Author: Catherine B. Asher
Cynthia Talbot/
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2011
Language: English
Pages: 313
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780521517508
Description
India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was ever the case, and at no time more so than in the India that existed from 1200 to 1750, before the European intervention.
In this absorbing and richly illustrated book, the authors take the reader on a journey across the political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes of medieval India from the Ghurid conquests and the Delhi Sultanate, through the rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara, to the peripheries of empire, and finally, to the great court of the Mughals.
This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a culture, an architecture, and a tradition which was uniquely their own and which still resonates in today’s India. As the first survey of its kind in over a decade, the book is a tour de force. It is fluently composed, with a cast of characters which will educate and entertain students and general readers alike.
Contents
List of illustrations
List of maps
Preface
Glossary
Place names: alternative spellings
Introduction: situating India
The expansion of Turkic power, 1180-1350
Southern India in the age of Vijayanagara, 1350-1550
North India between empires: history, society and culture, 1350-1550
Sixteenth-century north India: empire reformulated
Expanding political and economic spheres, 1550-1650
Elite cultures in seventeenth – century South Asia
Challenging central authority, 1650-1750
Changing socio-economic formations, 1650-1750
Epilogue
Biographical notes
Bibliography
Index