Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia : Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800

In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imagination in late precolonial South Asia, about what systematic forms of thought existed, how they worked, or who produced them. This pioneering collection of essays helps to rectify this situation by addressing the ways thinkers in India and Tibet responded to a rapidly changing world in the three centuries prior to 1800. Contributors examine new forms of communication and conceptions of power that developed across the subcontinent; changing modes of literary consciousness, practices, and institutions in north India; unprecedented engagements in comparative religion, autobiography, and ethnography in the Indo-Persian sphere; and new directions in disciplinarity, medicine, and geography in Tibet. Taken together, the essays in __Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia__ inaugurate the exploration of a particularly complex intellectual terrain, while gesturing toward distinctive forms of non-Western modernity.__Contributors__. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi In the past two decades, scholars have transformed our understanding of the interactions between India and the West since the consolidation of British power on the subcontinent around 1800. While acknowledging the merits of this scholarship, Sheldon Pollock argues that knowing how colonialism changed South Asian cultures, particularly how Western modes of thought became dominant, requires knowing what was there to be changed. Yet little is known about the history of knowledge and imagination in late precolonial South Asia, about what systematic forms of thought existed, how they worked, or who produced them. This pioneering collection of essays helps to rectify this situation by addressing the ways thinkers in India and Tibet responded to a rapidly changing world in the three centuries prior to 1800. Contributors examine new forms of communication and conceptions of power that developed across the subcontinent; changing modes of literary consciousness, practices, and institutions in north India; unprecedented engagements in comparative religion, autobiography, and ethnography in the Indo-Persian sphere; and new directions in disciplinarity, medicine, and geography in Tibet. Taken together, the essays in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia inaugurate the exploration of a particularly complex intellectual terrain, while gesturing toward distinctive forms of non-Western modernity. Contributors. Muzaffar Alam, Imre Bangha, Aditya Behl, Allison Busch, Sumit Guha, Janet Gyatso, Matthew T. Kapstein, Françoise Mallison, Sheldon Pollock, Velcheru Narayana Rao, Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Sunil Sharma, David Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi The Languages Of Science In Early Modern India / Sheldon Pollock -- Bad Language And Good Language : Lexical Awareness In The Cultural Politics Of Peninsular India, Ca. 1300-800 / Sumit Guha -- A New Imperial Idiom In The Sixteenth Century : Krishnadevaraya And His Political Theory Of Vijayanagara / Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, And Sanjay Subrahmanyam -- The Anxiety Of Innovation : The Practice Of Literary Science In The Hindi Rīti Tradition / Allison Busch -- Writing Devotion : The Dynamics Of Textual Transmission In The Kavitāvalī Of Tulsīdās / Imre Bangha -- The Teaching Of Braj, Gujarati, And Bardic Poetry At The Court Of Kutch : The Bhuj Brajbhāṣā Pāṭhśālā (1749-1948 ) / Françoise Mallison -- The Making Of A Munshī / Muzaffar Alam And Sanjay Subrahmanyam -- Pages From The Book Of Religions : Encountering Difference In Mughal India / Aditya Behl -- If There Is A Paradise On Earth, It Is Here : Urban Ethnography In Indo-persian Poetic And Historical Texts / Sunil Sharma -- Early Persianate Modernity / Mohamad Tavakoli-targhi -- New Scholarship In Tibet, 1650-1700 / Kurtis R. Schaeffer -- Experience, Empiricism, And The Fortunes Of Authority : Tibetan Medicine And Buddhism On The Eve Of Modernity / Janet Gyatso -- Just Where On Jambudvīpa Are We? : New Geographical Knowledge And Old Cosmological Schemes In Eighteenth-century Tibet / Matthew T. Kapstein. Edited By Sheldon Pollock. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Essays illuminate the extraordinarily varied and dynamic intellectual developments underway in India and Tibet during the three centuries prior to the consolidation of British imperial power in 1800. Fills a gap in scholarship on Indian culture and power between 1500 and 1800, arguing that we can't know how colonialism changed South Asia unless we know what there was to be changed