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  3. South Asian Intellectual History

This series focuses on South Asian texts and their translations, afterlives, and reinventions. It investigates South Asian canons and systems of knowledge and their social production, communication, performance, and circulation. Simultaneously, the series centre-stages intellectual production from the social and geographical margins of South Asia. Ultimately, the series brings to the fore transregional, transnational, and transcontinental intellectual exchanges linking the subcontinent to the wider world, and thus, to global intellectual history. We welcome submissions from across all historical epochs.

  • Editorial Boards: Asad Q. Ahmed, University of California, Berkeley, Milinda Banerjee, University of St Andrews, Scotland, Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi, Anshu Malhotra, University of California, Santa Barbara, Upinder Singh, Ashoka University, India

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3 results in South Asian Intellectual History

Democracy's Dhamma
  • Buddhism in the Making of Modern India, c. 1890–1956
  • Gitanjali Surendran
  • Published online:
    28 November 2024
    Print publication:
    02 January 2025
  • In 1956, B. R. Ambedkar publicly converted to Buddhism raising questions about his turn from constitutionalism to religion. The answer lies in Buddhism itself. In the late colonial era, the struggle to produce an appropriate Buddhism for a nation-in-the-making reveals a secret history foundational to modern India. Thinkers, activists, reformers, pilgrims, and monks from around South, Southeast and East Asia discussed universalism, nationalism, modernity, democracy, and caste radicalism and advocated an Indian return to Buddhism and the Buddha. This book traces this genealogy through the Buddhist itineraries and political projects of figures like Anagarika Dharmapala, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vinayak D. Savarkar, Rahul Sankrityayan and Ambedkar, to reveal how Buddhism emerged as democracy's dhamma, the religion of democracy.

The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought
  • Edited by Milinda Banerjee, Julian Strube
  • Published online:
    31 August 2024
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • The ancient Indian epic, Mahabharata, was first composed in Sanskrit and then rendered into Indian vernaculars and other Asian and European languages. This book demonstrates how the epic has shaped the birth of modern politics and thought across India, Europe, Japan, China, Thailand, Iran, and the Arab world. It draws on methodologies of global intellectual and religious history. The contributing authors are specialists on various world-regions. They reveal how kings and peasants, statesmen and revolutionaries, intellectuals, and activists, have invoked the epic to forge their political visions over the past centuries. The epic has thus contributed to state formation, nationalism, as well as the decolonization and democratization of the modern world. This book helps us understand the non-Eurocentric roots of modern political and social ideas, in India and across Asia and Europe. We thereby understand the global origins of contemporary politics, society, and democracy.

Local Selfhood, Global Turns
  • Akshay Kumar Dutta and Bengali Intellectual History in the Nineteenth Century
  • Sumit Chakrabarti
  • Published online:
    30 June 2023
    Print publication:
    27 June 2024
  • The book examines the works of Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886), who can be seen as ideologically inhabiting the cusp between religion and rationalism – the two most crucial avenues of debate and discussion in the public sphere in nineteenth-century Bengal. While nineteenth-century Bengal has been an important discourse within South Asian history, major figures of reform such as Rammohun Roy, Debendranath Tagore, Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, or Keshub Chunder Sen have generally been the focus. The book attempts to rescue Dutta from the clutches of academic amnesia, and to locate him as one of the foundational figures of intellectual refashioning among the common albeit educated public in nineteenth-century Bengal.