Agnes Smedley's (1894-1950) career as an activist journalist began in the 1910s and 1920s, with a commitment to the Indian Independence movement. Her anti-imperialism was based on the Jeffersonian tradition of the American Revolution. In New York, she was close to the Lion of the Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, writing for his publications until his death. In California, she was involved with the Sikh-led Ghadar party of insurrectionists. Her complicated relationship with the European movement leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in Berlin in the 1920s is better known. Smedley left Europe for China in 1929 in an effort to reach India through the backdoor. Once in China, she was struck by the poverty and oppression of ordinary people. Her new cause, in addition to anti-imperialism, became the Chinese peasant. For the next two decades she documented their plight in countless publications (including in the Indian press). Herself the product of rural poverty, she identified like few Westerners did with the plight of peasants, Chinese or Indian, and wrote biographies of Chinese peasant leaders such as Zhu De.
Climate, Calamity and the Wild: An Environmental History of the Bengal Delta, c.1737-1947 offers a climatic and environmental history of the deltaic plains of Bengal. Unlike the prevalent model of history-writing, this book tackles historical issues in ecological, biological and cultural terms, turning away from conventional ideological and political approaches. The volume examines how the delta's political economy, production, crop pattern, inland and overseas trade, demographic pattern, culture and economy developed and were transformed by shifts in climate, forests, river systems and hydrology. This involves an exploration of the complex dynamics of the interaction of human societies with the rich history of natural disasters such as super cyclones, severe thunderstorms and floods, resulting in loss of life, property, livestock, human settlements and wildlife as well as major shifts in the history of colonial Bengal.
Iron in India: History and Historiography presents a transdisciplinary narrative aimed at a reconstruction of the history of Indian iron before its industrial production. This book looks at the pre-industrial period with a two-fold perspective: by understanding the material culture that has survived through the passage of time, and by examining the process through which historians have discovered, interacted, and interpreted those trails of the past. This book includes a detailed discussion on a new set of evidence unearthed in the recent years and examines diverse historical explanations/narratives such as the pre-colonial penchant for 'superior quality of Indian iron', details on Indian iron as a part of systematic knowledge production during the colonial period, and post-colonial interpretations of the subject mostly guided by colonial framework. It also highlights the nature of settlement dynamics with regards to the production and use of iron, thus establishing a meaningful synergy between archaeological findings and historical discourses.
The Lotus and The Lion dwell on Indian history between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries, when India was the site of the encounter between two great pan-Asian literary traditions, the Sanskrit and the Persian-metaphorically, the lotus and the lion-and the socio-cultural and moral worlds they created and sustained. The book's first part explores how these cosmopolitan and prestigious worlds interacted both with each other and with regional cultures. The second part presents five essays dealing with Islam in precolonial India, ranging from the nature of Islamic traditions, to Islamization in Punjab and Bengal, to current debates on understanding Islam in India. The third part offers two essays on the Mughals, the first elaborating different kinds of frontiers in Mughal history, and the second proposing new ways of evaluating the emperors Akbar and 'Alamgir. The fourth part contains four essays on the Deccan, ranging from the Tughluq invasion to the earliest advent of gunpowder technology and of written vernaculars in the region. The book closes with five essays on historical methodology, each one illustrating a different way of engaging with, and of illuminating, India's rich past.
Colonialism is generally understood to encompass political domination, military expansion, and economic exploitation, but the British, in their nearly two centuries of rule over India, also achieved a thoroughgoing conquest of knowledge. In the backdrop of the Enlightenment impulse, which held that everything can be known, mapped, counted, categorized, and bounded, and the knowledge thus acquired reshaped into useable forms, the British in India created an epistemological state. The Colonial State and Forms of Knowledge: The British in India examines the fields and bodies of knowledge through which this state was created.
Boundaries and Belonging: Rehabilitating Refugees in India, 1947-1971 documents and analyses the efforts of the Indian State to rehabilitate the refugees migrating to India after the tragic partitioning of the subcontinent. While Partition and borders decided the physical contours of India and Pakistan, the rehabilitation programme in both countries was more than just an administrative task as it decided the crucial issue of being citizens of the State. Comparing the treatment and policies for refugees from West and East Pakistan, this book investigates the priorities of the nascent nation-state in determining its constituents.
