The Civilizations of the East : India

Alfred A Knopf, 1931, Volume II of Civilization of the East. With 249 black and white illustrations Hardcover, 404 pp. First Edition. Good/ NO dust jacket. Black cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and red block and gold lettering on spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers and light overall scuffing and rubbing to spine. Binding tight. Light to moderate age spotting to edges of text block. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From Introduction] This volume is the second of the series planned as an introduction to the study of the arts in Asia, and is devoted to the Indian world, both Muhammadan and non-Muhammadan, including Farther India and the Malay Archipelago, but excluding Kashgaria and Tibet, which will find a place, with China, in Volumes III and IV of this series. The fact is that India, with the cultures which trace their origin to it, is a world apart, one of the three or four great centres of human thought. There have been an Indian aesthetic ideal and an Indian humanism of equal value to the world at large with the aesthetic ideal and the humanism of either the Mediterranean countries or China. To convey an idea of what this centre of culture was, I have given copious illustrations and quotations from texts, as in the previous volume, or even more so. The mere juxtaposition of a page from the Lalitavistara with a relief from Amaravati, or of a stanza of the Gita Govinda with a Rajput miniature, will create the atmosphere and suggest the surroundings in which they came into being better than any dissertation. By such means as these I have attempted to call up a picture of Indian civilization, while referring my readers to an-other of my works for a history of facts and ideas. . …