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This book seek to understand modern China and India through an unprecedented comparative analysis of their long histories. Using new sources, making new connections, and reexamining old assumptions, noted scholars of China and India pair up in each chapter to tackle major questions by combining their expertise.
List of contents
Preface
Maps
Introduction, by Benjamin Elman and Sheldon Pollock
Part I
1. Life and Energy, by Kenneth Pomeranz and Sumit Guha
2. Conquest, Rulership, and the State, by Pamela Crossley and Richard M. Eaton
3. Gender Systems: The Exotic Asian and Other Fallacies, by Beverly Bossler and Ruby Lal
Part II
4. Relating the Past: Writing (and Rewriting) History, by Cynthia Brokaw and Allison Busch
5. Sorting Out Babel: Literature and Its Changing Languages, by Stephen Owen and Sheldon Pollock
Part III
6. Big Science: Classicism and Conquest, by Benjamin Elman and Christopher Minkowski
7. Pilgrims in Search of Religion, by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and Richard H. Davis
8. Art and Vision: Varieties of World Making, by Eugene Wang and Molly Aitken
Afterword: The Act of Comparing (Both Sides, Now), by Haun Saussy and Dipesh Chakrabarty
Chronology
Chinese and Indian Terms
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Benjamin Elman is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies and professor of East Asian studies and history at Princeton University. His books include A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (2006) and Civil Examinations and Meritocracy in Late Imperial China (2013).
Sheldon Pollock is the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies at Columbia University. His many publications include World Philology (2015) and A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics (Columbia, 2016). He is founding general editor of the Murty Classical Library of India.
Summary
This book seek to understand modern China and India through an unprecedented comparative analysis of their long histories. Using new sources, making new connections, and reexamining old assumptions, noted scholars of China and India pair up in each chapter to tackle major questions by combining their expertise.
Additional text
A useful counter to the tendency to project from one case to the universal...Many readers, furthermore, will probably come to this book with a greater knowledge of one place than the other, the side-by-side analysis puts the lesser-known of the two countries in a more familiar context.
