The History of Janakpurdham is a major contribution to the understanding of three important social persona in Hindu societies of South Asia: the ascetic, the Brahman and the king. Deviating from earlier discussions that focused on the binary opposition between the Brahman and the king, Burghart introduces a model of a trinity that included the ascetic. Besides being a rich ethnography of the Ramanandi order of ascetics, the book also provides a very detailed ethnohistory of Janakpurdham in the Nepal Terai and its religious significance in what was then the Hindu kingdom of Nepal . based on a rich and largely unpublished corpus of historical documents, it reconstructs the complex dealings and inter-relationships between the royal centre and the Ramanadi ascetics at the periphery.