A Lamp for the Dark World

A Lamp for the Dark World

Author: Parvati Sharma

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2023-05-15

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 1538177900

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Akbar the Great is a very familiar figure to most Indians. Hailed as a brilliant warrior, a great administrator, and a visionary ruler whose ideas of pluralism and tolerance sought to unify India with all its diversity of peoples and religions, he is also an increasingly contested figure in the national discourse. And familiar though he might be, Akbar is a mystery too, locked in his own legend: a man to admire but difficult to know. What was Akbar really like—as a child, a father, a friend, a foe? What were his moods like – his anger, his melancholy, his passions and his laughter? How did a thirteen-year-old fatherless boy, surrounded by ambitious advisors and warlords, become one of the world’s most powerful monarchs; and how did he deal with his dizzying rise? Was Akbar a sceptic or did he believe he had divine, miraculous powers? With revealing psychological insights into Akbar’s complex and magnetic personality, this biography is also the story of how Akbar’s ideas and ideals of kingship evolved through his reign; of how he came to concentrate in himself both political and religious authority; of his instances of megalomania, his doubts, and his yearning for justice. Rich in detail, and with a cast of unforgettable characters, it sparkles with humor and drama too, as it vividly evokes the world he lived in. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Parvati Sharma’s portrait of Akbar the Great brings alive as never before a man imperfect and extraordinary, who ruled for fifty years and has lived in the Indian imagination for close to half a millennium.


Warfare in Pre-British India - 1500BCE to 1740CE

Warfare in Pre-British India - 1500BCE to 1740CE

Author: Kaushik Roy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-06-03

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1317586913

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This book presents a comprehensive survey of warfare in India up to the point where the British began to dominate the sub-continent. It discusses issues such as how far was the relatively bloodless nature of pre-British Indian warfare the product of stateless Indian society? How far did technology determine the dynamics of warfare in India? Did warfare in this period have a particular Indian nature and was it ritualistic? The book considers land warfare including sieges, naval warfare, the impact of horses, elephants and gunpowder, and the differences made by the arrival of Muslim rulers and by the influx of other foreign influences and techniques. The book concludes by arguing that the presence of standing professional armies supported by centralised bureaucratic states have been underemphasised in the history of India.


The Mughal Empire at War

The Mughal Empire at War

Author: Andrew de la Garza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-28

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1317245318

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The Mughal Empire was one of the great powers of the early modern era, ruling almost all of South Asia, a conquest state, dominated by its military elite. Many historians have viewed the Mughal Empire as relatively backward, the Emperor the head of a traditional warband from Central Asia, with tribalism and the traditions of the Islamic world to the fore, and the Empire not remotely comparable to the forward looking Western European states of the period, with their strong innovative armies implementing the “military revolution”. This book argues that, on the contrary, the military establishment built by the Emperor Babur and his successors was highly sophisticated, an effective combination of personnel, expertise, technology and tactics, drawing on precedents from Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and India, and that the resulting combined arms system transformed the conduct of warfare in South Asia. The book traces the development of the Mughal Empire chronologically, examines weapons and technology, tactics and operations, organization, recruitment and training, and logistics and non-combat operations, and concludes by assessing the overall achievements of the Mughal Empire, comparing it to its Western counterparts, and analyzing the reasons for its decline.


Local States in an Imperial World

Local States in an Imperial World

Author: Fischel Roy S. Fischel

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-04-15

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 1474436102

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Focusing on the Deccan Sultanates of 16th- and 17th-century central India, Local States in an Imperial World promotes the idea that some polities of the time were not aspiring to be empires. Instead of the universalist and hierarchical vision typical of the language of empire, the sultanates presented another brand of state - one that prefers negotiation, flexibility and plurality of languages, religions and cultures. Building on theories of early modernity, empire, cosmopolitanism and vernaculars, Roy Fischel considers the components that shaped state and society: people, identities and idioms. He presents a frame for understanding the Deccan Sultanates as a rare case of the early modern non-imperial state, shedding light both on the region and on the imperial world surrounding it.


Religion, Landscape and Material Culture in Pre-modern South Asia

Religion, Landscape and Material Culture in Pre-modern South Asia

Author: Tilottama Mukherjee

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-02-10

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1000847292

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This book highlights emerging trends and new themes in South Asian history. It covers issues broadly related to religion, materiality and nature from differing perspectives and methods to offer a kaleidoscopic view of Indian history until the late eighteenth century. The essays in the volume focus on understanding questions of premodern religion, material culture processes and their spatial and environmental contexts through a study of networks of commodities and cultural and religious landscapes. From the early history of coastal regions such as Gujarat and Bengal to material networks of political culture, from temples and their connection with maritime trade to the importance of landscape in influencing temple-building, from regions considered peripheral to mainstream historiography to the development of religious sects, this collection of articles maps the diverse networks and connections across regions and time. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of history, archaeology, museum and heritage studies, religion, especially Hinduism, Sufism and Buddhism, and South Asian studies.


Pelagic Passageways

Pelagic Passageways

Author: Rila Mukherjee

Publisher: Primus Books

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9380607202

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Due to the frontierization of nation-states, maritime historians have tended to ignore the northern Bay of Bengal. Yet, this marginal region, now dispersed over the four nation-states of India, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh, was not marginal in the past. Until recently, however, historians have concentrated largely on the 'big four': the Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel and western Bengal coasts. Extreme eastern South Asia -- Bengal and the lands to its north-east fanning into Burma and China, or modern India's north-east and beyond -- is the focus of Pelagic Passageways. This regional unit, including diverse topographic features: plains, forests, estuaries, deltas, rivers, mountains, lakes, plateaus and remote passes, oscillates between unity and fragmentation, between centrality and marginality in the larger space of the Bay of Bengal. To attempt a history of this space is indeed challenging. There is not one, but two deltas here: the western delta, corresponding to present West Bengal in India and centred now on Kolkata, and the south-eastern delta, in present Bangladesh, centred on Dhaka, and running into Arakan. Not merely in terms of location, but on a historical axis too, the two deltas are vastly different as they have followed disparate trajectories, dictated in part by their geographies. Pelagic Passageways, therefore, questions the conventional fault line, located on the south-eastern Bengal delta, between the historiography of South and South-East Asia. Concentrating on commodity and currency flows, travel, trade, routes and interactive networks Pelagic Passageways visualizes the cultural space of the northern Bay of Bengal as embracing upland landlocked areas -- Ava, Yunnan, the Tripuri, Dimasa and Ahom states -- not usually seen as part of maritime history. This collection of essays suggests that they too were a part of the social and commercial networks of the Indian Ocean. While these countries literally fell off the map, this volume proposes that we see these areas instead as crossroads, mediating flows between the land-dwelling and aquatic worlds.


India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765

India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765

Author: Richard Maxwell Eaton

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0520325125

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With relish and originality, historian Eaton traces the rise of Persianate culture, introduced to India in the 11th century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan.