Conclusion

The Conclusion examines the conception of the body in medieval India. This body was vulnerable to demons and reliant on deities for its continued existence. For the Tantric practitioner, the divinized body is part of a psychophysical organism. The protective rites of the Netra Tantra reveal that the name of an individual overcome with illness works as a ritual substitute for that person. This is not to say that the physical body of the person is not important. The body is central to ritual practice. When the mantrin places the mantra upon the body (nyāsa), he creates a Tantric body that itself becomes a ritual tool. The body and the mantra become fused. This allows the mantra to heal the body.

Book review: Sabita Singh, The Politics of Marriage in Medieval India: Gender and Alliance in Rajasthan

Sabita Singh, The Politics of Marriage in Medieval India: Gender and Alliance in Rajasthan, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, xiii + 292 pp., ₹1,195, ISBN: 9780199491453.

Aesthetic Significance of Solah Shringar (Sixteen Ornaments) in Unani Medicine

Ancient people were as passionate about the aesthetics of appearance as are individuals of today. Physical appearance has consistently been an inseparable part of daily human growth, and most individuals prefer to be labelled as beautiful and handsome. The practice of ‘Solah Shringar’ comprises sixteen ways of adorning a woman's body in the Hindu as well as Muslim ceremonies in India. The description of Solah Shringar is commonly found in the writings of Hindi poets. Different poets and scholars have enlisted various cosmetics in their writings from time to time. In medieval India, the Solah Shringar was referred to the seven plus nine items in which seven were connoted as Haft Qalam Ārāyish along with other nine ornaments. These sixteen aesthetics have greater relevance with Unani therapeutics. This article is a sincere attempt to critically analyse the therapeutic and cosmetic importance of sixteen ornaments of medieval India in the light of Unani medicine.

Tolerance and Counter Narratives in Medieval India: A social phenomenon of Bengal Sultanate

The last mighty Tughlaq monarch Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq was preoccupied with various rebellions which ultimately led to the broke away of Bengal from the centric dominance of Delhi in 1338AD. Ilyas Khan, one of the noble of Delhi sultanate had ascended the throne of Bengal by capturing Lakhnauti and Sonargaon. In this period of study, we have two most remarkable phenomena – firstly, Bengal region secured its distinctiveness from the sway of Delhi Sultanate despite numerous inroads and skirmishes; secondly, the emergence of a divergent socio-cultural atmosphere. In fact, with the advent of this regime Bengal had been transformed into a new composite facet which had become a dynamic force towards the formation of Bengali heritage. However, one formulated narrative does not play the prime key role to impartially evaluate any theme of history, so that we must need proper appropriation. In this paper, therefore, I shall try to project my topic in both common and counter narrative about the socio-cultural repercussions of this age.

LX George Roerich Annual International Meeting (Ancient and Medieval India and Central Asia: Text and the Genesis of Notions and Meanings in Culture)

The article offers a review of the George Roerich Annual International Meeting, the conference dedicated to the memory of G. N. Roerich. Traditionally, there participate the scholars whose research interests correspond to the main areas of activity of George Roerich (russ.: Yurii Nikolaevich Rerikh 1902-1960), the outstanding scholar, artist and traveller. Most of the contributions are original studies on the little-studied areas of culture, philology, philosophy, and art of Tibet, India, and other countries associated with this area. Similarly to the last year, the contributions were united under a joint title “Text and the Genesis of Notions and Meanings in Culture”. While exploring the material of ancient and medieval authentic texts, the speakers dealt with a variety of theoretical problems related to the formation of culture and the specific features of the generation, translation and functioning of the text.

China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia

Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.

Agro-Pastoralism, Archaeology and Religious Landscapes in Early Medieval South India

Agro-pastoralism has been an important economic subsistence among diverse communities in the semi-arid climate and dry-deciduous ecology of the Deccan for the last four millennia. Recent research that looks at the entanglements of human-animal-environment relations in South Asian archaeology and history have highlighted the complex histories that prompt a reconsideration of the contexts within which political authority articulated in medieval India. This essay demonstrates the presence of non-elite agro-pastoral groups based on the evidence from my archaeological survey. I then present results from a limited study the Early Chalukya inscriptions to identify agro-pastoral activities. In addition, I employ limited architectural and iconographic analysis and argue that the non-Brahmanical religious affiliations of pastoral groups played a role in shaping the political and sacred landscapes of the Early Chalukya polity (ca. 550–750 ad) in the Deccan plateau of South India. A related aim in this essay is to highlight the productive engagement of archaeological investigations with ‘conventional’ history research. I suggest that the medieval period of Indian archaeology is a potent arena for such interdisciplinary research.

State Failure and Successful Leadership in Medieval India

State failure has been an enduring topic in the history of political thought. This article will revisit modern debates on the characteristics of state failure and the factors conducive to successful leadership by focusing on political ideas that evolved in fourteenth-century India. I will discuss two works with the same title, i.e., Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī ( The History of Fīrūz Shāh) of the distinguished historians of the Delhi Sultanate period Ziyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 1285–1357) and Shams Sirāj ‘Afīf (d. 1399) about Sultans Muḥammad b. Tughluq and (his successor) Fīrūz Shāh as instantiations of state failure and good governance, respectively. The deployment of the concept of state failure has often been construed as an effort to impose a political straitjacket; the examination of authors like Baranī and ‘Afīf demonstrates the value of reflecting on lessons from history and exploring how societies in the past evolved their own patterns of thinking about effective or failed leadership.