Year: 1998
Type: article
Abstract: In this article my intention is to discuss in a general way the some-what obscure period of Indian literary and religious history falling between the last phase of the creation of commonly recognised Vedic literature (the Smrti part of it) and the beginnings of the modern scholarship dealing with it. In short – the mediaeval period. How-ever, there is an inherent danger in using schematic terms of periodisation, especially when originally brought from a different geographic context. Therefore I must first try to define somewhat more exactly what I here understand under the notion of mediaevalism. A concept like the Middle Ages is not very precise, even in Euro-pean circumstances, and when applied to India it has a different meaning. In history, the concept of Indian Middle Ages is mostly used as roughly corresponding the early (pre-Mughal) Islamic pe-riod, sometimes also including the period immediately preceding the Islamic conquest.
Author: Klaus Karttunen
Language: English
Topic: Indian and Buddhist Studies
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2170543271