Sources of Indian Traditions

TrueRachel Fell McDermott is professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. She is a specialist in Bengali goddess worship whose books include Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals; Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal; and Mother of My Heart, Daughter of My Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal.

Leonard A. Gordon is professor of history emeritus of the City University of New York and the author of Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Subhas and Sarat Chandra Bose and Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940. He is also the director of the Taraknath Das Foundation.

Ainslie T. Embree is professor of history emeritus of Columbia University. Since his retirement, he has taught at Brown University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He is the editor of Sources of Indian Tradition: From the Beginning to 1800, Volume 1, Second Edition.

Frances W. Pritchett is professor emerita of modern Indic languages in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Among her books are Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics and The Romance Tradition in Urdu: Adventures from the Dastan of Amir Hamzah. She is pursuing major online projects that include A Desertful of Roses and A Garden of Kashmir, commentaries on the Urdu ghazal poetry of Ghalib and Mir.

Dennis Dalton is professor emeritus of political science at Barnard College. He is the author of Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action and Indian Idea of Freedom: Political Thought of Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore and the editor of Mahatma Gandhi: Selected Political Writings.

Barbara D. Metcalf, University of California, Davis:
The third edition of Sources of Indian Traditions will assuredly be, like the earlier versions, an indispensable resource for teaching South Asia across a wide range of disciplines. The revisions are extensive and substantially reflect scholarly advances of recent years. Specialists and novices alike will learn from the texts that are included, and the organization and commentaries are bound to stimulate productive conversation and even controversy.

Owen M. Lynch, New York University:
The third edition of Sources of Indian Traditions is fascinating, easy to read, provocative, and relevant to the present. Two narrative lines flow, like an underground river, through the book: colonialism and the search for independence and the struggle with the ever-changing questions of nationalism. An excellent expansion of the second edition, this anthology is masterly organized, making it a unique teaching text on South Asia.