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Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660

Fatima Quraishi

The historic role of funerary architecture in South Asia.

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Maklī became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

In Palimpsests Past and Present, Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Maklī’s built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Maklī, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.

A Journey of Institutionalized Scientific Music Research in India: From Sir C.V. Raman till date

Ranjan Sengupta, Shankha Sanyal, Dipak Ghosh and Soubhik Chakraborty

This book offers an engaging and accessible journey into Indian music by blending art, science, and human experience into a single narrative. Rather than treating music only as a cultural tradition, it presents it as a fascinating system of sound, emotion, and meaning that connects the physical world with the human mind.

Beginning with the roots of Indian music, the book traces how natural sounds gradually evolved into structured forms like rāga and tāl, shaped by human perception and emotion. It then highlights the ground-breaking work of Sir C.V. Raman, who revealed the hidden science behind Indian musical instruments, showing how traditional designs embody complex acoustic principles.

The narrative moves into modern scientific research in music, exploring the role of institutions such as the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, the Sir C.V. Raman Centre for Physics and Music at Jadavpur University and Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. These three institutions have demonstrated how ancient musical knowledge can interact with contemporary tools such as signal processing, neuroscience, computational musicology and artificial intelligence. Studies on brain responses to music, for instance, show how rāgas can influence emotions and cognition in measurable ways.

At its heart, the book argues that music exists at the intersection of sound and consciousness. By combining physics, psychology, statistics, audio signal processing and cultural insight, it invites readers to see music not just as something we hear, but as a powerful medium that shapes how we think, feel, and connect with the world.

A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (author), Tim Mackintosh-Smith (translator), Mansoura Ez-Eldin (foreword)

Flora, fauna, and famine in thirteenth-century Egypt.

A Physician on the Nile begins as a description of everyday life in Egypt at the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century, before becoming a harrowing account of famine and pestilence. Written by the polymath and physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and intended for the Abbasid caliph al-Nāṣir, the first part of the book offers detailed descriptions of Egypt’s geography, plants, animals, and local cuisine, including a recipe for a giant picnic pie made with three entire roast lambs and dozens of chickens. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s text is also a pioneering work of ancient Egyptology, with detailed observations of Pharaonic monuments, sculptures, and mummies. An early and ardent champion of archaeological conservation, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf condemns the vandalism wrought by tomb-robbers and notes with distaste that Egyptian grocers price their goods with labels written on recycled mummy-wrappings.

The book’s second half relates his horrific eyewitness account of the great famine that afflicted Egypt in the years 597–598/1200–1202. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a keen observer of humanity, and he offers vivid first-hand depictions of starvation, cannibalism, and a society in moral free-fall.

A Physician on the Nile contains great diversity in a small compass, distinguished by the acute, humane, and ever-curious mind of its author. It is rare to be able to hear the voice of such a man responding so directly to novelty, beauty, and tragedy.

Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice

Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (author), Michael Fishbein (translator), James E. Montgomery (translator), Marina Warner DBE (foreword)

Timeless tales of loyalty and betrayal.

Like Aesop’s Fables, Kalīlah and Dimnah is a collection designed not only for moral instruction, but also for the entertainment of readers. The stories, which originated in the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, were adapted, augmented, and translated into Arabic by the scholar and state official Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the second/eighth century. The stories are engaging, entertaining, and often funny, from “The Man Who Found a Treasure But Could Not Keep It,” to “The Raven Who Tried To Learn To Walk Like a Partridge” and “How the Wolf, the Raven, and the Jackal Destroyed the Camel.”

Kalīlah and Dimnah is a “mirror for princes,” a book meant to inculcate virtues and discernment in rulers and warn against flattery and deception. Many of the animals who populate the book represent ministers counseling kings, friends advising friends, or wives admonishing husbands. Throughout, Kalīlah and Dimnah offers insight into the moral lessons Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ wished to impart to rulers—and readers.

Love, Death, Fame: Poetry and Lore from the Emirati Oral Tradition

al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir (author), Marcel Kurpershoek (translator), David F. Elmer (foreword), Philip F. Kennedy (editor)

Poems and tales of a literary forefather of the United Arab Emirates.

Love, Death, Fame features the poetry of al-Māyidī ibn Ẓāhir, who has been embraced as the earliest poet in what would later become the United Arab Emirates. Although little is known about his life, he is the subject of a sizeable body of folk legend and is thought to have lived in the seventeenth century, in the area now called the Emirates. The tales included in Love, Death, Fame portray him as a witty, resourceful, scruffy poet, at times combative and at times kindhearted.

His poetry primarily features verses of wisdom and romance, with scenes of clouds and rain, desert migrations, seafaring, and pearl diving. Like Arabian Romantic and Arabian Satire, this collection is a prime example of Nabaṭī poetry, combining vernacular language of the Arabian Peninsula with archaic vocabulary and images dating to Arabic poetry’s very origins. Distinguished by Ibn Ẓāhir’s unique voice, Love, Death, Fame offers a glimpse of what life was like four centuries ago in the region that is now the UAE.

The Doctors’ Dinner Party

Ibn Buṭlān (author), Philip F. Kennedy (translator), Jeremy Farrell (translator), Emily Gowers (foreword), Shawkat M. Toorawa (editor)

A witty satire of the medical profession.

The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an eleventh-century satire in the form of a novella, set in a medical milieu. A young doctor from out of town is invited to dinner with a group of older medical men, whose conversation reveals their incompetence. Written by the accomplished physician Ibn Buṭlān, the work satirizes the hypocrisy of quack doctors while displaying Ibn Buṭlān’s own deep technical knowledge of medical practice, including surgery, blood-letting, and medicines. He also makes reference to the great thinkers and physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates, Galen, and Socrates.

Combining literary parody with social satire, the book is richly textured and carefully organized: in addition to the use of the question-and-answer format associated with technical literature, it is replete with verse and subtexts that hint at the infatuation of the elderly practitioners with their young guest. The Doctors’ Dinner Party is an entertaining read in which the author skewers the pretensions of the physicians around the table.

Fate the Hunter: Early Arabic Hunting Poems

James E. Montgomery (translator), Alice Oswald (foreword), Richard Sieburth (editor)

A rich anthology of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry on the beauties and perils of the hunt.

In the poems of Fate the Hunter, many of them translated into English for the first time, trained cheetahs chase oryx, and goshawks glare from falconers’ arms, while archers stalk their prey across the desert plains and mountain ravines of the Arabian peninsula. With this collection, James E. Montgomery, acclaimed translator of War Songs by ʿAntarah ibn Shaddād, offers a new edition and translation of twenty-six early works of hunting poetry, or ṭardiyyāt. Included here are poems by pre-Islamic poets such as Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Shanfarā, as well as poets from the Umayyad era such as al-Shamardal ibn Sharīk. The volume concludes with the earliest extant epistle about hunting, written by ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib, a master of Arabic prose.

Through the eyes of the poet, the hunter’s pursuit of the quarry mirrors Fate’s pursuit of both humans and nonhumans and highlights the ambiguity of the encounter. With breathtaking descriptions of falcons, gazelles, and saluki gazehounds, the poems in Fate the Hunter capture the drama and tension of the hunt while offering meditations on Fate, mortality, and death.

The Guardian of the Hills: Devata Culture and Living Shamanism in the Western Himalaya (Shimla Hills)

G.C. Chauhan and Malvika Chauhan

The Guardian of the Hills: Devata Culture and Living Shamanism in the Western Himalaya (Shimla Hills) examines the enduring significance of Devata culture and shamanistic traditions in the religious and social life of the Shimla Hills. Situating these traditions within the wider context of indigenous religious practices, the book explores a world in which deities, ritual specialists, and local communities remain closely intertwined, and religious belief continues to shape social customs, cultural traditions, and moral life.

At the heart of the study is a challenge to the view that the Devi-Devatas of the Shimla Hills are merely local Hindu gods or figures of regional folklore. The authors argue that these deities are better understood as territorial sovereigns: guardians, judges, and final authorities within their respective domains. Their authority is embedded in the social and territorial organisation of local communities and historically connected with land and structures of administration. Devata culture thus emerges not simply as a body of belief, but as a living institution of authority and governance.

Through an examination of the localisation of deities, rituals of worship, shamanistic practices, and the role of the gur or mali as a medium of divine communication, the book reveals the complex relationship between sacred authority and everyday social life. It presents the Devata tradition not as a relic of the past, but as a living religious and social institution through which faith, authority, community, and regional identity continue to intersect in the Western Himalaya.

Chinese Calcuttawallah: Articulating a Diaspora Ethnic Identity in India

Kunaljeet Roy and Sukla Basu

Offers a comprehensive ethno-spatial study of the unique Chinatown landscapes of Kolkata.

• Harnesses cartographic and archival records which depict the multi-cultural landscape formation in Kolkata.
• Examines how the Chinatown landscapes of Kolkata relate to diaspora identity and place-making.
• Adopts visual ethnographic ‘streetscape’ and cognitive ‘emotional’ cartographic research techniques to depict the everyday geography of the ‘twin Chinatowns’.
• (Re)Connects to transnational ‘hybrid’ identity-making spaces and rebuilds cultural ties for the ‘Chinese Calcuttawallah’.

By examining the everyday geographies of ethnic identity, place-making and cultural landscape transformations, as well as tracing the root of the Chinese community’s origin through cartographic and archival records, this book depicts multi-cultural landscape formation in Kolkata (Calcutta). The authors capture how Kolkata’s vibrant Chinese community has uniquely shaped the ‘twin Chinatowns’ amidst the city’s diverse urban tapestry and gradually modified the adjacent cultural landscape towards a ‘little China’. As these neighbourhoods encounter modern challenges of gentrification and global connectivity, the book explores the ways in which the community, particularly its youth, navigates the complexities of maintaining a transnational identity while being deeply rooted in the local cultural milieu. From the continuous ebb and flow of migration to the fostering of hybrid identities, this analysis examines how these transformations impact community cohesion and cultural heritage.

Featuring poignant individual case studies from Indian-Chinese respondents, the book examines issues such as identity, preservation efforts and the effects of socio-economic changes. Research techniques like adopting visual ethnographic ‘streetscape’ and cognitive ‘emotional’ cartography depict the everyday geography of the ‘twin Chinatowns’, illustrating how these communities claim their spaces and build connections on a global scale. Kunaljeet Roy and Sukla Basu reconnect with the essence of Kolkata’s Chinese community and showcase how they navigate the challenges of a globalised world while holding onto the threads of heritage that define them as a ‘Chinese Calcuttawallah’.

Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI

David Eliot

Artificially Intelligent places humans at the center of AI’s story, making a compelling case for the role we have yet to play in technology’s transformation of our world.

The story of AI is still unfolding. The question is: how will you be part of it?

With the unprecedented adoption of artificial intelligence and its far-reaching implications, people everywhere are witnessing the world change around them. Artificially Intelligent answers today’s most pressing questions about AI – from the fundamental to the futuristic – offering readers a new, informed worldview.

In an age of unparalleled innovation and change, artificial intelligence has become the heart of our fears, discussions, and debates. Thus, AI researcher and award-winner David Eliot takes readers on a journey through the key moments and decisions that have shaped its creation and our world. A socially driven history, the book explores AI’s technical breakthroughs and the social forces that made them possible.

But this book isn’t just about the past – it’s about you. Artificially Intelligent invites readers to find their place in the story of AI, to understand its impact on their lives, and to decide what kind of future they want to help create.

Artificially Intelligent tells the story of the technology the way it was meant to be told: not as an exhaustive retelling of history, nor as a prophecy of doom and gloom, but as a human story that is not yet complete.

Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean

Nile Green (editor)

The most comprehensive anthology of primary sources on Sri Lanka’s links with the Islamic world ever assembled in English.

Sri Lanka is an underappreciated focal point of global history. Known to Persian and Arab traders as Serendib, the island has long been a site of intensive cultural and material exchange, as well as a holy place—Islamic tradition holds that the biblical Adam arrived there after his expulsion from Eden. Assembling centuries of texts, this volume presents an array of sources from the Indian Ocean.

Serendipitous Translations gathers travelogues, literary works, commercial records, inscriptions, religious tracts, pilgrim manuals, and more—an unprecedented range of Muslim voices from Sri Lanka between the 1200s and 1990s. These works vividly document medieval pilgrimages, maritime mysticism, diplomatic encounters, colonial-era commerce, and the bustling everyday affairs of a cosmopolitan Asian nexus. Expert translations bring Arabic, Malay, Turkish, Urdu, Dhivehi, Sinhala, Arabic-Tamil, and Tamil texts to readers of English for the first time. Editor Nile Green situates these texts in their Indian Ocean contexts by introducing the broad sweep of Sri Lanka’s story. An invaluable collection, Serendipitous Translations is the most comprehensive anthology of primary sources ever assembled on Sri Lanka’s thousand-year links to the Muslim world.

Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy

Shiben Banerji

The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.

War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity’s fundamental unity and common fate.

Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period's most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects.

2026 PROSE Award in Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers (AAP).

The Palace of Echoes

Vikarn Chowdhary

When Vidya, a young mathematics teacher from Delhi, receives an unexpected marriage proposal from Raja Rajendra Singh of Weir, she leaves behind everything she has ever known for the fading grandeur of an ancient Rajput haveli. But behind its regal façade lies a family haunted by loss, bound by silence, and guarding secrets that were never meant to be uncovered.

As Vidya begins her new life as the new queen of Weir, she finds herself drawn into a mystery that reaches far beyond the walls of the haveli. A forgotten wing remains locked, whispers linger in deserted corridors, and every answer seems to unravel another question. The deeper she ventures into Weir’s past, the more she realises that the greatest danger lies not in what has been hidden, but in why it was hidden in the first place.

Set against the twilight of India’s princely era, The Palace of Echoes is a haunting historical mystery woven with love, betrayal, and long-buried truths. It is a story of forgotten lives, impossible choices, and secrets that echo across generations, where every locked door promises a revelation and the past refuses to remain buried.

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (hardcover)

Alan Mikhail

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.

Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520).

Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. With personal charisma and military prowess—as well as the guidance of his remarkably gifted mother, Gülbahar—Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim—known by his subjects as “God’s Shadow on Earth”—fostered religious diversity, welcoming Jews among other minority populations into the empire; encouraged learning and philosophy; and penned his own verse.

Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail’s game-changing account “challenges readers to recalibrate their sense of history” (Leslie Peirce), adroitly using Selim’s life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories that have held sway for decades. Whether recasting Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the “Americas” as a bumbling attempt to slay Muslims or showing how the Ottomans allowed slaves to become the elite of society while Christian states at the very same time waged the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, God’s Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the history of the modern world.

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (paperback)

Alan Mikhail

Long neglected in world history, the Ottoman Empire was a hub of intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the height of their authority in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans, with extraordinary military dominance and unparalleled monopolies over trade routes, controlled more territory and ruled over more people than any world power, forcing Europeans out of the Mediterranean and to the New World.

Yet, despite its towering influence and centrality to the rise of our modern world, the Ottoman Empire’s history has for centuries been distorted, misrepresented, and even suppressed in the West. Now Alan Mikhail presents a vitally needed recasting of Ottoman history, retelling the story of the Ottoman conquest of the world through the dramatic biography of Sultan Selim I (1470–1520).

Born to a concubine, and the fourth of his sultan father’s ten sons, Selim was never meant to inherit the throne. With personal charisma and military prowess—as well as the guidance of his remarkably gifted mother, Gülbahar—Selim claimed power over the empire in 1512 and, through ruthless ambition, nearly tripled the territory under Ottoman control, building a governing structure that lasted into the twentieth century. At the same time, Selim—known by his subjects as “God’s Shadow on Earth”—fostered religious diversity, welcoming Jews among other minority populations into the empire; encouraged learning and philosophy; and penned his own verse.

Drawing on previously unexamined sources from multiple languages, and with original maps and stunning illustrations, Mikhail’s game-changing account “challenges readers to recalibrate their sense of history” (Leslie Peirce), adroitly using Selim’s life to upend prevailing shibboleths about Islamic history and jingoistic “rise of the West” theories that have held sway for decades. Whether recasting Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the “Americas” as a bumbling attempt to slay Muslims or showing how the Ottomans allowed slaves to become the elite of society while Christian states at the very same time waged the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, God’s Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of the importance of Selim’s Ottoman Empire in the history of the modern world.

The Discovery of Insulin: Special Centenary Edition

Michael Bliss (author), Alison Li (foreword)

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921–2 was one of the most dramatic events in the history of the treatment of disease. Insulin, discovered by the Canadian research team of Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, and John Macleod, was a wonder drug with the ability to bring diabetes patients back from the brink of death. It was no surprise that in 1923 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded for its discovery.

In this engaging and award-winning account, historian Michael Bliss draws on archival records and personal adventures to recount the fascinating story behind the discovery of insulin – a story as much filled with fiery confrontation and intense competition as medical dedication and scientific genius.

With a new preface by Michael Bliss and a new foreword by Alison Li, the special centenary edition of The Discovery of Insulin honours the one hundredth anniversary of insulin’s discovery and its continued significance a century later.

Life of the Buddha

James Scarth Gale (translator), Hyangsoon Yi (editor)

Composed in vernacular Korean by Powŏl, P’alsangnok, or Record of the Eight Marks, is an influential pre-modern fictional biography of the Buddha that chronicles the life of Śākyamuni through eight transformative stages, from his celestial origins to his final moments.

Life of the Buddha illuminates the rich tapestry of Chosŏn Buddhism as translated by Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale in 1915. With nearly four decades of immersion in Korean culture, Gale’s expertise ensures that this translation retains the essence of the original, while highlighting unique local teachings alongside the broader Buddhist biographical tradition. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to P’alsangnok and compiles an extensive list of Buddha biographies published in European languages from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, aiming to evaluate Gale’s impact on the discursive formation of Buddhism in the West.

Edited by Hyangsoon Yi, this groundbreaking volume examines the dynamic interplay between popular Buddhist practice and literature during the Chosŏn era, offering a vital opportunity to explore intercultural and interreligious dialogues and the enduring relevance of Buddhist teachings.

Onscreen/Offscreen

Constantine V. Nakassis

Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, Onscreen/Offscreen is an exploration of the politics and being of filmic images. The book examines contestations inside and outside the Tamil film industry over the question “what is an image?” Answers to this question may be found in the ontological politics that take place on film sets, in theatre halls, and in the social fabric of everyday life in South India, from populist electoral politics and the gendering of social space to caste uplift and domination.

Bridging and synthesizing linguistic anthropology, film studies, visual studies, and media anthropology, Onscreen/Offscreen rethinks key issues across a number of fields concerned with the semiotic constitution of social life, from the performativity and ontology of images to questions of spectatorship, realism, and presence. In doing so, it offers both a challenge to any approach that would separate image from social context and a new vision for linguistic anthropology beyond the question of “language.”

The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (hardcover)

Tulasi Srinivas

In The Goddess in the Mirror, Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty parlors in Bangalore. Exploring the gendered world of beauty in the intimate spaces of the salon, whose popularity has exploded amid an urban tech revolution, Srinivas invites readers to consider what beauty is and what it does. Visiting diverse salons that cater to various classes, castes, and queer sexualities, she tracks the relationships between clients and workers, revealing the beauty industry’s painful political, religious, and economic stakes. Embodiment, religion, and narrative intersect as clients and beauticians tell well-known stories of beautiful Hindu goddesses, heroines, queens, and apsaras, thereby weaving their own ethical subjectivities every day. Following the goddess’s allure, radiance, woundedness, fluidity, and fertility, Srinivas situates ideas of beauty within a larger moral and political context where beauty is both a fleeting pursuit and a rich resource for navigating a patriarchal present.

The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (paperback)

Tulasi Srinivas

Economic Dimensions of Buddhism in Early India: From 6th Century BCE to 7th Century CE

G.C. Chauhan and Gurbinder (authors), N. Shaik Masthan (foreword)

Economic Dimensions of Buddhism in Early India: From 6th Century BCE to 7th Century CE offers a critical examination of the relationship between Buddhism and economic structures in early India. It analyzes the role of Buddhist monasteries and institutions in shaping economic activities such as trade, agriculture, and artisanal production.

The study further investigates the Buddhist Sangha as an economic institution, with particular attention to its engagement in landholding, credit systems, and other financial practices. It also explores the extent to which Buddhist ethical principles, especially non-attachment and simplicity, informed economic behaviour and thought.

By tracing patterns of continuity and change, the book situates economic developments within a broader socio-cultural context, raising important questions regarding the material foundations of ancient Indian Buddhism.

Déjà Viewed: Nation, Gender, and Genre in Bollywood Remakes of Hollywood Cinema

Gohar Siddiqui

Situates the remake as one of the primary responses to Bollywood’s globalization and corporatization.

Focused on post-1990 Bollywood remakes of Hollywood films, Déjà Viewed tells a larger story of the rapidly changing Indian film industry in the wake of globalization and corporatization. It situates the remake as a gendered response to these changes, drawing on approaches from film theory, gender studies, and cultural studies. The book looks at films from a variety of genres and modes, including the Bollywood family film, romantic comedy, noir, and melodrama, and each film’s close analysis is accompanied by attention to concerns related to remake theory, such as homage, anxiety of influence, defamiliarization, and pastiche. Seeking to historicize how gender and genres become translated and transformed in the Bollywood remake, the book contributes to transnational understandings of gender and genre as media texts move across various borders—geographic, cinematic, economic, and aesthetic.

Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices

Amy L. Allocco and Xenia Zeiler (editors)

Explores how these two currents are shaping the contours of contemporary Hindu worship, myth, and visual and material culture in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas.

This volume focuses on two alternately converging and diverging currents that increasingly shape Hindu traditions—namely, sweetening and intensification. Sweetening is understood here to include the softening of deities’ iconographies, the standardization of religious narratives, and the sanitization of ritual practices. Alongside this current exists intensification, which is understood as an insistence on the continuing relevance of rigorous, visceral, and frequently stigmatized practices and beliefs, often in response to new circumstances and challenges. This volume emphasizes an inclusive approach by bringing these two currents into sustained conversation. As Hindu traditions are increasingly expanding into new settings, including but not limited to new diaspora and new media contexts, the long-established yet ever changing scale of sweet/neutral/spicy unfolds in new ways, as well. The essays in this volume delineate these developments across diverse Hindu geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and social contexts; textual and theological traditions; and ritual and media formats. Indeed, the volume’s multidisciplinary approach shows how these processes intersect with and even drive contemporary (re)negotiations, (re)interpretations, and (re)constructions of Hindu deities, practices, narratives, and symbols.

Yoga and Phenomenology on Consciousness

Giulia Moiraghi

Brings yogic traditions into dialogue with current philosophical and scientific research on consciousness.

In this book, philosopher and yoga practitioner Giulia Moiraghi brings yoga into dialogue with current debates on consciousness in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. The book explores embodiment’s role in revealing a typically overlooked dimension of consciousness: the horizon consciousness. Bringing major thinkers in phenomenology together with the classical texts of yogic traditions, as well as the author’s own firsthand experience, the book argues that yoga, across all the centuries and in its diversity of practices, points toward a common core that should not be left to an archaeological domain of study but should be integrated into ongoing philosophical research on consciousness. By helping the reader understand the relevance of key phenomenological concepts to the practice and actualization of yoga, the book provides a concise and agile tool for general practitioners in the contemplative field and for scholars in consciousness studies, Indian studies, philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Compact Atlas of Global Christianity

Kenneth R. Ross, Gina A. Zurlo, and Todd M. Johnson (editors)

Combining empirical data, thematic maps, innovative graphs and original analysis, this volume offers a uniquely detailed visual and textual account of Global Christianity.

