A few of my students and ex-students also helped me more specifically, and I want to thank them (in alphabetical order) for their ideas: Manan Ahmed on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Aditya Behl on Sufis; Brian Collins on the Mahabharata; Will Elison on the British; Amanda Huffer on contemporary India and America; Rajeev Kinra on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals; Ajay Rao on South India; and Arshia Sattar on the Ramayana. Others did more extensive work on this book: Jeremy Morse foraged for elusive facts and texts and disciplined the computer when it acted up; Laura Desmond read early drafts of the whole text, talked over each chapter with me, made revolutionizing comments, and provided the background for the chapter on the shastras; and Blake Wentworth drew the rabbit on the moon (in the preface), hunted down obscure texts and illustrations, read several drafts of the chapter on bhakti, and taught me a great deal about South India. I am also grateful to Gurcharan Das and to Donna Wulff and her class at Brown University, for their detailed and candid responses to an early draft, and to Mike O’Flaherty for his fastidious proofreading.
