Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practices in South Asia - Hardcover

Inden, Ronald; Walters, Jonathan; Ali, Daud

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195124308 ISBN 13: 9780195124309

Publisher: OUP USA, 2000

Synopsis

Indologist Ronald Inden has in the past raised questions about the images of a "traditional" or "medieval" India deployed by colonial scholars and rulers--"Orientalists"--and has also argued that a history of "early medieval" India very different from both the colonial and nationalist accounts could be written. This volume is designed as an important first step towards that goal. The authors look closely at three genres of texts that have been crucial to the representations of precolonial India. All three essays challenge not only colonialist scholarship but the attempts by religious nationalists to identify Hinduism as the essence of national identity in India and Buddhism as the essence of nationality in Sri Lanka.

About this title

Review

This volume is an important, groundbreaking work challenging how we read and understand texts ... This is must reading for those engaged in the struggle to understand the deeper past or disheartened by radical deconstruction of texts to the point that signifiers 'float,' meaning everything and nothing. (Stewart Gordon, University of Michigan)

Stimulating, challenging and important ... this is a book which historians of medieval India will find difficult to ignore ... Like this book, the medieval is at once fascinating, infuriating, illuminating, perplexing, seminal and irrelevant. We can never be done with it, however much we try. (South Asian Studies)

The book will prove stimulating for anyone interested in the relationships between texts, the contexts in which texts are produced and which texts affect, and the use of texts to write history. (History)

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195124308
• ISBN 13: 9780195124309
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248