Transcending Boundaries: Premodern Cultural Transactions across Asia: Essays in Honour of Professor Osmund Bopearachchi

Contents: Introduction/Susmita Basu Majumdar. Part I: Archaeology, Material Remains and Archives. 1. Finding Forgotten Stories about the Harappan Civilization: Vignettes from the Archives/Nayanjot Lahiri. 2. Wine-making and Wine-drinking in Central Asia and Gandhara from the Bronze Age to Pre-Kushan Antiquity/Henri-Paul Francfort. 3. Giribawa in the Context of Glass Production and Maritime Exchanges in South Asia/Ariane De Saxce. Part II: Epigraphic and Numismatic Sources and Interpretative Histories. 4. Liako Kusulako and the Era of Maues/Harry Falk. 5. Berenike Brahmi Inscription Revisited/Susmita Basu Majumdar. 6. A Prosperous Hub in the Hinterland: Situating Junnar in the Early Historic Context/Smita Halder. 7. Seventeenth-century Pali Inscriptions from Wat Chaiwathanaram, Ayuthaya: The Sambuddhe Verses and Dependent Arising/Peter Skilling. 8. The Indo-Greek Gold Coinages: A New Heliocles II Specimen?/Olivier Bordeaux. 9. The Verehakale Hoard of Roman Coins/Michael Amandry. 10. About Collection of Lieutenant Alexander Burnes and some questions of Bactrian History/Kazim Abdullaev. 11. A So Strange Coinage: The Coins of the ‘Western Regions’ in the Chinese Texts of Han period/Francois Thierry. 12. Remarks on Lead-Tin Chinese Coins from the Tenth-Century Cirebon Shipwreck/Lyce Jankowski. 13. Interpreting Monetary History of Medieval Bengal: Some Issues Reflected through the Prism of Coin Hoards/Sutapa Sinha. Part III: Looking Through and Beyond the Texts. 14. Foreign Geographic Projections in Cosmas Indicopleustes/Federico Romanis. 15. Archaeology, History and the Poetic Imagination: Valmiki’s Ramayana as a Tale of Three Cities/Robert P. Goldman. 16. Demonic Demise: Demons, Dismemberment, and Decapitation in Valmiki’s Ramayana/Sally J. Sutherland Goldman. 17. Cultural Relations between Nagarjunakonda and Sri Lanka as Revealed in the Sihalavatthu/Nadeesha S. Gunawardana. 18. Five Weeks After: Post-Enlightenment in Xuanzang’s Record of the Western Regions/Max Deeg. 19. Situating Early Kashmir: Connected Histories in Kalhana’s Rajatarangini/Shonaleeka Kaul. Part IV: Art, Architecture and Beyond. 20. Seeking Survivals in Buddhist Art: Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Early Development/Janice Leoshko. 21. The Archery Competition of Siddharta and the Pre-Marital Ceremony in Gandharan Art: An Example of Shared Traditions in Buddhism and Indian Epics/Laura Giuliano. 22. Bodhisattvas or Deified Portraits in Gandharan Art? Some Thoughts/Vincent Lefevre. 23. From Gandhara to Kucha and Back Again: Identifications of Gandharan Reliefs/Means of Kuchean Iconography/Monika Zin. 24. Iconographical Remarks on the Mural Fragments from the Kizil Grottoes in the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum, Japan/Satomi Hiyama. 25. The Relationship between a Portrait of Prince Shotoku (c.573–622) and Tang Royal Murals: On the Materialist of the Cultural Identity of the Tang/Pei Ying Lin. 26. The Indian Elements of the Qingzhou Style of Buddha Images in China/Tianshu Zhu. 27. Morphing Icons: Radiant Icono text Paintings in Medieval Jodo Shin Buddhism/Mark L. Blum. 28. An Ancestral Skill: The Decorative Motifs of Sinjali Architecture (West Nepal)/David C. Andolfatto. 29. Embodying Prosperity: The Treasures Sankhanidhi and Padmanidhi’s Long Auspicious Journeying/John Guy. 30. Finding Fua Haribhitak (1910–1993), Thailand’s First National Artist, in Santiniketan, India: Discerning Methodology and Thickening Discourse/Yin Ker. Part V: Fusion and Diffusion: Religion with Special Focus on Buddhism. 31. On Pious Ladies and Merchants Making Money for Buddhist Monks: An Inscription and a Rule/Gregory Schopen. 32. Towards Identifying Bhiksunis in Gandhara/Ashwini Lakshminarayanan. 33. A Lost Copy of the Buddha’s Footprint/Donald Stadtner. 34. A Moveable Court: Itinerant Kingship, Royal Temples, and Buddhist Monasteries during the Kusana Era/Sanjyot Mehendele. 35. Bamiyan Buddhist Caves and Squinches/Shumpei Iwai. 36. A ‘Hindu Buddha’? Inclusive Propensities and Philosophical Difference/John Clifford Holt. 37. Early Tibetan Uses of the Manjusriyamulakalpa/Jacob P. Dalton. 38. Avalokitesvaro Visvarspi/Lauren M. Bausch. 39. Revisiting Asvaghosa’s Kavya: Innovations in Transmission of Buddhism/Nupur Dasgupta. 40. Fusion and Diffusion: Various Factors in the Images of the Buddhist Guardians of Khotan/Chen Suyu and Ruan Jinyi. 41. Moksa: When Moksa Does Not Mean Moksa/Patrick Olivelle. Part VI: History and Beyond. 42. India, History and Comparativism: The Case of the Dumezil’s Para-Vedic Theory/Guillaume Ducoeur. 43. On the Trail of the Yavanas/Upinder Singh. 44. Travellers and Travel ‘Rations’: Mapping Connections between Indo-Iranian Borderlands and Persepolis/Suchandra Ghosh. 45. Who Killed Eukratides the Great?/Frank L. Holt. 46. Social Transformation in a Micro Zone: A Case Study of the Pudukkottai Region/K. Rajan. 47. The Early Medieval Port of Balipattana in the Light of Maritime Epigraphy and the Documentary Geniza/Ranabir Chakravarti. 48. A Story about Wrong Viewers in a 1112 AD Shrine: What For?/Lilian Handlin. 49. Trans-Oceanic Exchanges: Towards a Connected History of India and Cambodia/Parul Pandya Dhar. 50. The Stronghold of the Nandana: History, Memory and Heritage/Muhammad Kashif Ali and Muhammad Hameed. 51. Blurred Lines: Mobility, Landscape and Space in Central Asia/Fiona Kidd. 52. A Study of the Probable Replication of the Sacred Landscape of Magadha in Western India/Manjiri Bhalerao. Index.

Transcending Boundaries: Premodern Cultural Transactions across Asia celebrates the scholarship of Osmund Bopearachchi, a pioneering scholar in the fields of art history and numismatics, whose work has impacted numerous other domains of history. Going beyond the traditional approach of cataloguing coins, Professor Bopearachchi has worked to link numismatics with sculptural and pictorial iconography. Across his decades-long career, he has transcended the boundaries of academic disciplines to carry out path-breaking research.

The chapters presented here consist of six themes related to Professor Bopearachchi’s diverse interests: archaeology, material remains and archives form the first segment; the second relates to epigraphic and numismatic sources and interpretative histories; the third deals with texts and their contexts; the fourth deals with art and architecture; the fifth is on religious studies with a special focus on Buddhism; and the final section deals with varied aspects of cultural history and beyond. Through these broadly interconnected themes, the volume transcends boundaries to reflect different aspects of cultural history and the changing vignettes of society in the premodern era based on a study of empirical sources, art historical material and texts.