Exploring India\'s Medieval Centuries : Essays in History, Society, Culture and Technology

Contents: Preface. I. The intellectual and cultural milieu: 1. Time in Abu\'l Fazl\'s historiography. 2. Time in India\'s religions and history. 3. \'Medieval India\': an alien conceptual hegemony? 4. The celebration of failure as dissent in Urdu Ghazal. 5. Communalism and the writing of medieval Indian history: a reappraisal. 6. The Ram Janmabhoomi-Babari Masjid dispute: evidence of medieval sources. 7. The ideology of the Bhakti Movement: the case of Dadu Dayal. 8. Marx on Pre-Colonial India: an evaluation. II. Economy and society: 9. Was there Feudalism in Indian history? 10. Peasant production and medieval Indian society. 11. Illegal extortions from peasants, artisans and menials in eighteenth century Eastern Rajasthan. 12. The Risala-i Zirat [A treatise on agriculture]. III. Technology: 13. Agricultural technology in Medieval North India. 14. Social resistance to superior technology: The filature in eighteenth-century Bengal.

"The fourteen essays comprising this anthology were written over a long stretch of time. They followed the author\'s developing academic interests in the footsteps of the rapidly evolving contours of the discipline of history itself in the second half of the twentieth century from dead certitudes to delicious ambiguities. The major chunk of the volume centres on the creation and circulation of ideas of ground level as much as at the highest echelons of court society. Other essays engage with questions of economy, society and technology. These are all in the nature of explorations, just as all historiographical endeavours are, in the end. All of these have been published earlier; some date from the 1970\'s others still in press. Many had appeared in a book over a decade and a half ago, but now unavailable, a major reason for the making of this anthology." (jacket)