For more than fifty years, students and teachers have made the two-volume resource Sources of Indian Traditions their top pick for an accessible yet thorough introduction to Indian and South Asian civilizations. Volume 2 contains an essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today. It details the advent of the East India Company, British colonization, the struggle for liberation, the partition of 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and contemporary India. This third edition now begins earlier than the first and second, featuring a new chapter on eighteenth-century intellectual and religious trends that set the stage for India's modern development. The editors have added material on Gandhi and his reception both nationally and abroad and include different perspectives on and approaches to Partition and its aftermath. They expand their portrait of post-1947 India and Pakistan and add perspectives on Bangladesh. The collection continues to be divided thematically, with a section devoted to the drafting of the Indian constitution, the rise of nationalism, the influence of Western thought, the conflict in Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, minority religions, secularism, and the role of the Indian political left. A phenomenal text, Sources of Indian Traditions is more indispensable than ever for courses in philosophy, religion, literature, and intellectual and cultural history.

Sources of Indian Tradition is an indispensable and essential selection of primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious history of India from the decline of Mughal rule in the eighteenth century to today. It details the advent of the East India Company, British colonization, the struggle for liberation, the partition of 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and contemporary India. Divided thematically, it begins with a chapter on eighteenth-century intellectual and religious trends that set the stage for India’s modern development. Nineteenth-century debates over social reform, featuring the leaders of reform and revival movements, follow. Chapters on Gandhi and his reception both nationally and abroad, and different perspectives on and approaches to partition, precede a section devoted to the drafting of the Indian constitution, the rise of nationalism, the influence of Western thought, the conflict in Kashmir, nuclear proliferation, minority religions, secularism, and the role of the Indian political left. The last two sections portray Pakistan and its struggle for national identity, and Bangladesh and the controversies over the fruits of freedom.

-- Wendy Doniger, University of Chcago

Since 1958 Sources Of Indian Tradition Has Been One Of The Most Important And Widely Used Texts On Civilization In South Asia (Now The Nation-States Of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, And Nepal). It Has Helped Generations Of Students And Lay Readers Understand How Leading Thinkers There Have Looked At Life, The Traditions Of Their Ancestors, And The World They Lived In. This Second Edition Has Been Extensively Revised, With Much New Material Added. Introductory Essays Explain The Particular Setting In Which These Thinkers Have Expressed Their Ideas About Religious, Social, Political, And Economic Questions. Brief Summaries Precede Each Passage From Their Writings Or Sayings. Chapters Address Such Topics As The Opening Of India To The West; Hindu And Muslim Social And Religious Reform Movements; The Emergence Of Both Moderate And Extremist Nationalisms; The Thought Of Mahatma Gandhi; Public Policies For Independent India; And Pakistan S Formation As An Islamic State. The Book Includes A Chronology Of The Subcontinent S History From 1498 To 1984.

What India’s founders derived from Western political traditions as they struggled to free their country from colonial rule is widely understood. Less well-known is how India’s own rich knowledge traditions of two and a half thousand years influenced these men as they set about constructing a nation in the wake of the Raj. In Righteous Republic, Ananya Vajpeyi furnishes this missing account, a ground-breaking assessment of modern Indian political thought. Taking five of the most important founding figures—Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B. R. Ambedkar—Vajpeyi looks at how each of them turned to classical texts in order to fashion an original sense of Indian selfhood. The diverse sources in which these leaders and thinkers immersed themselves included Buddhist literature, the Bhagavad Gita, Sanskrit poetry, the edicts of Emperor Ashoka, and the artistic and architectural achievements of the Mughal Empire. India’s founders went to these sources not to recuperate old philosophical frameworks but to invent new ones. In Righteous Republic, a portrait emerges of a group of innovative, synthetic, and cosmopolitan thinkers who succeeded in braiding together two Indian knowledge traditions, the one political and concerned with social questions, the other religious and oriented toward transcendence. Within their vast intellectual, aesthetic, and moral inheritance, the founders searched for different aspects of the self that would allow India to come into its own as a modern nation-state. The new republic they envisaged would embody both India’s struggle for sovereignty and its quest for the self.

This new text is a detailed study of an important process in modern Indian history. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, India experienced an intellectual renaissance, which owed as much to the influx of new ideas from the West as to traditional religious and cultural insights. Gosling examines the effects of the introduction of Western science into India, and the relationship between Indian traditions of thought and secular Western scientific doctrine. He charts the early development of science in India, its role in the secularization of Indian society, and the subsequent reassertion, adaptation and rejection of traditional modes of thought. The beliefs of key Indian scientists, including Jagadish Chandra Bose, P.C. Roy and S.N. Bose are explored and the book goes on to reflect upon how individual scientists could still accept particular religious beliefs such as reincarnation, cosmology, miracles and prayer. Science and the Indian Tradition gives an in-depth assessment of results of the introduction of Western science into India, and will be of interest to scholars of Indian history and those interested in the interaction between Western and Indian traditions of intellectual thought.