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The book attempts to examine the modes by which orientalism and liberalism as colonial epistemologies and the ideological foundations of colonial power contributed to the making of the imperial history of modern South Asia.

Have you realized that the divide between 'Us' and 'Them' has grown steadily in Indian politics? Do you sometimes wonder whether it will be repaired at all in the near future? Do you ever pause to reflect why emotions spill on the streets and why democratic institutions in India have become dysfunctional? Have you thought about why we get hurt easily and how this gets reflected in everyday politics?India after Modi attempts to address these questions through an analysis of events like Award Wapsi, demonetization, the crisis in JNU and higher education, and electoral outcomes, including in the states of Bihar, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Through this collection of essays, Ajay Gudavarthy focuses exclusively on Indian democracy after Narendra Modi took over as the prime minister in 2014. He looks at the politics that India has been witnessing since then and addresses emerging issues in Indian democracy, including that of women's participation, new urban spaces, and the role of youth.

An inspiring memoir about one man's crusade to help improve the life of widows.

The book looks at the different ways the temporal features in the existential exigencies of the human located within the definitive boundaries of Indianness. This has been done through an interrogation of different cultural artefacts that have been produced, across the space and time of the Indian nation, to look not only at representations of Time but how time (as the temporal) actually finds a play in them. Each act of the cultural becomes, in a sense, a relation of the very action of time. This way, the volume wishes to think, in a very pointed manner, how this play of the temporal defines the Indian Being and allow narratives, of different kinds and forms, to become. Each chapter in the volume seek to read the temporal action inside the contemporaneity of India's existence since, for better or for worse, the west has taken a hold in. The global interaction that India has had to go through, either as a British colony or a world post-colony, has allowed a meshing in of the western philosophical conceptualisations of time with (and within) the Indian ones. The changes that it has wrought, then, become as important as those that have been rooted in a historical functioning of the nation.

The book demonstrates how the early novel can be seen as a good site to think about what was effected by the print technology in the last decades of the 19th Century in Kerala. It was in the novel that changes that occurred in diverse fields in the print space came together and displayed themselves as such. This is also the reason why the early Malayalam novel is a useful site for thinking about Kerala's modernity. The story that unfolds in this book is about the newness of the nineteenth century novel and of a specific formation of modernity that emerged in Kerala at that time. This modernity included within its domain formations of diverse and new entities - social, political, cultural, linguistic, and literary. They shall not be seen as separate or as forming distinct modernities with their own distinct constituency; instead they need be seen as constituent elements of a particular modernity shaped in the final decades of nineteenth century. The books develops a new way to look at these elements and seek their story within the larger space of Kerala's print culture and then return to the novels and see how they work in these texts. The book persuades to change the conceptions about the early novels and formation of modernity in Kerala considerably, and enable new ways to look at contemporary social, political and cultural issues.

The book is about what posthumanism means in the contemporary Indian context and what different lines of consideration this can take.The world today has universalized a Eurocentric history of the human with its privileges, oppressions, exploitations and exclusions. On the one hand, this has led to the triumphalist narrative of technology, the blurring of biological embodiment through prostheses and the dream of transhumanist self-exceeding. On the other hand, we are witness to the contemporary eruption of dystopian anomalies due to the dis-balance or revolt of the "others" of humanism - climate crisis, chronic pandemic, religious, ethnocentric and geopolitical violence, ideological and authoritarian state control. Posthumanism is both an acknowledgement of these blurred boundaries of humanism and a critical response to it.The editors of this volume opine that the discourse of posthumanism in India warrants urgent consideration, if we are to adequately address both national and global emergencies and look for solutions that India may be in a unique position to offer. Essays in the volume are by scholars in the area dealing with representative directions relating to posthumanism in India. The essays are divided into five areas of cultural relevance - (1) internal selves and others; (2) technology, normativity and ethics; (3) human and animal; (4) bodies and their discards; (5) becoming-cosmos. Together they form the beginnings of an approach to a critical cartography of posthumanism as it pertains specifically to India.

