years and active assistance from graduate students, especially from Jeff
Brackett, who helped in the development of the text and with the glossary,
and Rob Phillips who provided feedback on the text, helped with the glos-
sary, and provided several of the photographs. Colleagues at the University
of Hyderabad served as ad hoc consultants for different portions of the
volume, especially historians Aloka Parasher Sen and R. L. Hangloo, and
members of the Folk Studies Center, especially M. K. Murty, P. Nagaraj,
and A. Anand. I am grateful to Dr. Richard Cohen and to a number of anony-
mous readers who offered helpful suggestions for revisions. Finally, several
persons deserve my gratitude for typing and preparing the draft for
publication, especially Cristina Lagnese who not only typed the final revi-
sions but also offered substantive suggestions along the way. To all these
people and many others who remain nameless, I am indebted. Of course,
no one but I should be blamed for the deficiencies that are bound to be
evident in a volume of this kind.
Certain of the maps and poetic excerpts have been reprinted in this
volume with the express permission of publishers in whose books they
previously appeared. I am pleased to acknowledge these permissions here:
The “Hymn to Purus.a” and an excerpt from the Milindapañhaare
reprinted from Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. I, edited by Ainslee T. Embree
with the permission of Columbia University Press.
Excerpts from the Chandogya Upanis.adVI and the Mundaka Upanis.adIII
are reprinted from Upanis.adstranslated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford World’s
Classics, 1998) by permission of Oxford University Press.
Poems by Namma ̄l
̄
va ̄r and by Ma ̄n.ikkava ̄cakar are reprinted from Hymns
for the Drowning: Poems for Vis.nu by Namma ̄l
̄
va ̄r, translated by A. K. Ramanujan,
courtesy of the publishers, Penguin Books India Private Ltd.
Poems of Kabı ̄r and Su ̄rdas are reprinted from Songs of the Saints of India,
edited by John Stratton Hawley, translated by John Stratton Hawley and M.
Juergensmeyer, copyright 1988 by Oxford University Press and used by
permission of Oxford University Press.
Four maps – those of As ́oka’s empire; the Gupta empire; India at the close
of the ninth century; and the Mughal empire at the Death of Akbar are
reprinted from A Cultural History of India, edited by A. L. Basham (London:
Clarendon Press, 1975) with the permission of Oxford University Press.
The map “European Bases in India” is reprinted from “Lectures in Indian
Civilization” edited by Joseph Elder (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing
Co., 1970) with the permission of Joseph Elder.
Preface xi