Table of Contents

1. Introduction Anne Murphy 2. Make it Fresh: Time, Tradition, and Newness in Early Modern Indo-Persian Literary Culture Rajeev Kinra 3. Redemptive Pasts and Imperiled Futures: The Writing of a Sikh History Purnima Dhavan 4. Reading Global Islam Through Messianic Renewal in Dasavatar Teena Purohit 5. A Zoroastrian historical imaginary in India Rastin Mehri 6. The Many Pasts of Mamul: Law and Custom in Early Colonial Madras Aparna Balachandran 7. Telling the History of the Sacred Ramaksetra (Coastal Maharashtra) in the Seventeenth century: The Sanskrit Vadesvarodayakavya by Visvanatha Nicolas Dejenne 8. The Theographic and the Historiographic in an Indian Sacred Life Story Christian Lee Novetzke 9. Hagiography and the Historical Imagination in Eighteenth Century Punjab James Hegarty 10. A Contested Community: Priyadas and the Re-imagining of Nabhadas’s Bhaktamal James P. Hare 11. Images of Nabadwip: Place, evidence, and inspiration in Chaitanya’s biographical tradition Varuni Bhatia 12. Time and Religion-Making in Modern Sikhism Arvind-pal S. Mandair

About the Author

Anne Murphy is Assistant Professor and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature, and Sikh Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research focuses on the historical formation of religious communities in Punjab and environs, with particular but not exclusive attention to the Sikh tradition.