The book delves into the educational challenges that indigenous groups faced during the late 18th and 19th centuries and examines how they responded to these challenges and threats. It centres on the historical evolution of education in the Bengal Presidency and the North-Western Provinces, with a particular emphasis on the roles of pandits, maulvis, and other influential figures within indigenous society. Up until the 19th century, questions about the nature of knowledge, the most effective methods of transmitting it, and the societal responsibilities toward educating the youth were not monopolized by any single entity. In most of Europe, private actors, rather than the state, assumed the role of the dominant authority controlling the definition and dissemination of knowledge. This trend gradually marginalized local knowledge and traditional ways of life. In contrast, the colonial state in India did not encourage "local agencies" to actively participate in the process of knowledge formation. Instead, under colonialism, indigenous institutions and educators became agents of the state. It's important to clarify the term "indigenous" in this context. Here, it refers to all educational institutions that served the local population, taught pre-British curricula, were staffed by Indian or native teachers, and initially received patronage from local elites. However, over time, colonial authorities began providing funding and assuming patronage of these institutions, which subsequently led to changes in their structures.

This book encapsulates the various historical contexts within which Nalanda assumed its significance and attained its mahavihara (mega-monastery) status. By examining sources ranging from textual to archaeological it reveals the history of Nalanda and its remarkable continuity with perceptible intellectual paraphernalia for which it became famous over the period. Contrary to the exposition of a pan-Indian decline of Buddhism, evidence gleaned from the various quarters from Nalanda amply demonstrate that monasteries were in a flourishing state in the entire region (i.e. Nalanda and its wider geographical landscape) and render any simple and conventional explanations of the decline of Buddhism in this period problematic. Thus, the book attempts to understand the dynamics of a complex religious process with the focus on this monastery and its religious domain. The interpretation is largely based upon the material records generated in the course of the excavations at Nalanda. Nalanda as a site in archaeological and historical parlance connotes a Buddhist monastic establishment which grew up under the patronage of both royal as well as non-royal categories. The incomplete excavation of this site has revealed a range of artifacts such as seals, inscriptions, and images attesting a larger monastic set up which underwent varied religious experiences. Primarily a Buddhist site, Nalanda bears a remarkable presence of other religious traditions such as Brahmanism and Jainism. The evidence of Brahmanical pantheons, symbols and other ritual entities presents a fascinating case study to understand and extrapolate the diversity of religious space of this monastic site. There is sufficient archaeological data which suggests that the monastery witnessed a conjugation of different religious and ideological streams. The book will make an important intervention in existing theoretical model that explains the decline of Buddhism.

Divided into six clear and easy to follow sections focusing on topics such as liver, Own Your Body bridges the gap between medical jargon and everyday life. Whether you're facing a health scare or just striving for a better lifestyle, Dr. Sarin's wisdom shines through, empowering readers to take charge of their health.

This book delves into decolonial saga of Malabar through the eyes of a native chronicler and uncover the hidden truth behind the 'Musaliar King,' the media moulded monarch by colonial misnomers. This richly woven narrative illuminates inter-community alliances amidst turmoil and exposes calculated colonial stratagems that obscured sacrifices made by natives. The narrative serves as a corrective lens, shedding light on the valiant deeds often overshadowed by colonial narratives. Readers are taken on a transformative journey, where historical understanding is reshaped, and the vernacular valour embedded in the history of Malabar comes to the forefront. Navigate the contours of a contentious issue surrounding a photograph, as the author masterfully challenges its authenticity. This eloquent journey transcends the mere exploration of historical facts; it is a symphony of identity, sacrifice, and community resilience. A literary gem for aficionados of history, this monograph invites readers to savour the beauty of Malabar's tumultuous past, promising a profound understanding of the events that have shaped its captivating history.This book debunks controversial narratives and confronts the misidentified, reshaping historical understanding and revealing the spirit within Malabar's untold stories of solidarity and sacrifice.

This book presents a solid introduction to nonviolence as a mode of thinking and a mode of life, but also as a strategy of self-defence and social and political transformation. "Nonviolence" is a frequently misunderstood, frequently abused term. It can be used in very narrow or broad constructs and can be based on a wide variety of philosophies and practices. The book will examine several of the main currents of nonviolent thought and practice, as approaches that concentrate around the concepts of "struggle" and "resistance". By focusing on these two concepts, the book will examine the theories and principles of nonviolence as well as the religious and philosophical underpinnings of their commitments.The book dwells on the theoretical discussion of the concept and history of nonviolence as a revolutionary concept for a change in mentalities and realities of our societies. It brings to the forefront the philosophy of nonviolence as it developed from Socrates to Thoreau, Jesus to Dalai Lama. The book covers Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. the advocates and practitioners of non-violence in the 20th Century.

