Explore the vast range of titles available.

What does it mean to be human? I , Yantra examines ancient Indian narratives about robots and mechanically constructed beings to explore how their Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist authors approached this question. Making translations of many of these texts available in English for the first time, author Signe Cohen argues that they shed considerable light on South Asian religious notions of humanity, self, and agency. She also documents connections between ancient and modern responses to the ethical problems of what precisely constitutes a sentient being and what rights such a being should have. Situated at the intersection of humanities and bioethics, this cross-disciplinary study will be of interest to scholars of South Asian languages and literature as well as specialists in religion and technology.

Modern Orientalism is not a brainchild of nineteenth-century European imperialists and colonialists, but, as Urs App demonstrates, was born in the eighteenth century after a very long gestation period defined less by economic or political motives than by religious ideology. Based on sources from a dozen languages, many unavailable in English,The Birth of Orientalismpresents a completely new picture of this protracted genesis, its underlying dynamics, and the Western discovery of Asian religions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. App documents the immense influence of Japan and China and describes how the Near Eastern cradle of civilization moved toward mother India. Moreover, he shows that some of India's purportedly oldest texts were products of eighteenth-century European authors. Though Western engagement with non-Abrahamic Asian religions reaches back to antiquity and can without exaggeration be called the largest-scale religiocultural encounter in history, it has so far received surprisingly little attention-which is why some of its major features and their role in the birth of modern Orientalism are described here for the first time. The study of Asian documents had a profound impact on Europe's intellectual makeup. Suddenly the Bible had much older competitors from China and India, Sanskrit threatened to replace Hebrew as the world's oldest language, and Judeo-Christianity appeared as a local phenomenon on a dramatically expanded, worldwide canvas of religions and mythologies. Orientalists were called upon as arbiters in a clash that involved neither gold and spices nor colonialism and imperialism but, rather, such fundamental questions as where we come from and who we are: questions of identity that demanded new answers as biblical authority dramatically waned.

This article argues that the presumed distinction between Christianity and Manichaeism among some scholars of early Christianity replicates an Orientalist fantasy that divides the world into West and East. In this discourse, West and East do not designate relative locations as a matter of convention, but function in an interested way to excise Manichaeism from Christianity. To make this argument, this article traces the persistent surfacing of the West/East binary in a number of academic works about Manichaeism, especially by Arthur Vööbus, Peter Brown, book reviews on Manichaean topics, and a recent introduction of Manichaeism written for scholars of early Christianity. It sharpens the contours of the West/East binary in these works with attention to recent developments in “Asian American” scholarship on the cultural location of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.” It concludes with a brief “Asian American” reading of a passage from the Coptic Manichaean Psalmbook . This reading attempts to situate the passage within developments in late antique Roman Christianity, rather than as a reflection of some distant moment in third-century Sasanian Mesopotamia, that is, to situate the passage within its contemporary context rather than in relation to Manichaeism’s origins in the East. This article does not argue that Manichaeism is a form of Christianity, but that there is much to be gained for scholars of early Christianity if we considered it as such.

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term “hindu” over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. “Hindu” is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of “hindu” and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of “hindu,” part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term “hindu”—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word “hindu” that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category.

Data from archaeology, linguistics, population genetics, and from early Vedic texts, which deal with religion, mythology and rituals, have to be assembled and closely compared in order to gain a comprehensive picture of the early ‘Aryans’. Such interdisciplinary dialogue is necessary in order to establish areas of overlap of data. This paper attempts to indicate a western Central Asian origin of the Indo-Aryan speakers, in the steppe belt near the Urals, from where they moved, via the Inner Asian Mountain belt and Bactria, into India. Their gradual migration entailed acculturation with previous populations, their languages and cultures.

This article reconstructs the history of the Indian YMCA's Orientalist knowledge production in an attempt to capture a significant, if forgotten, transitional moment in the production and dissemination of scholarship on the religions and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. The YMCA's three Orientalist book series examined here flourished from the 1910s to the 1930s and represent a kind of third-stream approach to the study of South Asia. Inspired by the Christian fulfillment theory, “Y Orientalism” was at pains to differentiate itself from older polemical missionary writings. It also distanced itself from the popular “spiritual Orientalism” advocated by the Theosophical Society and from the philologically inclined “academic Orientalism” pursued in the Sanskrit departments of Western universities. The interest of the series’ authors in the region's present and the multifarious facets of its “little traditions,” living languages, arts, and cultures, as well as their privileging of knowledge that was generated “in the field” rather than in distant Western libraries, was unusual. Arguably, it anticipated important elements of the “area studies” approach to the Indian subcontinent that became dominant in Anglophone academia after the Second World War.