India: An Anthropological Perspective

This book provides in a relatively few number of pages a comprehensive study of civilizational processes and cultural structures in India. It covers many Indias, both fictional and real, from the India of the ancients, to the India of geographers, as well as the India defined by modern political divisions between India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon, and Nepal. The development of Indian culture is seen as the realization of basic cognitive orientations, of Indian ways of perceiving the universe. In particular, the author demonstrates the continuity of Indian conceptions of the relation between humankind and the universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm, clearly showing that these underlying cognitive processes and categories persist through transformations and reorderings of Indian ways of life.