Indian and South Asian Historiography

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

We are nearing the  end of centenary year  in which the relics of Mohenjo Daro Harappa  were dug out of earth in the plains of the Indus- Sarasvati rivers. The latter river also mysteriously vanished into earth. So too there was a sudden collapse of the Harappan Civilization. This  Article sums up all the developments that had taken place since 1921, with a view to achieve clarity of the State of Art.

The historical, political junctures of colonial and post-colonial Punjab discloses that in the milieu of Punjab, the study of biraderi politics has probable new significance as it provides a rational model of manipulation of power through biraderies. It postulates a state where biraderism is used by biraderies as a tool of manipulation through social, abstract power by which to strive for control over scarce resources and the remains of colonial rule.

Myanmar’s Spring Revolution is a grassroots, bottom-to-top
nationwide resistance against the military ruling class that retook
state power in February 2021. It is unprecedented in scale,
fascinating in form and shows a profound societal change within
the country.
http://crisea.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Policy-brief-Michal-Lubina.pdf

Tekkalakota, located in Bellary District,
Karnataka, is well known as a site associated with the
Southern Neolithic period (c. 3000 - 1200 BCE). Since this
time, it has been continuously occupied, through the Iron
Age (c. 1200 - 300 BCE), Early Historic (c. 300 BCE - 600 CE),
Medieval (c. 6th century -16th century CE), and Modern (post
16th century CE) periods, although the locations of the
settlements and other areas of activity have shifted
considerably over the millennia. The MAST project is a multiyear excavation and exploration program designed to
examine the evidence for change and continuity during all
these periods. An early season of test excavations at
Tekkalakota identified deposits dating to the late stages of
the Iron Age, as well as substantial evidence for metallurgical
production. This paper will outline some of these details, as
well as plans for future investigation of earlier deposits, and
the potential implication for understanding the beginning of
the Iron Age in South India.

https://www.routledge.com/Kala-Pani-Crossings-Revisiting-19th-Century-Migrations-from-Indias-Perspective/Bharadwaj-Barak/p/book/9780367760885

When used in India, the term Kala pani refers to the cellular jail in Port Blair, where the British colonisers sent a select category of freedom fighters. In the diaspora it refers to the transoceanic migration of indentured labour from India to plantation colonies across the globe from the mid-19th century onwards.

This volume discusses the legacies of indenture in the Caribbean, Reunion, Mauritius, and Fiji, and how they still imbue our present. More importantly, it draws attention to India and raises new questions: doesn’t one need, at some stage, to wonder why this forgotten chapter of Indian history needs to be retrieved? How is it that this history is better known outside India than in India itself? What are the advantages of shining a torch onto a history that was made invisible? Why have the tribulations of the old diaspora been swept under the carpet at a time when the successes of the new diaspora have been foregrounded? What do we stand to gain from resurrecting these histories in the early 21st century and from shifting our perspectives?

A key volume on Indian diaspora, modern history, indentured labour, and the legacy of indentureship, this co-edited collection of essays examines these questions largely through the frame of important works of literature and cinema, folk songs, and oral tales, making it an artistic enquiry of the past and of the present. It will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of world history, especially labour history, literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, diaspora studies, sociology and social anthropology, Indian Ocean studies, and South Asian studies.

Nathdwara is one of the last schools of Miniature painting on the sub continent. The late 19th century brought a modernity into this school through the use of technology that made its way into this quasi state. The artists used 'modern' techniques to complement their work and through  its agency survive and expand.

It had been said by the colonial scholars and historians that India possessed no history by pointing out that the ancient India has a rich heritage of religious texts and literature, but it lacks historical works as comparison to the scholars of Greece and Rome of those times had systematically documented their period. It is only from the beginning of the medieval period that Muslim scholars started writing histories to document the triumph of Islam. But if we study the great literary works of Sanskrit literature in ancient India i.e. ‘itihas-puran tradition’, itivrtta, akhyayika, vansabali, carita, and chronicle of kings, then we find that they forms some types of historical sense. In this paper I will point out
the ideas of historical sense in the Sanskrit literature in India with special reference to Kalhana’s ‘Rajatarangini’. I will mostly focus on the translation which had been carried out by a various historians through 16th, 17th, 18th 19th
and 20th century, historical debates on the nature of Kalhana’s ‘Rajatarangini’ and its values, his themes and contents etc. There has been a lot of ongoing argument related to ‘Rajatarangini’ to define it as literary work or the historical work. My work will try to show it that it should be seen as the historical or the great literary texts written by a great man of Kashmir in 12th century AD.

