For more than half a century, T.N. Madan has been a towering influence on the sociological and anthropological studies of family and kinship, cultural dimensions of development, religion, secularism, and Hindu society and tradition. This Omnibus brings together his seminal writings on marriage, kinship, family, and the household in Hindu society. Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, first published in 1965, remains a pioneering ethnographic study of the Kashmiri Pandits, and is considered a classic in the field of world anthropology. The book presents a social history of a people and culture which is currently virtually non-existent in the Kashmir Valley. Drawing upon new theoretical and methodological perspectives, Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture provides a nuanced understanding of Hinduism as a lived tradition. It explores aspects of auspiciousness, purity, asceticism, eroticism, altruism, and death while focussing on the householder's life in Hindu society. The Omnibus also includes additional essays on the Brahmanic gotra, and the Hindu family and development, along with a short piece on aspects of traditional household culture. It features an autobiographical essay—the author's recollection of growing up in a Pandit home in Srinagar, Kashmir. In the Prologue, T.N. Madan engages with the 'householder tradition' across the cultural regions of India, analysing themes of householdership and renunciation in religious philosophy and ethnography.

First published in 1965 by the Asia Publishing House and recognized in anthropological and sociological circles as a pioneering and ethnographically rich account of the Hindu family, this is the second edition published by the OUP. This enlarged edition has three new appendices, a revised listof references and a new index, though the text remains unchanged. The book describes a typical Kashmiri homeland and examines the composition of and modes of recruitment to the household.

This book discusses the ideologies of secularism and fundamentalism in the setting of the religious traditions of India, covering Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism. It has a new preface where the author revisits the debate on secularism in India and contemporarizes it for the reader. It also has two new appendices on secularism.

Focusing on the householder in Hindu society, this Omnibus brings together distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan's writings on the theme. With a new preface, prologue, epilogue, and three new appendices, the omnibus sheds light on life and society of Pandits in the Kashmir Valley.

This book looks at the sociology of India from two perspectives: first, understanding the cultural traditions of India with special reference to religious and ethical values; and second, exploring the growth of the sociological traditions of India. Divided in two parts, the book goes beyond mere description of the main religious traditions and looks at the ethical values that are embedded in the religio-secular traditions of India. It also projects the sociological traditions of India as a historical process, a process of growth of sociological knowledge.

Pathways is an important contribution in the study of how intellectual traditions grow through a process of critical assessment. Madan first examines various aspects of the work of several outstanding scholars, including D.N. Majumdar and M.N. Srinivas, who have had a major impact on the direction of his own work. Through this examination Madan discusses the major theoretical and methodological perspectives which have guided the study of society in India during the last fifty years. Next, he describes how his own conception of anthropology has evolved during this period, providing an interesting and insightful discussion of some of the substantive concerns of Indian sociology such as the social construction of ethnicity and intellectual responses to the modern West.

This Omnibus brings together two of distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan's books on the concept of the householder in Hinduism. A common thread running through the Omnibus is the focus on life and society amongst the Hindu Kashmiri Pandit community. One of the books discussed in this Omnibus is Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir, a pioneering and ethnographically rich account of the Indian family. It is considered to be a classic kinship study and is probably the only study of its kind of traditional Pandit life in the Kashmir Valley. The second book is Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture, which draws attention away from the ideas of caste and renunciation and focuses instead on the 'householder' in Hindu society. Beginning with an analysis of the ideology of the householder among Kashmiri Pandits the author deals with asceticism, eroticism, altruism and death as elaborations of the householder tradition. The Omnibus also includes a new Preface; a Prologue which introduces the reader to the concept of the householder tradition in Hinduism; an Epilogue-the author's memories of growing up in a Kashmiri Pandit household in Srinagar; and three appendices on related themes.

India occupies a unique place among the democratic countries of the world for the importance it accords to the primordial identities of religion, language, and caste. Religion as personal faith is a significant psychological and social resource in the lives of millions of Indians. However, in a multi-religious society, a religiously neutral state is an imperative. The Indian state protects and even facilitates public expression of religious beliefs and practices. This often creates problems. In this collection, one of India's leading sociologists explores these issues.