Skip to main content

from the author of ANCIENT INDIA AND ANCIENT CHINA


Xinru Liu, editor
India and Central Asia
A Reader
Mouth of a water fountain at Ai Khanoum



Central Asia has been a strategic region in world history because of its central location in the Afro-Eurasian land mass, and because it was the hinge between several different ecological zones. From the border of the Iranian plateau to the edge of the Takla Makan desert, and from the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains to the Taiga zone of Siberia, Central Asia encompasses peoples who spoke many languages and practised various forms of livelihood. 

For historians who have been focused on individual civilizations, or the societies which have left written records, Central Asia has seemed an ocean full of dark energy.  From time to time, ‘barbaric’ nomads flew out from Central Asia to loot villages and destroy cities in East and South Asia, and even Europe. 

In recent decades, research on the lives of nomadic people on the steppe, archaeological excavations of urban settlements on oases along the Amu and Sir rivers, and the discovery of more Hellenistic remains have made scholars look at this region from a different perspective. Looking towards Central Asia from the Indian subcontinent shows that the dynamics in Central Asia were often the momentum for fundamental changes in history which brought new cultural elements to South Asia.

XINRU LIU has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches South Asia, Central Asia, and World History at the College of New Jersey, Ewing. She is also associated with the Institute of History and the Institute of World History, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her many publications include Ancient India and Ancient China (1988); Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People in A.D. 60 –1200 (1996); Connections Across Eurasia: Transportation, Communications, and Cultural Exchange on the Silk Roads (with Lynda Norene Shaffer; 2007); and The Silk Road in World History (2010).

Hardback / 344pp / Rs 795 / ISBN 81-7824-347-4 / World rights / 2012

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Romila Thapar remembers an old friend

A few weeks before he passed away, Eric Hobsbawm   and his wife invited Romila Thapar to the historian’s 95 th birthday party in London. John Williams played the guitar. The gathered companions drank to the great man’s health. He was convivial and had all his wits about him—as seems evident in the pictures below. A century seemed possible ... In her obituary below, Romila Thapar recounts what Hobsbawm’s work meant to her, and its intellectual legacy more broadly.        REMEMBERING ERIC HOBSBAWM             Romila Thapar Eric Hobsbawm was the kind of historian whose work, although largely on the last three centuries of European history, was relevant even to those of us who work on a different space and time. The process of historical investigation for him was not restricted to a narrow engagement with a specific subject, but with having to situate it in an extensive ...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE BOOK OF INDIAN ESSAYS

Indians have been writing prose for 200 years, and yet when we think of literary prose we think of the novel. The “essay”   brings only the school essay to mind. Those of us who read and write English in India might find it hard to name an essay even by someone like R.K. Narayan as easily as we would one of his novels, say Swami and Friends or The Guide . Our inability to recall essays is largely due to the strange paradox that while the form itself remains invisible, it is everywhere present. The paradox becomes even more strange when we realise that some of our finest writers of English prose  did not write novels at all, they wrote essays. The anthology is an attempt at making what has always been present also permanently visible. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra   • A collection of the finest essays written in English by Indians over the past two hundred years. • The Book of Indian Essays is a wide-ranging historical anthology of the Indian essay in E...
Post a Comment
Read more

THE GREAT AGRARIAN CONQUEST by NEELADRI BHATTACHARYA

BUY THE PAPERBACK       FROM THE REVIEWS   Review in SOCIAL HISTORY, USA by Benjamin Siegel The Great Agrarian Conquest represents a massive intervention into the contemporary historiography of South Asia, elaborating upon some conventional wisdom but upending a great deal more of it. Readers might well place this book in conversation with works like Ranajit Guha ’ s A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963) and Bernard Cohn ’ s Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (1997), to which The Great Agrarian Conquest owes some preliminary inspiration. Yet what Bhattacharya o ff ers is a wholly original account of the transformation to agrarian colonialism . . .   Few volumes in South Asian history have been more awaited than this monograph, Neeladri Bhattacharya ’ s fi rst. One of the most celebrated mentors and researchers at New Delhi ’ s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Bhattacharya retired in 2017 after a decades-long career. His formal scholarl...
Post a Comment
Read more