Kings, Company and Communities: Andhra-Telangana in Eighteenth-Century India is the first book of its kind as it analyses the social, economic, and political formations of the Andhra-Telangana region at a crucial juncture where they were put to the test by the manifestations of colonial rule. Capturing the vibrancy of the regional economy and the process of 'rurbanization', Sridhar investigates the manner in which local potentates negotiated with captains of colonialism and their native agents. As the region also witnessed the reassertion of caste identities during this period, this book maps the changes in varna perceptions with the aid of previously unexplored sources.
Examining questions of vernacularity and marginality, Vernacularizing Pasts explores critical concerns underlying history, time-space, modernity, and their associated discourses about Odisha. Illustrating the history of ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book brings into focus the hitherto-unexplored literary and political figures of Odisha which ushered in a regional cultural transformation within the broader nationalist movement.
Translation of: Devaråanåi jeòthåanåi kåi kahåanåi.
This volume looks back at the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 through contemporary accounts and scholarly reflections. Organized into five parts, the collection contains passages from Gandhi's own recollection of the Satyagraha; excerpts from the accounts of participants such as Rajendra Prasad and J.B. Kripalani; statements of indigo ryots; selections from official documents; and extracts from the works of historians and academics. Gandhi and the Champaran Satyagraha: Select Readings provides readers with an idea of how the first Gandhian mass political intervention in India has been recreated, contextualized, and assessed in writings, and captured through some archival visuals.
Order and Disorder in Early Colonial Bengal: 1800-1860 investigates the mechanism of social control with reference to contemporary British administrative policies and the ideological background and colonial perceptions of law and justice. It also concentrates on the various social disorders faced by the colonial state at times when the society was relatively free from insurrectionary disturbances. It gives a detailed account of apparently less significant rural violence, dacoity, and rural riots in particular-which kept the local authorities on their toes-in the light of popular attitudes, prejudices, and perceptions of law and order vis-àvis the colonial one.
Indian Sound Cultures, Indian Sound Citizenship argue that sound, from the cinema hall to the recording studio and the public festival ground, is inextricably linked to issues of citizenship, identity, and belonging in India. Together, the contributions in this volume investigate the sonic turn in the study of South Asia by understanding sound in its own social and cultural contexts, and by exploring the diverse ways in which sound has been and continues to be crucial to the ideological construction of a unifying postcolonial Indian nation-state.
Inscribing Identities, Proclaiming Piety: Exploring Recording Practices in Early Historic India focuses on votive inscriptions from the second century BCE to the second century CE found in four areas: Bharhut, Sanchi, the Western Ghats and Mathura. In Barhut and Sanchi, votive inscriptions have been found on the architecture of the stūpas and in Mathura on statues, while they have been found in caves and tanks along the Western Ghats.
This book binds together essays that, in spite of adopting diverse methodologies and different perspectives, study Bihar's development, cultural changes, violence, governance, etc., over a long durée and across a vast region with blurred or even absent boundaries. These keywords are reflective of the realities 'in', rather than 'of', this state as in many other regions across the world. The state's profile on these parameters has undergone change several times in the last century. The essays in this collection present some of these changes in a vivid manner as well as set the agenda for new research.
Common Sense and Legal History in India brings together the shorter works of Richard W. Lariviere on one important tradition of law in classical and medieval India- the corpus of Sanskrit legal texts called dharmaśāstra. Lariviere's contributions to both general and specific topics of Hindu law have changed our understanding of the depth and complexity of legal ideas, the possibilities and limits of Sanskrit legal sources for historical study, and the continuing relevance of dharmaśāstra in colonial and contemporary India.
Understanding Drama contains 70 short essays that analyse a number of geographically diverse, historically significant plays-among them Oedipus Tyrannos, King Lear, Tartuffe, Long Day's Journey into Night, Hedda Gabler, Androcles and the Lion, Our Town, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Riders to the Sea, Old Times, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Glengarry Glen Ross, Buried Child, The Threepenny Opera, and Edward II. Supplementing these model essays are a Step-by-Step Approach to Play Analysis, a Glossary of Dramatic Terms, Study Guides, Topics for Writing and Discussion, Bibliographical Resources, and a comprehensive Index. Written with students in mind, these critical essays cover many important plays included in most dramatic literature courses and will provide students with practical models to help them improve their own writing and analytical skills. Presenting a detailed yet objective examination of the structure, style, imagery, and language of the plays, this textbook also offers analyses of character, action, dialogue, and setting that can be translated into concepts for theatrical production-or that can at least provide the kind of understanding of a play with which a theatre practitioner could fruitfully quarrel.
