This book is both from and for my students, who inspired me to write it, contributed many thoughts to it, responded incisively to draft after draft that I taught in classes for years and years, asked me questions I couldn’t answer, plied me with books and articles I would otherwise have missed, and constituted the ideal audience for it. A few of my students and ex-students also helped me more specifically, and I want to thank them (in alphabetical order) for their ideas: Manan Ahmed on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Aditya Behl on Sufis; Brian Collins on the Mahabharata;Will Elison on the British; Amanda Huffer on contemporary India and America; Rajeev Kinra on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Ajay Rao on South India; and Arshia Sattar on the Ramayana. Others did more extensive work on this book: Jeremy Morse foraged for elusive facts and texts and disciplined the computer when it acted up; Laura Desmond read early drafts of the whole text, talked over each chapter with me, made revolutionizing comments, and provided the background for the chapter on the shastras; and Blake Wentworth drew the rabbit on the moon (in the preface), hunted down obscure texts and illustrations, read several drafts of the chapter on bhakti, and taught me a great deal about South India. I am also grateful to Gurcharan Das and to Donna Wulff and her class at Brown University, for their detailed and candid responses to an early draft, and to Mike O’Flaherty for his fastidious proofreading.
Special thanks go to Scott Moyers for his canny advice about the book in its earliest stages; to Lorraine Daston for reading chapter after chapter and responding, as always, with brilliant ideas that would not have occurred to me in a thousand years; to Mike Murphy for the week at Big Sur in which I pulled it all together; to Vanessa Mobley, my patient and supportive editor at Penguin; and Nicole Hughes, who shepherded me, and the book, through the production labyrinth with tact and skill; to Emma Sweeney, my feisty and energizing agent; and to Richard Rosengarten, dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, for his unflagging interest and encouragement, his faith in me, and his generosity in providing time for me to write and funds for me to pay my student assistants and my special Indological editor, Katherine Eirene Ulrich.
Katherine Ulrich read several long, long drafts, catching many howlers as well as stylistic tics, pinpointing obscurities, suggesting books and articles, challenging unsupported assumptions, and sustaining me with no-nonsense, appreciative, and often hilarious comments. To cap it all, she gave me the image of the composite horse that appears on the jacket of this book, not just finding it but buying it and carrying it back from India for me. This book is dedicated to her and to William Dalrymple, who stood by me at the lecture in London in 2003 when someone threw an egg at me and who then threw down a gauntlet in his subsequent article about the need to tell the history of Hinduism in a new way. I am grateful to him not only for his encouragement but for the example that he sets in his own work, writing about the history of India in a way that brings it alive to readers of all backgrounds and raises the important issues that give such writing its life and meaning.
Truro, August 2008