Bengali society has experienced religious encounters from time immemorial, resulting in various syncretic tendencies and various reform movements from time to time. Within the Hindu tradition, Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833) rose to eminence as the father of socio-religious reform and the Bengali Renaissance in the nineteenth century. For his reform project, he adapted the Advaita Vedanta of Shankar Acharya (788-820). He amalgamated it with Muslim Sufism and modern western influences such as deism, utilitarianism, and the broader scientific outlook. His exposure to Christian missionaries also played an important role in the formation of his reform agenda. The paper maintains that although Roy based his socio-religious reform on Shankar Acharya's Advaita Vedanta, especially as regards the concept of formless one God, he deviated from the classical Vedanta in opposing the tenets of traditional Hindu dharma like idol worship, the belief in the infallibility of Vedas, caste system, and widow burning. His selective focus on Upanishads from amongst the Vedic literature was also novel. In sum, Roy propounded a new version of Vedanta, dubbed as neo-Vedanta by several academics, which proved to be seminal for the subsequent Hindu reform movements.

Although the famous Mughal poet Mir Taqi Mir's Persian text Zikr-i Mīr has come to enjoy considerable renown as the first autobiography penned by an Urdu poet, scholars of Mir have continued to be puzzled by the text's contents. Its diverse sections comprise a mishmash of hagiography, historical chronicle and popular bon mots, and yield little in the way of informing us about Mir the man or Mir the poet. Even more problematical is the inclusion in the text of numerous 'facts' that are quite easily disprovable. Should we then consider much of Zikr-i Mīr to be false and fabricated? Or should we take Mir's intention in composing the text to be something other than autobiographical? This article argues for the latter, proposing that much of what is confusing about the text is only really so because of our misplaced generic expectations from it—many of its 'inconsistencies' may be accounted for by freeing it from its autobiographical straitjacket and viewing it instead through the prism of a variety of alternative Persianate genres forming part of a wider, cosmopolitan, classical literary tradition. Through the focal example of Mir's text as well as examples from a variety of Mughal, Ottoman and Arabic writings, the article underlines the importance of distinguishing between 'autobiography' and 'autobiographical', and contests notions of the existence of a distinct, recognisable and recognised genre of autobiography in the pre-modern Islamicate context.

The so-called Peutinger Table, whose template goes back to a road map from the Roman imperial period, depicts only a few localities for southern India. Nevertheless, this limitation certainly reflects crucial centres of the long-distance trade network between Rome and the south of the subcontinent. Parallel historical events of the 2nd century CE in Rome on the one side and South India with Sri Lanka on the other side have been considered in this study. Their relation to the few localities recorded is shown. In the analysis of the significance of these localities in the historical development of South India in the 2nd century CE, climatic changes and epidemics in particular become visible as two extreme triggers of social processes. It also becomes apparent that southern India experienced similar developments as its large trading partner, the Roman empire on the other side of the ocean.

Historians include the Bāṇas among the important minor dynasties of South India. They are first mentioned as Bṛhadbāṇas in the Tāḷagunda inscription of the fifth century. Rulers with the Bāṇa name existed up to the sixteenth century in the Tamil country. During their history, they also married into major dynasties like the Cōḻas and claimed to be descendants of a lineage starting from Bali. Many historians have noted the semantic similarity between the term Bṛhadbāṇa and the earlier Tamil bardic Perumpāṇaṉ of the Caṅkam literature. The historians, however, have not explicitly addressed the issues of whether the Bāṇas originated from the Tamil Pāṇar and why they chose to claim Purāṇic Bali to be their progenitor. In the present essay, based on an analysis of Caṅkam texts, and epigraphic data, it is shown first that the Bāṇas must have originated from the Tamil bards. Later, the reasons for the Bāṇas choosing to have Bali as the progenitor of their lineage are explored. It looks like Tamil bardic age values might have played a role in this.

