India - The Social Anthropology of a Civilization

This essay is an attempt to convey what one anthropologist and historian has learned about India. It draws on the work of hundreds of other scholars. The argument of the essay is a simple one, and is implicit: that a civilization, a social system, a nation exists in time as well as in space. The effort has been to see India not as it exists at a moment in time, the ethnographic present, but how it has existed through time....