This book offers a choice selection of readings from some timeless classics of India and South Asia. You will savor reading again and again these selected extracts from masterpieces which have shaped and influenced people’s lives over the millennia. These writings also illustrate the richness of the Indian sub-continent’s culture and heritage.

Drawing from a wide range of both ancient and modern works, this anthology is a rare, fabulous treasury spanning literature, religion, philosophy, politics and society. For perspective, each extract is accompanied by a masterly introduction which highlights the work’s background, its author and its influence and enduring importance.

Come, discover and enjoy the richness, wisdom and beauty of some of the greatest writings and minds of all time, including the Vedas, Buddha's teachings, the Bhagavad Gita, Kautilya's masterly treatise on politics and statecraft, Arthasastra, classic Tamil poetry, Sanskrit romances, celebration of Krishna's divinity and love play in Jayadeva's Gitagovinda, Hanuman Chalisa, Kabir's wisdom songs, sacred writings of the Sikhs, Akbar Nama, Raja Ram Mohan Roy on widow burning, Mahatma Gandhi's seminal work, Hind Swaraj, Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali, Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of India and R. K. Narayan's fiction.

Patrick Peebles is Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he taught courses on Asian history. He is a specialist on the modern history of Sri Lanka. In 2008–2009, he carried out research in Sri Lanka under a grant from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies for a book on the transformation of the colony from a military outpost to a plantation economy in the period from 1833 to 1850. In the fall of 2009, he taught in London in the Missouri London Program. His most recent research and book project is his micro-history of the East India Company from 1680 to 1700. He is a contributor to a number of encyclopedias and dictionaries on South Asia, and his books include History of Sri Lanka (2006), Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (2001), Social Change in Nineteenth Century Ceylon (1995), and Classics of Eastern Thought (1994).