This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

A ground breaking study of the long-neglected fifteenth century in South Asian history.

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The western state of Gujarat has been a hub of religious and trading activity from the eighth century onwards. The medieval history of Gujarat unlike other states in India is not very well known. The present book analyses the religious changes in early medieval Gujarat and examines the social context especially in reference to the rise of Brahmanism, Jainism and Buddhism and their support from the local kings and chieftains.

Gujarat lies at the confluence of communities, commerce, and cultures. As the modern Indian state of Gujarat marks its fiftieth year in 2010, this book charts its coalescence into a distinct political and linguistic unit roughly five hundred years ago. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, Gujarat's cosmopolitan coastline and productive hinterland were held together in a contested unity which nurtured the political integration of the region's pastoralists, peasants, soldiers and artisans, and the evolution of the Gujarati language. Forging a Region explores the creation of Gujarat's unified identity, culminating under a lineage of sultans who united eastern Gujarat and Saurashtra by military action and economic pragmatism in the fifteenth century. Delineating the evolution of the Gujarati political order alongside networks of trade and religion, Samira Sheikh examines how Gujarat's renowned entrepreneurial ethos and dominant discourses on pacifism, vegetarianism, and austerity coexisted, then as now, with a martial pastoralist order. She argues that the religious diversity of medieval Gujarat facilitated economic and political cooperation leading to its cosmopolitan ethos. Sifting through Persian, medieval Gujarati, and Sanskrit sources, Sheikh addresses the long-term history of communities and politics in Gujarat to provide an understanding of the past and present of the region.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 'Remarkable ... this brilliant book stands as an important monument to an almost forgotten world' William Dalrymple, Spectator A sweeping, magisterial new history of India from the middle ages to the arrival of the British The Indian subcontinent might seem a self-contained world. Protected by vast mountains and seas, it has created its own religions, philosophies and social systems. And yet this ancient land experienced prolonged and intense interaction with the peoples and cultures of East and Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa and, especially, Central Asia and the Iranian plateau between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries. Richard M. Eaton's wonderful new book tells this extraordinary story with relish and originality. His major theme is the rise of 'Persianate' culture - a many-faceted transregional world informed by a canon of texts that circulated through ever-widening networks across much of Asia. Introduced to India in the eleventh century by dynasties based in eastern Afghanistan, this culture would become thoroughly indigenized by the time of the great Mughals in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. This long-term process of cultural interaction and assimilation is reflected in India's language, literature, cuisine, attire, religion, styles of rulership and warfare, science, art, music, architecture, and more. The book brilliantly elaborates the complex encounter between India's Sanskrit culture - which continued to flourish and grow throughout this period - and Persian culture, which helped shape the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire and a host of regional states, and made India what it is today.