Product Description: India is known worldwide for having developed a unique system of social stratification: the caste society. There isn’t another aspect about Southern Asia that evokes such strong opinions and emotions. After many years of study, Agustín Pániker submerges us in this book as if we as readers live in a society based on class, detailing the dark origins, religion, rituals and ideology, political and economic power, major social transformations over centuries, and the growing importance of ethnicity factoring into class...read more

Product Description: This examination focuses on religion—one of the longest-lived and most universal aspects of humanity—and combines essay with travelogue, anthropological analysis, and journalistic article. Pániker begins by answering the most basic of all questions, What is religion?, and then tackles issues such as the role of contemplation, death, and sacred texts in religion; the concept of conversion and sacrifice; ideas such as orthodoxy, syncretism, and fundamentalism; and the appearance of religious sects and cults...read more

Product Description: Filled with the rigorous detail of a historian, this dynamic history of the Sikhs covers their origins in the 16th century, the expansion and transformation of the community, the establishment of a military order, the reformist movement of the 19th century, how Sikhism has separated itself from Hinduism and Islam as well as contemporary issues...read more

Product Description: Jainism is an ancient religion of nonviolence made popular by Gandhi in the 20th century. A religion without a god, it reveals what is truly divine in the innermost part of every living being. This all-encompasing volume analyzes the history, the philosophy, the mythology, the institutions, the social aspects, and the main practices of this centuries-old Indian tradition...read more

Product Description: Examining not only the influence exercised by the Colonial West on India, but also the influence of India on Western modern thought, this study aims to decolonize the Indian continent of the clichés and tales imposed on it by the West and by modernity...read more