It is perhaps commonplace to say that India is one of the world's richest and most enticing cultures. One thousand years have passed since Albiruni, arguably the first "Indologist", wrote his outsider's account of the subcontinent and two hundred years have passed since the inception of Western Indology. And yet, what this monumental scholarship has achieved is still outweighed by the huge tracts of terra incognita: thousands of works lacking scholarly attention and even more manuscripts which still await careful study whilst decaying in the unforgiving Indian climate.


In September 2009 young researchers and graduate students in this field came together to present their cutting-edge work at the first International Indology Graduate Research Symposium, which was held at Oxford University. This volume, the first in a new series which will publish the proceedings of the Symposium, will make important contributions to the study of the classical civilisation of the Indian sub-continent. The series, edited by Nina Mirnig, Péter-Dániel Szántó and Michael Williams, will strive to cover a wide range of subjects reaching from literature, religion, philosophy, ritual and grammar to social history, with the aim that the research published will not only enrich the field of classical Indology but eventually also contribute to the studies of history and anthropology of India and Indianised Central and South-East Asia.

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Defining the Svara Bearing Unit in the śiksāvedānga literature: Unmasking a veiled debate
• Chapter 2: Purānic transformations in Cola Cidambaram: The Cidambara- māhātmya and the Sūtasamhitā
• Chapter 3: Unfuzzying the fuzzy. The distinction between rasas and bhāvas in Bharata and Abhinavagupta
• Chapter 4: A contribution of Vedānta to the history of Mīmāmsā: Prakāśātman’s interpretation of “verbal effectuation” (śabdabhāvanā)
• Chapter 5: Married women and courtesans: Marriage and women’s room for manæuvre as depicted in the Kathā-sarit-sāgara
• Chapter 6: Towards a new edition of the corpus of Pallava inscriptions
• Chapter 7: Did Mīmāmsā authors formulate a theory of action?
• Chapter 8: Trajectories of dance on the surface of theatrical meanings: a contribution to the theory of rasa from the fourth chapter of the Abhinavabhāratī
• Chapter 9: Dravya as a Permanent Referent: The Potential Sarvāstivāda Influence on Patañjali’s Paspaśāhnika
• Chapter 10: Rituals in the Mahāsāhasrapramardanasūtra
• Chapter 11: The Lingodbhava Myth in Early Saiva Sources
• Chapter 12: Yantras in the Buddhist Tantras — Yamāritantras and Related Literature
• Chapter 13: Śaiva Siddhānta Śrāddha Towards an evaluation of the socio-religious landscape envisaged by pre-12th century sources
• Chapter 14: Constituents of Buddhahood as Presented in the Buddhabhūmisūtra and the 9th Chapter of the Mahāyānasūtrālamkāra: A Comparative Analysis
• Chapter 15: The ganacchandas in the Indian metrical tradition
• Chapter 16: Anātmatā, Soteriology and Moral Psychology in Indian Buddhism
• Chapter 17: Pāramārthika or apāramārthika? On the ontological status of separation according to Abhinavagupta
• Chapter 18: Thy Fierce Lotus-Feet: Danger and Benevolence in Mediaeval Sanskrit Poems to Mahisāsuramardinī-Durgā
• Chapter 19: Minor Vajrayāna texts II. A new manuscript of the Gurupañcāśikā
• Chapter 20: Can we infer unestablished entities? A Mādhva contribution to the Indian theory of inference