The mutinies that took place on 10th of May, 1857 in Meerut and their marched to Delhi on 11th May and very soon the spread of the mutinies in Kanpur, Locnow, Jhansi etc. have been called as “Sepoy Mutiny” by the colonial official and British colonial historians. But after a few decades of the revolt, perception of the historian like John. W. Kaye was different in nature. An remarkable turning point came out on the notion of the revolt in 1909 when V.D. Savarkar published his work and defined it as the Indian War of Independence. While the celebration of 100th anniversary of revolt has brought a large number of researches and books on the topic by Joshi, Chaudhary and Sen ect. where they saw the revolt of 1857 into a new perspectives. Then the new kinds of historiographies ermerged by Mukherjee and Stokes in the late 20th century and works of Dalrymple, Yadav and Rajendran in early decades of 21st century presented the historyof the revolt in the very new perspectives that had been never written by the early historians. In his article, i will highlight the issues and concept of historiography that had been done both in the colonial India and independent India.

Like many other parts of India, modern history writing of Assam began with colonial
intervention and the nationalist response to it. Since Assam was made a part of the Bengal Presidency in 1826,
socio-geographical and historical investigations into the region were actively carried out under the auspices of
Government. Though the early colonial accounts contain important information on the region, they are mostly
administrative documents with descriptive contents. The period between the second half of the nineteenth
century and the early twentieth century witnessed not only a gradual accumulation of historical materials,
but also a rising popular awareness of Assamese history. During this time, Kāmarūpa known as the ancient
kingdom of the Brahmaputra valley began to occupy the first page of the history of Assam unanimously and
its importance was accentuated by the group of nationalist historians. Their main concern was to find out a
proper place for Assam in the mainstream of Indian history and civilization. Kāmarūpa became an entrance
through which Assam could connect herself with the rest of India. In the last century, there was a considerable
progress in the quantitative compilation of historical information about Kāmarūpa gleaned from epigraphic
and textual records and some archeological evidences. Nonetheless, barring a few, the history writings on
Kāmarūpa have been limited to a dynastic history emphasizing a unilineal political continuity of Assam. The
divergent perspectives could scarcely address fundamental problems of the colonial historical paradigm. Either
a number of controversial issues remained unsolved or they were conveniently erased from the dominant
history writings on Kāmarūpa. This article presents a critical review of historiography of Kāmarūpa in the
colonial and post-colonial period of Assam.

Kāmarūpa, the ancient past of Assam, has complicated implications, due to the importance given to it by the group of nationalist historians of Assam from the early twentieth century. For them, the redefinition of the past constituted a fundamental part of the regional identity formation. By locating the function and purpose of Sanskrit records in the socio-political context of early medieval eastern India, this article reconsiders the controversial issues of Kāmarūpa history, especially its temporal, spatial and social aspects. It delineates the two different historical processes, that is, the imagination of the region in the modern historiography on the one hand and the formation of the region in the early medieval period on the other.

The study of ritual in India is indissociable from the study of prescriptive texts. Now the Śaiva scriptures of the Śaivasiddhānta purport to lay down every aspect of the Śaiva religion, from doctrine to comportment, but they are for various reasons typically not straightforward guides to the performance of rituals and, in spite of their presenting themselves as revealed literature, they do not teach one body of ritual activity that is coherent and free from internal contradictions, as Śaiva exegetes have long freely acknowledged. One way of helping practitioners to perform rites ‘according to the rules’ was to write commentaries on particular scriptures.  The tenth-century Kashmirian theologian Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha, a back-to-the-texts fundamentalist at least in the matter of ritual correctness, clearly advocated this strategy and has left us commentaries on the ritual portions of the Mataṅgapārameśvaratantra and the Sārdhatriśatikālottara.  Another strategy was to craft ritual handbooks, paddhatis, that clearly set out ritual practice step-by-step.  Almost all surviving paddhatis, as Sanderson has observed (2004:358), are notionally based upon a single scripture, the Dviśatikālottara; but in practice this strategy gave ample room for innovation, typically by eclectic blending of ritual elements from different sources. A large number of Śaiva ritual manuals composed from the tenth century onwards survive (the best known are listed by Sanderson in his fn 24 on p. 358 of Sanderson 2004), only a few of which have been published to date.  Because these manuals acknowledge themselves to be the works of human authors rooted in time and place, they can be of particular interest to the religious historian partly because they allow us to map the spread of different currents of Śaivism in time and place.  Like the scriptures, they borrow generously from each other, thus demonstrating  how they are mutually related. This article, to be followed by a few others on the same general theme, is intended as a small contribution to the history of Saiddhāntika paddhati literature.

