Ever since the collapse of socialism in East Europe and the Soviet Union the political project of Marxism has been seriously questioned. A spate of philosophies and social movements has arisen casting doubt about the relevance of Marxist theories for understanding contemporary problems.
This volume, the jacket flap tells us, is the latest in a series devoted to ‘book history in India’, the subtitle of this edited work. One expects a chronological account of the history of book production and then one realizes that this is not a history of the book in India but book history in India—a capacious category.
In its time, Sanskrit occupied in South Asia a position similar in some respects to that of English today. It was the language of authority and culture, of higher learning and academic research, and of elite intercourse across linguistic and regional divides.
A sthalamahatmya is intended to certify to the importance of a holy place such as a temple, retrieving its imagined past and also occasionally describing the different rituals performed there.
In the Western intellectual tradition, virtue is a commonly used euphemism for political inequality. In a different age, writing against the practices of democratic Athens, Plato argued that only the philosophers, with their monopoly of intellectual virtue and concomitant to that, their moral virtue, were entitled to rule.
Of only a very few books can it be said that they are truly path-breaking. The Myth of 1648 is one of them and is a deserved co-recipient of the prestigious Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2003.