Medieval South Asia Research Articles

When Is Medicine?

Time was a problem in medieval South Asia. It was – among other things – a medical problem that philosophers and physicians set out to solve. The complexities of medical practice – which entailed considering an almost infinite set of variables and combinations – meant that no normal person could possibly derive the principles of medicine in a single lifetime. There was too much to know and too little time. This meant that medical practitioners had to rely on the words of other people to carry out their cures. Practicing medicine depended on trusting the proper authorities. This article follows the arguments of two philosophers employed in royal courts in the 9th century – Jayanta Bhaṭṭa and Ugrāditya – who constructed arguments about how to relate to the textualized past of medicine in Sanskrit. Both scholars accepted that the temporalities of knowledge necessitated that medicine was originally propounded by an omniscient individual. But they disagreed on who counted as an authority and on the value of the Sanskrit medical classics. The article uses these scholars to show the temporalities of medicine in pre-colonial South Asia as multiple, shifting and contested. Moving beyond binaries of historical and mythic time in colonial and pre-colonial South Asia, this article attends to the work of medieval scholars to explicate the multiple rhythms of time that existed side-by-side prior to the epistemic violence of colonialism and the rise of modern Ayurveda.

Islam and Sufism in South Asia

In his Lovers of God: Sufism and the Politics of Islam in Medieval India, Raziuddin Aquil studied the role of Sufis in preaching Islam in medieval South Asia. He saw the preaching of Islam in South Asia as a gradual process. Many Sufi orders preached Islam in South Asia from medieval times. Among these Sufi orders, the Chishtī order caught the attention of many scholars of Islamics. Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence also penned a highly acclaimed work Sufi Martyrs of Love: Chishti Sufism in South Asia and Beyond. While Aquil detailed various practices of the Chishtī order and Chishtī saints’ role in various socio-political events that took place in the Delhi Sultanate, Ernst and Lawrence elaborated on the origin, development, practices, and concepts of the Chishtī order. Unlike Aquil, Ernst and Lawrence continued describing the history of the Chishtī order up to the twenty-first century. The purpose of this review essay is to compare and assess these two works with the help of primary and secondary sources.

Mercenaries and private military corporations in ancient and early medieval South Asia

ABSTRACT In India, from the time of emergence of empires in circa 300 BCE till the rise of British power in eighteenth century, military mercenaries and private military companies dominated the politico-military landscape. Premodern India had both secular (military guilds) and religious (based on temples and akharas) military corporations. The mercenaries were mostly marginal peasants and demobilised soldiers. They were hired through the agency of their clan leaders, tribal chieftains or the zamindars (large landlords) in whose villages they resided. Historians argue that the presence of the mercenaries and extra state military corporations prevented the rise of strong states in premodern India. In this paper, based mostly on indigenous sources, I argue that the military mercenaries and the private military corporations of pre-British India were at the forefront of technological development. The mercenaries were the channel through which tools, techniques, and ideas of warfare were transferred. The rulers relied on the mercenaries because of their military skills and in the long run they also proved to be cheaper compared to the cost of maintaining permanently a large regular army.

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

AbstractCross-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.

Charity in Medieval Sufi Islam: Spiritual Dimensions

The Early Chishti Sufi Shaikhs from thirteenth and fourteenth century Delhi made critical interventions in the religious lives of the Muslims in South Asia. They cultivated in their adherents the much-needed ethical vision and sensitivity towards the socially marginalized. Yet hardly any attention is paid to the pedagogy of these Sufis on religion and spirituality. Their discourses on their community are documented in their literary works like malfūzāt. Of late, malfūzāt have been studied as a literary genre for the unique processes of their making. But their didactic contents on Islam and their instructions to Sufi initiates have barely been examined. This lacuna stems on account of the usage of these religious texts as fillers for information lacking in court chronicles. The essay studies the pedagogy of the Early Chishtī Shaikhs and as they related to charity in medieval South Asia. It also examines the mechanisms deployed by them to cultivate a philanthropic vision in Muslims in the praxis of faith.

Climatic Variation and Society in Medieval South Asia: Unexplored Threads of History and Archaeology of Mandu

Instabilities of the monsoon climate system, along with alternating periods of severe dryness and wetness, are known to have punctuated and disrupted the lives of peoples and institutions across Asia during medieval times. As far as India is concerned, the topic has attracted little attention from historians and archaeologists. Did climatic variations play a determining role in societal changes in medieval times? The aim of this article is not to answer, but to raise and refine this question by calling for new interdisciplinary initiatives which would enrich our reading and understanding of the past and contribute different threads to the narratives of medieval history and archaeology. While doing so, it highlights two lingering ‘lacks’ underlying the well-established historiography: the lack of attention to nature, and thus to climate; and the lack of archaeology. Attention is then focused on recent advances in palaeoclimatology and in research linking climate and society, in which India is yet to find a substantial place. Finally, the article outlines prospects and openings for the study of the medieval past as it relates to the climate-water-society nexus, by presenting an ongoing project called MANDU exploring histories and archaeologies of the land-waterscapes of Mandu in Central India.

