Repetition, reconfiguration, or adaptation form key characteristics of the Indian literary traditions. Jain literature exemplifies this vividly, especially through its rich narrative tradition. The Examination of Religion (Dharmaparīkṣā): A Jain Tradition of Narrative Adaptations (Brill, 2026) studies one such narrative, known as the Dharmaparīkṣā ('Examination of Religion'), which has intrigued audiences for its ridiculing critique of Brahmanical beliefs and authority.

This book is the first to examine six versions of the story in classical and vernacular languages and from different periods together as a tradition of adaptations. Revealing the adaptive practices Jain authors applied as literary and socio-historical contexts evolved, the book offers a diachronic perspective on Jain polemics, and on the conceptualization of adaptation and translation in South Asia.

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The "Thombos" are a rather unique collection of eighteenth-century land and population registers detailing the lives lived, lands held, and labour provided by tens of thousands of people inhabiting the coastal regions of Sri Lanka that were colonised by the Dutch East India Company. Turning this archive inside out by highlighting both the indigenous and colonial roots of this administrative system, Luc Bulten presents a gateway into everyday social realities surrounding caste, conjugality, (forced) work, and land tenure. In doing so, he demonstrates how both European expansionism and local agency reciprocally affected the ways such social realities were shaped. Tune in to our conversation about Lives, Land, and Labour: A Social History of Eighteenth-Century Sri Lanka (Brill, 2026)

Dr Luc Bulten is Assistant Professor of Social and Economic History at Radboud University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Sri Lankan History at the University of Cambridge. This interview is conducted by Dr Lewis Wade, a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Bamberg. He is the author of the prize-winning Privilege, Economy and State in Old Regime France and can be found on Bluesky @wadehistory.bsky.social.

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How was drama experienced in early modern China? It was not tied to a single medium such as the page or the stage, but operated in a media ecology—an environment in which it integrated other arts and media while being refashioned in a variety of arts and media. Playing with Plays: Drama and Early Modern Chinese Media Ecologies (Brill, 2025)
explores a wide range of cultural experimentation, collectively termed “playing with plays:” the theatricality embedded in commentary, the poetic and visual imagination arising from drama illustrations, the interactions between reading and singing arias, the imbrication of reading plays and practicing religion, and the ludic act of writing playful essays on drama. Through engaging these disparate phenomena with media studies, the book advances a new model for thinking about drama history, and shows the entwinement of plays and different forms of media in shaping perception, molding experience, and enabling new subject positions to emerge in early modern China.

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