There references, in the Madras copper plate of  Pandya king Nedunjadaiyan  and Tiruvalangad copper plates of Chola king Rajendra to a fort constructed by the Ay rulers at their capital city of Vizhinjam.  The remains of this fort was uncovered in the explorations conducted at Vizhinjam. This article covers the history and the discovery of its remains at Vizhinjam

The current state of the emerging queer discourse in India is finding expression through incredibly bourgeois and idealised models — the tendency to extend queer identities into the infinitude of Indian history and the almost incessant combing through of Brahmanical texts and disparate cultural examples to string together the idea of an eternal homosexual and his place in Indian history is repeated ad nauseam in popular discourse.
But what does the queer identity mean? Where and when does it arise? How much historical truth is in these popular assertions? What ideas do they seek to construct about queerness and its space within the national imagination of India?
In my paper, taking cues from traditions of queer Marxism, I seek to draw a world-historical understanding of the queer identity and its emergence with capitalist accumulation — investigating how exactly the commodity form transformed the idiom on which “sexuality” was understood, as recently suggested by Christopher Chitty? Traversing the historiographical debate on the origins of the modern ideas of homosexuality, I seek to establish that “queerness” and it’s correlatives been inflected by particularities of caste, class and race; and that suggestions to build an ahistorical, and idealised notion of queerness that enforces idealisation of identity, while not reflecting on materialist politics feeds into the bourgeois need for such a class blind history that enables the policing of working class queer and trans people. Such blind mythmaking also allows bourgeois queers to pink-wash regimes of control like India’s involvement in Kashmir to indoctrinate the voices of Kashmiri queer organising in a bid to use their supposed condition of persecution by their own community to legitimise imperialism. Building from this argument, I seek to articulate how organising among queer and trans people — despite the origins of our identities from the freeing of wage labor under capital — has to be anti-capitalist and built on solidarities with the working class. No true emancipation for us lies in the vampiric system of exploitation under capitalism.

Accessible in OA: http://hdl.handle.net/11370/fe42f18a-925f-4a9c-a64d-93d8d9667103

Beyond Being Koelies and Kantráki traces the self-positioning of Hindostani people in the face of British and Dutch colonial practices. Originally from India and shipped to the Dutch colony of Surinam after the abolition of slavery, the Hindustani served as contract labourers to keep the plantation system afloat from 1873. Central to the book is the perspective of the Hindostani’s themselves. We travel alongside the Hindostani’s from the moment they signed up for contract labour and their movement through the depots awaiting shipment, their travel experiences and encounters on ships en route to a new and unfamiliar land, their arrival in Suriname, relocation to plantations, and their dispersal following the end of their contracts, either as city workers, or farmers. All along, the book poses the question of identification: how did Hindostani make sense of themselves, their fellow Hindostani, and Surinamese society, both on the plantation as well as when they moved on to lives beyond contract labour when they took up jobs as small farmers and in the city? Beyond Being Koelies and Kantraki unhinges stereotyped characterisations of Hindostani lives, showing how various men and women, upper caste and lower caste, Hindus and Muslims, adults and children shaped their lives.

Ghent University offers a two-year master's program in South Asian Languages and Cultures ("Oriental Languages and Cultures-India"). The program draws on the expertise of the faculty and researchers from the "South Asia Network Ghent Research Group." From the academic year 2021-2022 onwards, the courses of the program's research-oriented track ("academic proficiency") are being offered completely in English and online, allowing students to obtain the degree from anywhere in the world. This research-oriented master focuses especially on the study of Jainism and its languages, preparing students for further studies in fields such as Religious Studies, History, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Literature, in addition to Indology or South Asian Studies. We are planning an online info session on Feb. 4th at 3 pm CET. To register, click the link below.

