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Ancient India: Insights into Social & Economic Dynamics
G.C. Chauhan

Ancient India: Insights into Social & Economic Dynamics begins with a survey of Vākāṭakas epigraphy reflecting society and religion of Vākāṭakas. This book further discusses certain social and economic issues, and also deals with some important issues such as sea and sea-faring as reflecting in Ṛigveda and agrarian relations in early medieval India. Buddhist community: elements of social change, teacher-taught relationship as enshrined in Upaniṣads, and social organisation as reflected in Manusmṛiti. The sacred waters: rain’s significance in the Vedās and reflection of Satī in literary and epigraphical traditions are some of the major themes taken up. The contributors of this book reconstruct the social and economic dynamics in ancient India. Trends, changes and continuity are identified and socio-economic developments are seen in their interconnection. Lastly, the book addresses significant social issues in the history of ancient India.

Independent Kashmir: An Incomplete Aspiration
Christopher Snedden

Many disenchanted Kashmiris continue to demand independence or freedom from India. Written by a leading authority on Kashmir’s troubled past, this book revisits the topic of independence for the region (also known as Jammu and Kashmir, or J&K), and explores exactly why this aspiration has never been fulfilled. In a rare India-Pakistan agreement, they concur that neither J&K, nor any part of it, can be independent.

Charting a complex history and intense geo-political rivalry from Maharaja Hari Singh’s leadership in the mid-1920s to the present, this book offers an essential insight into the disputes that have shaped the region. As tensions continue to rise following government-imposed COVID-19 lockdowns, Snedden asks a vital question: what might independence look like and just how realistic is this aspiration?

The Road to Empire: The Political Education of Khalsa Sikhs in the Late 1600s
Satnam Singh

From the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century, the Sikh community transformed from a relatively insignificant religious minority to an elevated position of kingship and empire. Under the leadership of Guru Gobind Singh (1661–1708), Sikh elites and peasants began to align themselves with discourses of power and authority, and within a few decades Khalsa Sikh warriors conquered some of the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal and Afghan empires.

In this book, Satnam Singh argues that the Sikhs’ increasing selfassertion was not simply a reaction to Mughal persecution but also a result of an active program initiated by the Guru to pursue larger visions of scholarship, conquest, and political sovereignty. Using a vast trove of understudied court literature, Singh shows how Sikhs grappled with Indo-Islamic traditions to forge their own unique ideas of governance and kingship with the aim to establish an independent Sikh polity. The Road to Empire offers an impressive intellectual history of the early modern Sikh world.

The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition
Victor Kattan, Amit Ranjan (editors)

The Breakup of India and Palestine is the first study of political and legal thinking about the partitions of India and Palestine in 1947. The chapters in the volume, authored by leading scholars of partition, draw attention to the pathways of peoples, geographic spaces, colonial policies, laws, and institutions that connect them from the vantage point of those most engaged by the process: political actors, party activists, jurists, diplomats, philosophers, and international representatives from the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. Additionally, the volume investigates some of the underlying causes of partition in both places such as the hardening of religious fault-lines, majoritarian politics, and the failure to construct viable forms of government in deeply divided societies. It analyses why, even 75 years after partition, the two regions have not been able to address some of the pertinent historical, political and social debates of the colonial years.

Everyday Islamic Law and the Making of Modern South Asia
Elizabeth Lhost

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state’s authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system.

Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.