The volume is a collection of essays interrogating the connections of digital governance and digital politics in South Asia. It challenges the dominant idea of digital governance as a purely technological, technocratic and 'apolitical' phenomenon. Based on a largely transdisciplinary approach, the contributions in the volume are both theoretically informed and empirically grounded as they cover select South Asian states. Against this backdrop, the volume highlights the growing intervention and outcome of new 'invasive' technologies in shaping the social and political processes. The contributors interrogate the critical intersections of governance and politics, with intense focus on strategies, policies, infrastructure, services, skills and capacity building, performance and measurement, and political communication. In offering a bottom-up view of the digital reality of South Asia along with its potentials, challenges and dilemmas, the volume seeks to provoke further deliberations and debates on this important theme.

Humanizing Humanity is distinctively framed advocacy of the ways in which the concept of humanity has been defended by various ideologues of India like Tagore, Gandhi, and Ambedkar. By grounding itself in the epistemology of intellectual history, the book delineates how these three major thinkers visualised the ways in which society can be better humanized. Such a process of humanization for these thinkers forms the bedrock of the trajectory in which humanity may be preserved, amidst intense authoritarianism and the violent quest for power by a small minority in the society. The book is an attempt at exploring the strands of inter-textuality that exist when Tagore, Gandhi and Ambedkar's thinking is situated in the ontic and epistemic context of a few humans' tendency to destroy humanity and the efforts of another section to create conditions for its preservation. Bidyut Chakrabarty does this by comparing the ways in which the Federalist Papers of the United States of America and the Indian Constitution manifest as quintessential texts that uphold the principles of liberty, equality, justice, and the protection of the weaker sections of society from structured strands of domination and exploitation.

The book examines the emergence of a new female subjectivity in 19th century Bengal through the life narratives of four women writers and gives a comprehensive account of each.This book provides the interrelationships between textuality, a historical context of cultural and epistemological shifts as the Bengali intelligentsia of the time advocated greater rights for women, class, which determined choice for the women agents, new educational policies which led to the founding of Bethune School in 1849, and the work of British women educationists like Annette Ackroyd and Mary Carpenter for women's education.The book provides a comprehensive insight into the socio-political and cultural history of Bengal of the late 19th century. The book postulates an interesting analysis of autobiography as a Romantic genre, examining its intersections with gender and its relevance to the cultural and literary landscape. It draws attention to the gendered difference and obvious power misbalance between men's autobiographies, designated 'atmacharit' and women's autobiographies, devalued as "only" reminiscences, and categorized as 'smritikatha', narratives based on memory and therefore lacking critical value.

Why are abnormal figures at the heart of literary canon and what do they tell us about the society that writes and circulates these stories? This book studies the constitution of disability and discusses concepts of corporeal difference that are socio-historically rooted in the Indian cultural milieu.The volume aims at looking at the central issue of the various aspects of disability representation, the impact of these representations on the materially embodied experience of disablement, the political imperatives shaping the narratives of corporeal difference, and the influences of highly particularised local cultural context on the constitution of epistemic and discursive notions of corporeality.The volume follows 3 routes of inquiry: How do we find 'disability' in texts or, what are 'disability texts'? How do we read concepts historically using literary and cultural texts and what would a similar study of the Indian context reveal? How do we study culturally distinct ways of narrating bodyminds? These questions will be answered through a discussion of representation histories of the abnormal informed by histories of disease conditions and its representations, with the aim of developing ways of thinking and talking about concepts of corporeal difference that are socio-culturally and socio-historically located away from the western context and to explore the intersections between gender, caste, religion, sexuality, class and disability.

This book changes the way we think of caste ideologies, histories and academic representations. It traces how the magico-religious beliefs on pollution as a state of danger inhering potency of violence were transformed into notions of dirt. The varying formulations and cultural beliefs founded on distinctive conceptions of pollution led to caste violence. It analyses the cultural and religious mechanisms of normalization of violence through the concepts of Matsyanayana and Vadho-avadhah that are central to discussions on danda and dharma and justification of violence. The modern discourse of othering through caste categories is legitimised through the Brahminic and Vedic interpretations. This historical dimension presents an alternative form and autonomous space for understanding ritual violence. The historical transition is examined through modern cult figures such as Savarkar, Gandhi and Ambedkar.

