India and Its Intellectual Traditions: Of Love, Advaita, Power, and Other Things

Vinay Lal is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Lal studied history, literature, and philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, before earning his doctorate from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at Columbia University and the University of Delhi. He is the author or editor of twenty books, eight of them from OUP, and his writings span a vast canvas of modern Indian and colonial history, historiography, public culture, global politics, cinema, political psychology, and the politics of knowledge systems.

• 1: The Social Representation of Power in India: A History in Fragments 2: Love in Future Tense 3: Cities of the Mind: Lost Cities and Their Inhabitants 4: The Uncommon through the Common: Of the Ramayana Performative Traditions 5: The Kannada Intellectual Tradition: Transcending Dichotomies and Binaries 6: Social and Political Role-play through the Theology of the Hindu Icon: An Exercise in Versatility 7: What 'Bahena' Saw 8: The Saddle of Experience: Adhyatma, Duality and Practical Knowledge 9: Interpreting Catastrophes: God, Karma, and Martyrdom 10: Backwater Infinitude: Pastness, Proprietariness, and the Symbolic Economy of Rupture 11: Othering the Same: Narayana Guru's Engaged Advaita 12: Beyond Binaries: Sreenarayana and the Political 13: Ambedkar, Tarde, and 'Castes in India': Six Remarks 14: Nature and Evil: Gandhi and Ambedkar on Caste and Untouchability