Representations are culturally constructed entities and are multi-dimensional. Ideology being an integral part of representations as well as the processes of knowledge production and its construction in
India has its genesis not only in the political context of the functioning of the mind but is also engaged in caste-hierarchy positions. Thus, the knowledge production process gets structured in the hierarchical constructions deeply rooted in caste and religious norms. The paper analyses hegemonic knowledge production process as well as claimed post-colonial frame work as part of the Brahmanic narrative, politics of representation and also cultural contestations through the frame work of 'protected ignorance'.

The primary focus of the Journal of Sindhi Studies (JOSS) is the Sindh region, located in southern Pakistan. However, Sindhis live in other parts of Pakistan as well as in India and across the globe. The journal accepts submissions that address the people of Sindh, regardless of their current geographic location.

JOSS aims to shed interdisciplinary light on the “Sindhi World.” It accepts submissions from all disciplines but prioritizes perspectives from the humanities and interpretive social sciences (e.g., anthropology, history, sociology, geography, literature, art history, and visual studies). The journal’s humanistic and interpretive approach aims to draw submissions into a single comparative forum to analyze, discuss, and understand the many intricate and multilayered contexts that constitute the Sindh region and the lives of its people.

JOSS also approaches Sindhi Studies as a field to address broader questions about society and the human condition, both in the past and present. It privileges submissions that, in addition to Sindh and Sindhis, tackle topics like colonialism and nationalism, integration and marginalization, devotion and institutionalization, vernacularism and cosmopolitanism, and many others. The journal strives toward a better general understanding of the world by addressing it through the lens of Sindhi Studies.

The stabilisation of Delhi as the centre of power in the subcontinent reorganised not only political and military structures in north India but also opened up new connections for trade and traders. This article traces the journey of one Hindu merchant family from their ancestral home in the Indus Valley to new prominence in the Sultanate capital. A close reading of a Sanskrit donative inscription written in ornate poetry from the Delhi hinterland shows the changing imagination of politics, religion and space among elite merchants. Uḍ ḍ hara Ṭ hakkura adapts the linguistic heritage of Sanskrit public presentation and creates a new and self-aware ideational language to express geography, politics and piety. Uḍ ḍ hara's model was powerful; over the next century, other merchant families adapt it to present their own donative largess. While F. Flood has highlighted the role of Hindu traders through material culture in his magisterial work Objects of Translation (), the Sanskrit literary production patronised by mobile mercantile groups can advance and nuance the picture, showing the complex negotiations in creating and presenting a public identity for Hindu groups in the Sultanate period.

As pre-colonial history in South Asia becomes widely appropriated and refashioned to suit preconceived political agenda, the article looks at the way the figure of Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the third grand Mughal emperor, was conceived in 18th-19th century Bengali literature. It chiefly focuses on a brief debate between Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore on how to conceptualize the Mughal legacy in shaping modern politics of the nation. It shows how power and gender were fundamental considerations in the appropriation of Mughal history.

Borderlines begins its second book forum, titled "Jungle Passports," with a discussion on borderlands, mobility, and citizenship by different scholars. This essay is the first part of the book forum which engages with the ideas within Malini Sur's book: "Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the NorthEast India-Bangladesh Border." India's new border fence with Bangladesh under construction in the states of Meghalaya and Assam, Northeast India. Photo courtesy: Malini Sur.

Balochistan is known generally for the Neolithic and Pre-Harappan cultures within the archaeology of South Asia. The region has not been incorporated within the discourse on the spread and development of Buddhism or Buddhist material cultures. Our systematic transect survey at Tehsil Bori of District Loralai revealed 26 archaeological sites. The survey produced 13 multi-periods and 8 single-period sites, including 6 Kot Dijian and 5 Harappan sites. All multi-period sites, except one, had early historic/Buddhist material culture. These sites were located within two distinct landscape and altitudinal settings. The presence of a relatively large number of Buddhist sites in the Balochistan and adjoining regions likely corresponds to the geographical extent of the poorly studied early historic state of Pāradān, with Loralai as the core region.