Ravi Dutt Bajpai examines some of the pivotal episodes in the modern history of China and India to argue that their behaviours reflect the self-identity of a civilization-state. The book starts from the progression of China and India into putatively modern polities during the colonial period, as the two indigenous societies imagined their national identities and nationalist aspirations primarily by contrasting their civilizational attributes with the Western colonial occupiers. As newly independent nation-states, both believed that their international status flowed from their civilizational glories. Therefore, despite their material and institutional fragility, China and India decided to pursue complete autonomy to manage their domestic and foreign affairs. Indian Prime Minister Nehru's policy of non-alignment, envisioning an alternate world order beyond the great power competition, was inspired by Indian civilizational ethos. The book also examines the Sino-Indian war of 1962 from a civilization-state perspective and argues that Tibet represented a conflict of civilizational influence.Chapters also explore some of the more recent developments, such as the Indian nuclear test of 1998, China's ambitious Belt and Road (BRI) infrastructure project aimed at reviving the ancient Silk Road, and India's campaign to regain its civilizational status of Vishwa Guru, as the continued manifestations of the two civilization-states endeavouring to regain their past glories in the contemporary world.

This volume contributes to understanding Bangladesh's growth story, as it celebrates 50 years of independence. The fastest growing South Asian state is being recognised as an important partner and model case study with increasing global relevance by world powers. Sreeradha Datta reviews many of its critical bilateral relationships, as well as its expanding influence in the region and world beyond, enabling an understanding of how Bangladesh's growth trajectory complements and informs its foreign policy aims. The volume has a mixture of thematic and bilateral chapters, and includes the active Bangladeshi diaspora population and its influence on the country's unfolding narrative. Datta features the viewpoints of key Bangladeshi policy makers; expert takes on how the world is engaging with Bangladesh; and covers the growing salience of Bangladesh's foreign policy, reflecting its new acquired economic status.

This volume is a critical reader, focusing on the continuities and discontinuities, confirmations and confrontations, crossovers and collisions, appropriations, adaptations and assimilations in the cultural transitions between British and Bangla vernacular modernist fiction within the context of the imperial modernity of the first half of the 20th century.The volume, consisting of critical essays aspires to illuminate, from multiple but intersecting perspectives, those thematic and structural areas where these two kinds of literary modernism, each aesthetically diverse, historically segmented by onslaughts of wars and other outbreaks of suffering and violence, and ideologically convoluted, but conditioned in many ways by common socio-historical catastrophes and promises, interact with each other to constitute an 'aesthetics of motion and dissonance'.Essays cut across literary criticism to employ interdisciplinary approaches, as they blur the boundaries between histories, biographies and fictional narratives, between individual ethics in and outside the fictional world, between imagined and living communities, between real and generic politics, between the home and the world, and between the corporeal and the cultural. These essays interrogate the mastery in literary techniques, narrative motives and dualities, 'major' and 'minor' genres, (de)formations of canons in respect of the 'worldliness' formed by the textual incorporation of the intricate imperial relationships between the United Kingdom and Bangla.

The book positions Sanskrit poetics in a postcolonial context to understand its contemporary relevance and proposes a productive future direction for this system of knowledge.The fundamental argument against Sanskrit poetics in modern literary circles is that it is a system of knowledge that does not have any contemporary relevance, since the idea of literature conceptualised by Sanskrit poetics is incompatible with the modern notion of literature. The general argument is that Sanskrit poetics has only the archaic value of a museum piece.This book which resists such an extremist approach to Sanskrit poetics aims to provide a new direction for Sanskrit poetics to generate new knowledge about this epistemology. The new approach that the author proposes is explicated through three major theoretical positions in Sanskrit poetics, namely dhvani, aucitya and vakrokti.