Building on the success of Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross’s highly acclaimed Atlas of Global Christianity, this volume is the tenth in a series of reference works that takes the analysis of worldwide Christianity to a deeper level of detail.

This volume focuses on Global Christianity, offering reliable demographic information, thematic maps, innovative graphs and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners. It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends. As a comprehensive account of the presence of Christianity in every part of the world, this volume will become a standard work of reference in its field.

Key features:

• Profiles of Christianity in every part of the world, coupled with attractive presentations of statistical and demographic information.
• Cutting-edge maps and innovative graphs, with detailed explanations of the significance of changes over time.
• Analyses of leading features and current trends in regard to Christianity worldwide, written by scholars with expertise in global Christianity, with a majority from the Global South.
• Essays examining each of the major Christian traditions as they are finding expression globally.
• Essays assessing the direction of Christian faith in global terms in relation to such key themes as faith and culture, worship and spirituality, theology, social and political engagement, mission and evangelism, religious freedom, gender, inter-religious relations, migration, and climate change.

Christianity in South and Central Asia

Kenneth R. Ross, Daniel Jeyaraj, and Todd M. Johnson (editors)

Combines empirical data and original analysis in a uniquely detailed account of Christianity in South and Central Asia.

This comprehensive reference volume covers every country in South and Central Asia, offering reliable demographic information and original interpretative essays by indigenous scholars and practitioners. It maps patterns of growth and decline, assesses major traditions and movements, analyses key themes and examines current trends.

Key Features:

• Profiles of Christianity in every country in South and Central Asia including clearly presented statistical and demographic information.
• Analyses of leading features and current trends written by indigenous scholars.
• Essays examining each of the major Christian traditions (Independents, Orthodox, United Churches, Protestants/Anglicans, Catholics, Evangelicals, Pentecostals/Charismatics) as they are finding expression in South and Central Asia.
• Essays explore key themes such as faith and culture, worship and spirituality, theology, social and political engagement, mission and evangelism, religious freedom, gender, inter-faith relations, monastic movements and spirituality, displaced populations, and ecclesiology.

Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660

A Journey of Institutionalized Scientific Music Research in India: From Sir C.V. Raman till date

A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years

Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice

Love, Death, Fame: Poetry and Lore from the Emirati Oral Tradition

The Doctors’ Dinner Party

Fate the Hunter: Early Arabic Hunting Poems

The Guardian of the Hills: Devata Culture and Living Shamanism in the Western Himalaya (Shimla Hills)

Chinese Calcuttawallah: Articulating a Diaspora Ethnic Identity in India

Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI

Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean

Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy

The Palace of Echoes

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (hardcover)

God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World (paperback)

The Discovery of Insulin: Special Centenary Edition

Life of the Buddha

Onscreen/Offscreen

The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (hardcover)

The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (paperback)

Economic Dimensions of Buddhism in Early India: From 6th Century BCE to 7th Century CE

Déjà Viewed: Nation, Gender, and Genre in Bollywood Remakes of Hollywood Cinema

Sweetening and Intensification: Currents Shaping Hindu Practices

Yoga and Phenomenology on Consciousness

Compact Atlas of Global Christianity

Christianity in South and Central Asia

::RECENT RELEASES

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Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, ...

A Journey of Institutionalized Scientific Music Research in India: From Sir C.V. ...

A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of ...

Kalīlah and Dimnah: Fables of Virtue and Vice

Love, Death, Fame: Poetry and Lore from the Emirati Oral Tradition

The Doctors’ Dinner Party

Fate the Hunter: Early Arabic Hunting Poems

The Guardian of the Hills: Devata Culture and Living Shamanism in the ...

Chinese Calcuttawallah: Articulating a Diaspora Ethnic Identity in India

Artificially Intelligent: The Very Human Story of AI

Serendipitous Translations: A Sourcebook on Sri Lanka in the Islamic Indian Ocean ...

Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy ...

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