A Fiscal Domain for Panchayats is a curious title for a book which primarily deals with the taxation of agricultural income. Of the nine chapters in Indira Rajaraman’s slim volume, apart from the Introduction and Conclusion, eight deal with different aspects of taxing the income from agriculture, including a land tax or land revenue.
There is much to recommend in Deepak Raja’s book. India’s premier Hindustani vocalist Ulhas Kashalkar has written the Foreword and the Introduction is by Lyle Wachovsky, the well-known American producer of Indian classical music who runs the label ‘Indian Archive’ from New York.
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.