South Asian Ways of Seeing: Contemporary Visual Cultures brings together eminent as well as new scholarly voices from across disciplines to explore South Asia from a visual standpoint, exploring multiple mediums and multiple ways of seeing, including tarot, film, graphic novels, painting, death pictures, graffiti, and installation art. With an intent to establish conversations between and across disciplines like history, sociology, literature, art history, culture and media studies, the discursivity of visual cultures in framing a South Asian imaginary is attempted.
A young Muslim woman, Muhammadi Begum, arrived on English shores from the princely state of Hyderabad in the early 1930s. Her sharp intelligence had won her a scholarship to attend Oxford University, making her one of just a few Indian Muslim women to receive the opportunity. A keen observer, she kept a diary which records a time when competing political configurations to improve lives had seized public imagination in Europe. Away from mainland Europe, in the colonies of the British Empire the movement for freedom had gathered momentum.A young Muslim woman, Muhammadi Begum, arrived on English shores from the princely state of Hyderabad in the early 1930s. Her sharp intelligence had won her a scholarship to attend Oxford University, making her one of just a few Indian Muslim women to receive the opportunity. A keen observer, she kept a diary which records a time when competing political configurations to improve lives had seized public imagination in Europe. Away from mainland Europe, in the colonies of the British Empire the movement for freedom had gathered momentum. Depicting this era for the first time, A Long Way from Hyderabad presents us with the diary Muhammadi Begum kept while abroad, translated from the original in Urdu. It was a voyage of discovery for her, whose efforts were encouraged by a far-sighted mother and a supportive husband. Describing her everyday life in a foreign land is itself a new experience which our young diarist handles with aplomb. Full of curiosity, there are new people to meet and changes to accept, such as the birth of her child or balancing housework with studies. Indeed, she is not short of opinion. Whether discussing Gandhian philosophy with fellow academics, reciting Iqbal's verses, or quizzing her tutor about women's participation in the Oxford Union, Muhammadi Begum is at ease in her new surroundings and welcomes discourse.
At the core of the social world of Buddhism was the alternative system of salvation provided by the Buddha. Representations of Marriage and Beyond explores this alternative by investigating the relationship between gender and history in Buddhist society, allowing us to trace the roots of subordination and hierarchical difference among men and women, monks, and nuns during this time period. Closely analysing three Buddhist textual traditions-the Jātakas, the Therῑgāthā and the Theragāthā- this book examines representations of marriage and gender relations in a period that witnessed far-reaching changes in economic, political, material, and social life.Investigating and understanding the confrontations and contradictions inherent in the verses of these narratives, this volume explores the elusive everyday lives of lay Buddhist followers and their interactions with the wider society. Instead of being a social reformer, the Buddha, by way of the saṇgha, tried to provide an alternative to the tradition of marriage that was rooted in the caste system and contemporary gender biases. The interlinkages of these power structures, social hierarchies, and relations of production and reproduction based on class, gender, and sexuality have been examined in this book to rethink the social world of early Buddhism.
From Oxus to Indus explores the political and cultural history of the Indo-Iranian borderlands during the reign of the Bactrian and Indo-Greek rulers, known as yavanas in the subcontinent. This was a region sans frontière and shows unrestricted exchanges between cultures. The book, in a sweeping survey of the power politics in the region, identifies certain salient features of the political processes in the period discussed. One of the major themes addressed in this book is 'Hellenism'. The changing nature of Hellenism is explored from a study of the sites from the Oxus to the Indus, the foremost among them being Ai Khanum. The study demonstrates that the region should be treated as an independent cultural zone with its multi-ethnic population, multipronged linkages, multiple political authorities and pluralistic culture. The iconographies and languages chosen by the Indo-Greek rulers have a direct relationship with their own religious beliefs and culture as well as with the ethnicity of their subjects. There was perhaps no effort to wipe out every other mode of life.
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