Religion is not about love and compassion only. It is also about exclusion, hatred and violence. Being a total narrative, religion gives meaning to existential and societal concerns of the believers.
Paul Brass stands next only to the late Myron Weiner and the Rudolphs (Lloyd and Susan) in the pantheon of American political scientists who have made it their lifelong business to understand Indian democracy.
Those of us who regularly pursue the contents of Religion may recall the sparkling essay that appeared roughly two years back from the author of this monograph on broadly the same theme.
The history of the book, or book history, as it is beginning to be called now, has for long been the preserve of bibliographers and antiquarians. This has been especially so in India. Looking at books from a narrow and often bibliophilic, if not bibliomaniac, perspective they were more often than not most concerned with debates no more exciting than who printed the first book, which press came first, the role of Christian missionaries, who contributed more to such-and-such language printing, etc.
The British established their Indian Raj by various means including the sword but undoubtedly they secured it with modern means of communication. Ruling India from distant London was a difficult and complex affair in which the press came to play a critical role specially from the mid-nineteenth century.
Himanshu Prabha Ray’s The Archaeology of Seafaring in Ancient South Asia makes a convincing case for the need to abandon an insular view of ancient India. Viewing the subcontinent within the larger world of the Indian Ocean, it replaces the usual episodic view of trade by a nuanced long-term narrative that stretches from the third millennium BC to the fifth century AD.