The last two decades of the twentieth century have been marked by an immense revival of interest in the sublime, yet past studies have used Western texts as their archives. This book dramatically shifts the focus by examining a major instance of a non-Western sublime: the Hindu Brahman.

Mishra examines European theories of the sublime, reads them off against contemporary critical uses of the term (notably by Lyotard and Paul de Man), and proposes that the Hindu Brahman constitutes an instance of one of the most fully developed of all sublimes. The book is the first to offer a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.