Bangladesh is a new name for an old land whose history is little known to the wider world. A country chiefly famous in the West for media images of poverty, underdevelopment, and natural disasters, Bangladesh did not exist as an independent state until 1971. Willem van Schendel's history reveals the country's vibrant, colourful past and its diverse culture as it navigates the extraordinary twis…
Shrouded in poetry, the earliest accounts of Hindu astronomy can strike modern readers as obscure. They involve the marriage of the moon to twenty-seven princesses, a war between gods and giants, and shadows that give birth to planets. In this fascinating study, first published in Calcutta in 1823 and reissued here in the 1825 edition, John Bentley (c.1750–1824) strives to strip back the myth…
Marathi, an official language of Maharashtra and Goa, is among the twenty most widely spoken languages in the world. The southernmost Indo-Aryan language, it is also spoken in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Daman and Diu, and is believed to be over 1,300 years old, with its origins in Sanskrit. First published in 1805, this grammar of Marathi (then known as Mahratta) was compiled by th…
The Indo-Aryan language of Sanskrit is the primary language of Hinduism and also a scholarly language of Buddhism. Dating back to the second millennium BCE, it is considered to be the parent of most modern languages of India, and remains central to work in Indo-European studies, philology and linguistics today. First published in 1806, this is a comprehensive grammar of Sanskrit, compiled by th…
Marathi, an official language of Maharashtra and Goa, is among the twenty most widely spoken languages in the world. The southernmost Indo-Aryan language, it is also spoken in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, and Daman and Diu, and is believed to be over 1,300 years old, with its origins in Sanskrit. First published in 1805, this grammar of Marathi (then known as Mahratta) was compiled by th…
Published in 1822, but completed in manuscript form almost 100 years earlier, this work was designed to accompany Beschi's earlier Grammar of Common Tamil. While the latter enabled the student to speak the language, this reissue offers a way into reading Tamil's classical literature with its complexity of thought and technique. One of the earliest and most distinguished pioneers in the field of…
The language of Bangladesh, West Bengal and parts of Tripura and Assam, Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language originating from Sanskrit. With over 230 million speakers, it is the sixth most spoken language in the world today. Published in 1778, this was one of the first grammars of Bengali ever compiled. The English orientalist Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–1830) prepared the work during his emp…
Using India as a case study, Joseph McQuade demonstrates how the modern concept of terrorism was shaped by colonial emergency laws dating back into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with the 'thugs', 'pirates', and 'fanatics' of the nineteenth century, McQuade traces the emerging and novel legal category of 'the terrorist' in early twentieth-century colonial law, ending wi…
This is the 1826 edition of the Burmese–English dictionary compiled from a grammar and other manuscripts written by the American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson (1788–1850), with additional content by fellow missionaries Felix Carey and James Coleman. Prepared by the Baptist Mission Press while Judson was imprisoned on suspicion of spying in Ava, it is the fruit of his work towards makin…
The language of Bangladesh, West Bengal and parts of Tripura and Assam, Bengali is the sixth most spoken language in the world. A member of the Indo-Aryan family, with its origins in Sanskrit, it has over 230 million speakers. Published in 1825, this is the first volume of a revised three-part dictionary of Bengali, compiled by the Baptist missionary William Carey (1761–1834) during his time …