India before Europe

India is a land of enormous diversity. Cross-cultural influences are everywhere in evidence, in the food people eat, the clothes they wear, and in the places they worship. This was ever the case, and at no time more so than in the India that existed from c. 1200 to 1750, before European intervention. In this thoughtfully revised and updated second edition, readers are taken on a richly illustrated journey across the political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes of India - from the Ghurid conquest and the Delhi Sultanate, through the rise and fall of the southern kingdom of Vijayanagara and their successors, to the peripheries of empire, to the great court of the Mughals. This was a time of conquest and consolidation, when Muslims and Hindus came together to create a literary, material, and visual culture which was uniquely their own and which still resonates today.

Catherine B. Asher is an art historian, focusing on the interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims. She has served as President of the Historians of Islamic Art, Vice President of the College Art Association and Chair of the CAA International Committee as well as Chair of the CAA Publications Committee. She has been Treasurer of the American Council for Southern Asian Art and Chair of the American Institute of Indian Studies Center for Art and Archaeology. Her publications include Delhi's Qutb Complex: The Minar, Mosque and Mehrauli (Marg Foundation); The Architecture of Mughal India (Cambridge University Press); and Perceptions of South Asia's Visual Past (American Institute of Indian Studies).