Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River

Details : 

Author : Sudipta Sen
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Viking 
Publication date ;16 January 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0670092193
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9780670092192
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 800 g

About the Book 

The Ganga enjoys a special place in the hearts of millions. In this unprecedented work, historian Sudipta Sen tells the fascinating story of the world's third-largest river from prehistoric times to the present.
Sen begins his chronicle with the river's first settlers, its myths of origin in Hinduism and its significance in popular Buddhism. He traces the communities that arose on its banks, the merchants that navigated its waters and the many empires that shaped the river's identity. Seamlessly weaving together geography, ecology and religious history, this lavishly illustrated volume paints a remarkable portrait of India's most sacred and beloved river.

About the Author 

Sudipta Sen, Professor of History and current Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, University of California, Davis, is a historian of late Mughal and early British India and the British Empire. Sen has taught at Beloit College WI, University of California, Berkeley, and Syracuse University, NY. A former Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research fellow and Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2000 he won the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for his contribution to research and teaching at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University NY.

Sen's work has largely focused on the early history of British expansion in India. He is the author of Empire of Free Trade: The English East India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998) and Distant Sovereignty: National Imperialism and the Origins of British India (Routledge, 2002).

His most recent book Ganges: The Many Pasts of an Indian River (Yale University Press, 2018) is an exploration of the idea of a cosmic, universal river at the interstices of myth, history, landscape and ecology. He is now finishing a book on the history of law, crime and punishment in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British India.

Sen is an avid cook and enthusiastic musician of modest ability (congas, guitar, keyboard). He is working on his Arabic (still intermediate level) and a book of short stories, which will likely be published without footnotes or a bibliography.