jeremy Bentham, uncritically endorsed autocracy. Dube’s essay reassesses the relationship between Bentham’s Utilitarianism and the ideas of the Mills. In the case of James Mill, Bentham’s opinion was that ‘His creed of politics results less from love of the many, than from the hatred of the few’ (p. 47). Majeed suggests that we need to take into account the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions that had a bearing on James Mill’s views about Britain’s empire in India. He was critical of William Jones’s romanticization of Indian culture, which created difficulties for undertaking reform.

This involves pooling funds, advancing informal loans, and adhering to social expectations and religious norms. Although driving is an overwhelmingly male occupation, Chillia women in Pathanwadi undertake maal, small-scale piecework for sale that is conducted from the confines of the home. Some women also serve as religious teachers in the community. Bedi highlights the centrality of women’s work to the family economy, sustaining households in the face of constant precarity.

A widely loved version of an armed Buddhist deity is Bodhisattva Manjushri, the face serene, the arm wielding the sword of wisdom. The battles here are metaphoric, the sword cutting through the obstacles to spiritual liberation—ego, attachment, greed, ignorance and delusion. I couldn’t help feeling some unease at the generalized deployment of an image from the Vajrayana tradition—with its complex intersection of Buddhist psychology and visual arts left unexplored here—for a book that focuses largely on forms of state-sponsored violence and monastic deviations in the Sri Lankan, Burmese, and Thai contexts.
But then this slim volume is by a journalist, not a historian or a sociologist or philosopher of religion.

Four named khattats carry the chapter from there: Mohammed Ghalib, who still writes out the Quran and volumes of verse by hand outside a shop numbered 4181, and speaks of the work as inheritance rather than income; Shiraz Hussain of Khwab Tanha Collective, whose studio still finds buyers for his poster-calligraphy at exhibitions and fairs; Mohammed Zubair, who learned the craft from an older brother as a boy, was once turned away from formal training for being too young, and is not teaching it to his own daughter; and Mushtaq Ahmed, who has taught the discipline to some two thousand students across fifty years and says, plainly, that none of it has ever been enough to live on. The chapter is proof, in miniature, of how the whole book works: patient attention, a named source behind every claim of significance, and testimony given room to speak for itself