Scholar Intellectuals in Early Modern India
In recent years, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have examined the revival in intellectual and literary cultures that took place during Indias early modern centuries. This was both a revival as well as a period of intense disputation and critical engagement. It took in the relationship of contemporaries to their own intellectual inheritances, shifts in the meaning and application of particular disciplines, the development of new literary genres and the emergence of new arenas and networks for the conduct of intellectual and religious debate. Exploring the worlds of Sanskrit and vernacular learning and piety in the subcontinent, these essays examine the role of individual scholar intellectuals in this revival, looking particularly at the interplay between intellectual discipline, sectarian links, family history and the personal religious interests of these men. Each essay offers a fine-grained study of an individual. Some are distinguished scholars, poets and religious leaders with subcontinent-wide reputations, others obscure provincial writers whose interest lies precisely in their relative anonymity. A particular focus of interest will be the way in which these men moved across the very different social milieus of early modern India, finding ways to negotiate relationships at courtly centres, temples, sectarian monasteries, the pandit assemblies of the cosmopolitan city of Banaras and lesser religious centres in the regions.
This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Christopher Minkowski is Boden Professor of Sanskrit, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Rosalind OHanlon is Professor of Indian History and Culture, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.
Anand Venkatkrishnan is a senior research student in the Department of Religion, Columbia University.
SOUTH ASIAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
David Washbrook -University of Cambridge, UK
Boria Majumdar -University of Central Lancashire, UK
Sharmistha Gooptu -South Asia Research Foundation, India
Nalin Mehta -La Trobe University, Melbourne
This series offers a forum that will provide an integrated perspective on the field at large. It brings together research on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences, and provides scholars with a platform covering, but not restricted to, their particular fields of interest and specialization. Such an approach is critical to any expanding field of study, for the development of more informed and broader perspectives, and of more overarching theoretical conceptions.
The series achieves a multidisciplinary forum for the study of South Asia under the aegis of established disciplines (e.g. history, politics, gender studies) combined with more recent fields (e.g. sport studies, sexuality studies). A focus is also to make available to a broader readership new research on film, media, photography, medicine and the environment, which have to date remained more specialized fields within South Asian studies.
A significant concern for the series is to focus across the whole of the region known as South Asia, and not simply on India, as most South Asia forums inevitably tend to do. We are most conscious of this gap in South Asian studies and work to bring into focus more scholarship on and from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and other parts of South Asia.
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Scholar Intellectuals in Early Modern India
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First published 2015
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The chapters in this book were originally published in South Asian History and Culture, volume 6, issue 1 (January 2015). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:
Social history in the study of Indian intellectual cultures?
Christopher Minkowski, Rosalind OHanlon and Anand Venkatkrishnan
South Asian History and Culture, volume 6, issue 1 (January 2015) pp. 19
South meets North: Banaras from the perspective of Appayya Dkita
Yigal Bronner
South Asian History and Culture, volume 6, issue 1 (January 2015) pp. 1031