This study attempts to explore, investigate and analyse causes and consequences of the pliability of the cultural heritage of Pakistan which is showing the signs of disappearing on the eve of extremism in Pakistan particularly of the Kalasha by focusing on the Kalasha people. The Kalasha were raided by the Muslims in the 14th century. The demarcation of Durand Line (Pak-Afghan border) in 1893 became their lifeline when they fell to the British Indian government while their tribe fellows at the other side of the Pak-Afghan border in Afghanistan were forcefully converted as a whole in 1896. Somehow, the Kalasha of Pakistan were leading their life according to their dastoor (culture & religion) and then military coup of 1977 brought ill-fate for them under pseudo Islamization of military ruler Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. The Talibanization/extremism suppressed the Kalasha indigenous tribe. The event of 9/11 devastatingly hit the tribe for their faith and their strategic location. As reactions and...

In the latter half of the fifteenth century, Sultan Zayn al-'Ābidın (r. -) commanded his court poet Sŕıvara to compose a Sanskrit praise poem (praśasti) commemorating a momentous occasion: the inauguration of the first cannons in valley of Kashmir. 1 In , Zayn's craftsmen had completed their task and the guns were ready for a public demonstration. The diffusion of gunpowder in Eurasia was a momentous technological shift and in embracing and celebrating the cannons, Sultan Zayn was very much a man of his times. His interest in gunpowder and allied sciences appears throughout Sŕıvara's account of his life, the Sanskrit Jainataraṅgiṇ ı̄. In a particularly striking section, Sŕıvara speaks of festivals and dramas punctuated by pyrotechnic displays, much to the amazement and delight of the spectators. 2 Sŕıvara even reports that Zayn composed a dialogue in poetic Persian that laid out instructions for the making of fireworks. 3 These gunpowder technologies were just a single example of the ways in which the material and cultural base Kashmiri life under Zayn and the sultans had transformed, yet many other examples could also be cited from Sanskrit and Persian sources, including the importation of new technologies such as weaving and bookbinding. Such expertise led to the development of new export industries, in which Kashmir became a key artisanal centre during the sultanate period. 4 From this viewpoint, Zayn's cannons are a synechdoche for shifts during these key centuries as new dynasties fostered new routes and connections, while new technologies flourished. Using the Āryāmetre, Sŕıvara describes the cannons in loving detail, deploying the lexical arsenal of Sanskrit to produce dense puns and wordplay. To provide just one example, towards the end of the composition, Sŕıvara uses a dense śleṣ a (sequences of phonemes that can be read in different senses, sometimes translated as pun) to explain the action of the cannons. He writes: dhatuvibhaktispharat padapravṛ ttyāprayojite śabde | arthopalabdhihetur bhavatv idam vṛ ddhiguṇ ayuktyā||..|| 1 Sŕıvara's Jainataraṅgiṇ ı..-. Here I follow the edition and the German translation of Walter Slaje in Slaje, 'Schleuder, Katapult, Armbrust und Kanonen: Zur weniger bekannten Militärtechnologie des mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Indien' In Zeitschrift der Deutchen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft ,  (), pp. - 2 See Sŕıvara's Jainataraṅgiṇ ı̄, .. 3 Sŕıvara's Jainataraṅgiṇ ı̄...

“Stuart, a professor of religious studies at the University of South Carolina, takes us above and beyond Goenka’s fame as a bringer of Vipassana to the West. Using Goenka’s own writings, he successfully shows that Goenka was a much deeper and profounder thinker than supposed, and consequently much more complex in his beliefs. … He does this by giving readers an extremely generous selection of Goenka’s writings, including new translations from Hindi and Burmese; the latter serve to highlight Goenka’s Burmese roots through his lineage and teachings in Burma. … In Stuart’s hands, Goenka emerges as a great meditation master, a man who spent a great deal of time struggling to get his teachings out to the world, eventually succeeding in founding global meditation centres and establishing connections with religious leaders all over the world.”