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An Alaṅkāra Reader: Classical Indian Poetics with Yigal Bronner (Columbia UP, 2026)
An Alaṅkāra Reader (Columbia University Press, 2026) is a groundbreaking panoramic overview of this tradition, presenting extensive and accessible translations of key works that span its history, from the sixth to eighteenth century CE. These texts vividly show how Indian theorists analyzed simile, metaphor, allegory, and dozens of other figures that are distinctive to their world. Yigal Bronner’s commentary makes Sanskrit concepts of ornamentation approachable while placing them in historical context. He provides a new account of the history of Sanskrit poetics, showing how it underwent successive waves of theoretical revolutions and emerged as a prestigious field that attracted a variety of scholars in the early modern era.
8 Oct 2026
The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations with Heleen De Jonckheere (Brill, 2026)
Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrative tradition. The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations (Brill, 2026) studies one such narrative, known as the Dharmaparīkṣā ('Examination of Religion'), which has intrigued audiences for its ridiculing critique of Brahmanical beliefs and authority.
This book is the first to examine six versions of the story in classical and vernacular languages and from different periods together as a tradition of adaptations. Revealing the adaptive practices Jain authors applied as literary and socio-historical contexts evolved, the book offers a diachronic perspective on Jain polemics, and on the conceptualization of adaptation and translation in South Asia.
1 Oct 2026
Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination with N.S. Gundur
Engages with the life and ideas of the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu.
In his last, profoundly innovative work Allama Prabhu and the Shaiva Imagination, D. R. Nagaraj (1954-1998) engages with the twelfth-century Shaiva mystic and philosopher-poet Allama Prabhu, whose enigmatic writings have perplexed many and thus resisted analysis. Nagaraj situates Allama in three intellectual contexts: the medieval philosophical world built around the worship of Shiva; the pan-Indian bhakti tradition; and, most broadly, Indian mystical thought. This framework enables a reconstruction of Allama through the poet's engagement with fellow poet-spiritualists (vachanakaras) such as Basava, as well as with the Kashmiri Shaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta and the founder of Hindu monasticism Gorakhnath. Nagaraj's close readings of Allama's vachanas offer a vision of Shaiva bhakti that seems to contradict the erotic and romantic expressive modes of Sringara rasa while tracing the limits of language for an understanding of the divine. Allama, Nagaraj suggests, is an epistemological iconoclast who expands the horizons of language and thought.
Through these explorations, Nagaraj decolonizes the standard modes of inquiry and critiques certain settled notions in Indian philosophy, revealing himself as a postcolonial scholar whose "hermeneutics of suspicion" leads to a novel understanding of Indian texts and traditions. Unifying literary criticism with critical theory, philosophical inquiry, and the history of ideas, the book's focus on a specific religious tradition--Virashaivism--is never singular, making it as much a work for scholars of Indian spiritualism and religious thought as for those interested in frameworks that transgress Eurocentricism. Translated into English by Kannada philosopher N. S. Gundur, this is a major contribution to studies of Indian philosophy and literature.
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