Pushing the Boundaries of South Asian History

Pushing the Boundaries of South Asian History is a tribute to Professor Dwijendra Narayan Jha's skill and craftsmanship as a historian. He was an outstanding scholar, who constantly reinvented himself and kept abreast of changes in historical perspectives and methodology. In this volume, a wide range of historians, whose works have made significant contributions to the understanding of South Asian history, have come together to pay homage to him through their work; in doing so they attempt to redefine the existing spatial, chronological and conceptual boundaries relating to the history of the region. The chapters herein, organized into four sections, focus on new aspects of South Asian history, drawing attention to liminal areas, filling intermittent spaces, and retrieving histories that sometimes slip through the gaps created by chronological boundaries of ancient versus early medieval, medieval vis-à-vis the modern. This demonstrates the fluid and nebulous nature of 'boundaries' and how 'connected' histories are. It also showcases the deeply entangled and intersecting layers of past societies and the new ways through which historians can attempt to retrieve the past. In doing so, this volume pushes at the boundaries of our existing knowledge of Indian history and underlines the dynamic nature of history as a discipline.