The Poetics of Detachment in Medieval Ka-vya: Anthologies and the Path of Literary Sanskrit in the Second Millennium

This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly ka-vya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.

Varieties of Drunk Experience in Early Medieval South Asia

Scholars of Indian cultural history have neglected the topic of alcohol and drinking, instead mostly emphasising a discourse of abstinence. Yet many Sanskrit technical and literary texts of the first through the early second millennium CE describe drinking in a positive light. There, drink is presented as a vital accessory for pleasure: drink is tasty, drink enhances the senses, loosens inhibitions and is associated with the enjoyment of sex for both women and men. The drinker is also an entertaining spectacle. Even those who abstained for religious reasons could savour the pleasures of drink as presented in poetry. Thus, within certain Sanskrit discourses that were presumably produced and used by an (unfortunately vaguely defined) educated elite through the later first and early second millennium CE, the multifaceted pleasures of drink are quite often celebrated. It is only by using a restricted archive that one would conclude that attitudes to drink among those who consumed Sanskrit texts in the early medieval period were largely negative.

Institutionalized Power and Pederasty in the Ancient and Medieval South Asia—A Study of Literary Evidences of Love, Lust, and Violence Against Men

Institutionalized Power and Pederasty in the Ancient and Medieval South Asia—A Study of Literary Evidences of Love, Lust, and Violence Against Men

Faceless Gazes, Silent Texts: Images of Devotees and Practices of Vision in Medieval South Asia

Faceless Gazes, Silent Texts: Images of Devotees and Practices of Vision in Medieval South Asia

Painted Palm-Leaf Manuscripts and the Art of the Book in Medieval South Asia

Abstract What was the main principle behind the design strategies developed to prepare painted palm-leaf manuscripts in medieval South Asia? How did various Indic religious communities design their manuscripts? By bringing together surviving painted manuscripts of heterogeneous religious traditions as well as contemporaneous sculptural representations and textual sources relating to the ritual practices involving books, this study suggests that a book was conceived and designed as a temple in Indic context. Taking innovative design strategies of twelfth-century Buddhist manuscripts as a starting point, it also demonstrates how a larger, architectural approach can help us better understand the art of the book in India.

Local Visions, Transcendental Practices: Iconographic Innovations of Indian Esoteric Buddhism

Previous articleNext article No AccessLocal Visions, Transcendental Practices: Iconographic Innovations of Indian Esoteric BuddhismJinah KimJinah KimHarvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 54, Number 1August 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676668 Views: 346Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jinah Kim China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia, International Journal of Asian Studies 19, no.22 (Jun 2021): 187–214.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591421000176James Mallinson Kālavañcana in the Konkan:How a Vajrayāna Haṭhayoga TraditionCheated Buddhism’s Death in India, Religions 10, no.44 (Apr 2019): 273.https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10040273Andrea Acri The Place of Nusantara in the Sanskritic Buddhist Cosmopolis, TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia 6, no.22 (Jul 2018): 139–166.https://doi.org/10.1017/trn.2018.5

Kalhana's Kashmir: Aspects of the Literary Production of Space in the Rajatarangini

This essay argues for moving beyond the binary of ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘vernacular’ in our understanding of language and expressions of space in early medieval South Asia. Drawing attention to a classic literary representation of regional space which is in the cosmopolitan Sanskrit and not in the vernacular, the paper examines Kalhan.a’s twelfth century Rājataraṅgiṇī for its depiction of Kashmir. It looks at some of the constituent elements of the spatial imaginary constructed in the text, and at the literary and discursive strategies employed in its construction, including the reworking of intertextual traditions from within Sanskrit literary culture. This essay suggests that more than an objectivist historical narrative which modern historians like to believe it is, the Rājataraṅgiṇī should be viewed as a whole as the traditional kāvya that it is, representing a specific language practice articulative of the poet’s vision.

The Silent Frontier of South Asia, c. A.D. 1100-1800

This article aims to situate medieval South Asia in the broader taxonomy of frontier types and to identify it as a region that was neither wholly sedentary nor wholly pastoral but rather a place where internal frontier zones existed between these two ecological types. From the twelfth century onward, these zones were invigorated by the growing resources of mobile warriors, pastoralists, and merchants. Hence, state-building increasingly hinged on spanning the divide between arid jungle and humid arable land.