From its earliest recorded history, India was a place of remarkable and varied religious activity, ranging from elaborate sacrificial rituals and rigorous regimes of personal austerity to psycho-spiritual experimentation and utopian visions. In this ambitious and wide-ranging chronicle, Richard Davis offers a history of India鈥檚 myriad religious cultures that spans two thousand years, from 1300 BCE to 700 CE. India, Davis writes, was not only the birthplace of the religions we now know as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. It was also the home of other, often unnamed religions that can be classified as 鈥渇olk鈥� or 鈥減opular鈥� religions. Tracing these intertwined practices, Davis shows that the ardent and heterogeneous religious cultures of early India came to define and redefine themselves in relation to one another.
Davis recounts this history through voices鈥攙oices recorded in hymns, poems, songs, didactic stories, epic narratives, scientific treatises, and theological discourses, as well as voices that speak through material remains, whether monumental sculptures or tiny terracotta figurines of nameless goddesses. He focuses on the long millennium often designated as 鈥渃lassical India,鈥� which stretches from the time of the founding figures of Buddhism and Jainism during the sixth century BCE through the seventh-century-CE dynasties of the Chalukyas and the Pallavas in southern India. Throughout, he emphasizes encounter, interaction, debate, critique, and borrowing among religious communities within a shared, changing social and political reality. The voices and visions of early India鈥檚 religions, Davis shows us, are fascinating in their multiplicity.
Richard H. Davis is research professor in the interdisciplinary study of religion program at Bard College. He previously taught at Yale University. He is the author of The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, Lives of Indian Images (both 91桃色), and other books.
"A sublime and first-rate examination of India’s lengthy religious history."鈥�Library Journal
"[A] coherent, reader-friendly exposition that follows neatly the development of Indian culture from c.1300 BCE to 700 CE. . . . Davis’s elegant exposition of the realities of ancient India offers marvels as arresting as the gold-digging ants of Herodotus. . . . Davis’s account is based on a good balance of textual evidence, epigraphy and architectural and iconographic considerations. The last two are brought to life by a well-chosen set of illustrations."鈥擩an Westerhoff, Times Literary Supplement
“This book is a remarkable achievement. It is the first comprehensive historical account of early South Asian religions, representing the culmination of decades of critical scholarship. It vastly improves on existing surveys of Hinduism and Buddhism in at least two ways. First, it eschews a ‘tradition-based’ approach to early religions, showing how any set of specific beliefs and rituals were formed in part through diverse interactions with other formations of religious practice, making the approach profoundly dialogical. Second, it integrates religious practice with both political and social history in deeply compelling and non-reductive ways—a feature that will recommend it to both historians and scholars of religion alike. It will be a benchmark for generations to come.”—Daud Ali, University of Pennsylvania
“Richard Davis has a wonderful gift for unraveling the complex tapestry of India's early religious history so that each feature emerges as an independent drama, clearly framed in its own chapter. This makes the book perfect for classroom use—and for the student in each of us. Invigorating, insightful, and indispensable.”—John Stratton Hawley, Barnard College, Columbia University
“An inspiring work of mature reflection that combines impressive respect for details with nuanced attention to large-scale processes, Richard Davis’s Religions of Early India is a wonderful gateway to the religious cultures of South Asia before the advent of Islam there. Davis leads us to the pleasures of better understanding and appreciation of the capacious worlds that humans made for themselves in ancient India.”—Charles Hallisey, Harvard University
