Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a research project funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the British Museum, the British Library, and SOAS, University of London. The principal investigators are Dr. Michael Willis, Dr. Sam van Schaik and Dr. Nathan Hill. The project was one of thirteen synergy grants awarded in 2013 and the only synergy grant in the humanities for that year. The project will run from 2014 to 2020.
The project is focussing on the history and culture of early medieval India, specifically the period of the Gupta dynasty (circa 320-510 CE). Although characterised as a ‘golden age’ in modern scholarship — and marked by developments that shaped South Asia for more than a thousand years — research on this pivotal moment is fragmented and compartmentalised. The purpose of the project is to move beyond these limitations and to recover a more compelling picture of this influential period and its impact on India and her neighbours. The project achieves this aim through the development of online research tools, a series of workshops, and traditional paper-based publications.
The project is interdisciplinary in design and aims to:
Investigate the constitution of the Gupta kingdom and its relationship with surrounding states
Chart the polities that flourished concurrently in central and southeast Asia
Define and analyse specific appropriations inspired by Indian examples and map how Sanskrit, Prakrit and Pali, the media of political and religious discourse, came to be used across Asia beside regional languages such as Pyu, Kannada and Khotanese
Examine how key scientific, literary and religious texts were composed, disseminated and translated, processes facilitated by writing systems derived from India
Scrutinize how temples and monasteries first emerged as autonomous socio-economic institutions with stable endowments, thereby possessing the resources needed to become long-standing trans-regional nodes of learning, ritual practice and new art styles
Digitial Silk Roads Project
Corpus of the Inscriptions of Campā
Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire
The Syriac Reference Portal
Mapping Buddhist Monasteries
Hans T. Bakker, The World of the Skandapurāṇa (Leiden: Brilll, 2014). ISBN 9789004270091.
Razieh Golzadeh and Michael Willis, The Book of War at the Court of the Great Mughal : Abū’l-Faẓl ‘Allāmī and the Persian Translation of the Mahābhārata (in press).
Sam van Schaik, "Married Monks: Buddhist Ideals and Practice in Kroraina,"South Asian Studies 30 (2014), pp. 269–77. doi:10.1080/02666030.2014.962322
Michael Willis, "The Dhanesar Kherā Buddha in the British Museum and the ‘Politische Strukturen’ of the Gupta Kingdom in India," South Asian Studies 30 (2014), pp.106-13. doi:10.1080/02666030.2014.962326
Michael Willis, "Detritus to Treasure : Memory, Metonymy and the Museum," in Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces : Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums, ed. Bruce M. Sullivan (London, Bloomsbury), pp. 145–52.
