Eastern Approaches

by T. S. Maxwell

Pioneering researches into India's past began over two hundred years ago with the work of Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Since then Indology as a discipline has diversified into a wide range of highly specialized areas. Indian Art History, with its background of linguistics, philosophy, mythology, and political history, is today one of the most energetically thriving of those branches. It is not often that readers encounter a book in which specialists reveal their working methods at the very moment of discovery, and of interpretation. Eastern Approaches is such a book. It is a collection of twenty-two essays by leading Indian and Western scholars directly involved in the continuing work of understanding the art and architecture of the Indian past, and revealing the patterns of thought behind them. The reader is invited to participate in the intellectual excitement of their discoveries. Mediterranean contact with the north-western Indian borderlands - including the