This book elaborates the politico-ideological viewpoints of Aurobindo, as displayed when he reigned as one of the major nationalist leaders defining Indian nationalism. Bidyut Chakrabarty examines Aurobindo's politico-ideological ideas during the period (1893-1910) when he was an active participant in the 'New Nationalist' or 'Democratic Nationalist' campaign, which started with the bifurcation of the Indian National Congress between the Moderates and Extremists (also known as the Revolutionary Nationalists) in its 1907 annual session, held at Surat.Chapters cover Aurobindo's distinctive ideas of nationalism, which he evolved in collaboration with his colleagues, especially Lal-Bal-Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal), and how he redefined the practice of nationalism. The book also demonstrates that unlike his predecessors, the Moderates, Aurobindo set out many strategies - including boycott and passive resistance - to execute the distinctive plan he designed to attain his politico-ideological goal. Other topics include the relatively less discussed aspect of Aurobindo's socio-political ideas, namely his unique model of education as an antidote to many of the crippling socio-cultural prejudices, and the importance of Bhagavad Gita in shaping Aurobindo's politico-ideological priorities.

This book explores narratives of nationalism in the Hindi novel (1940s-80s), engaging with mainstream, populist, political conceptualisation of a postcolonial nation and local, cultural, often marginalised fictional parallels and alternatives to it.Analysing processes of nation-formation and nationalism(s) via experiments with the novel form and versions of realism in Hindi, conversations between the political and the cultural, rural/borders and the urban/central spaces, individual subjectivity and social structures, and the challenges Hindi novels' internal linguistic diversity poses to formalised Hindi's hegemony, Imagining a Postcolonial Nation: Hindi Novels and Forms of India (1940s-80s) traces Hindi fiction's history of postcolonial India. The multiplicity of realisms indicates significant responses to postcolonial nationalism, idealistic, critical, regional, satirical and psychological.Looking at indigenous narrative methods employed by authors to critically evolve Western ideas of the nation and novel, the book explores the simultaneous convergences and divergences between literary and political understandings of ideological, religious and linguistic nationalisms. Surveying the broad sentiments of idealism, enchantment and disenchantment with freedom and postcoloniality, it studies the possibilities of fiction embodying national history without an outright commitment to mainstream nationalism or nationalist literary canon formation.It also briefly tries to understand the repercussions of nationalism as a masculinist project and its gendered nature affecting a section of writing, novels by women authors, to present counter-narratives to both national and literary canons. Choosing a fairly broad historical timeframe, the book reveals the radical potential of narratives that have over the years been critically categorised as canonical. It reopens discussions around nationalism within novels that have been often canonised as apparently uncritically nationalist.

Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi constitute the key pillars of Indian nationalist thought. In this book Bidyut Chakrabarty demonstrates how Tagore and Gandhi drew on each other as they articulated their unique mode of thinking, which led to an innovative discourse. Tagore and Gandhi agreed on many ideas but also had serious differences on quite a few, for instance, on whether to support the British during the Boer War.Confluence of Thought brings out the compatibility as well as the differences in their thoughts by asserting that both of them, despite their differences in approach, are essentially informed and shaped by Western and indigenous discourses as well as by colonial rule.The chapters in the volume dwell on their views on nationalism, civilisation, religion, rural construction and religion. These ideas and arguments moulded the freedom struggle and shaped the future of a free India.

The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living.Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self - stoic or heroic, political andcreative - come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.

Human interventions with living entities have had to be in a constant state of negotiating space necessary for co-habitation with animals, birds, trees, plants, grasslands, forests, hills, water bodies in the creation of villages and other settlements. The book argues that negotiating this space meant sharing, which impacted economic strategies, religious experiences, cultural interactions and oral performances that humans have strategized and preserved. This intersectional theme, through individual case studies, ultimately provides us the civilizational ethos of the Indian sub-continent on how human non-human relations informed it. The book provides a window on how this relationship was represented in a variety of material and literary texts, visual representations, archival records, folklore and oral testimonies. It brings to the fore these narratives over the longue durée to explicate the complex and delicate relationships in region specific ecological settings and thus give readers a perspective that crosses disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.

Leisure is a corollary to pleasure. While modern sociologists locate and relate leisure with the notion of work, time and entertainment emerging as a prominent status marker with modernity; this historical exploration, traces how leisure and recreation were often imagined and celebrated during premodern times, spanning from the ancient to the precolonial period.The book takes into account the differential access to leisure and pleasure based on class and gender where masculinity is projected through manly sports and femininity though beauty and indulgence in projection of recreation, entertainment and luxury. The counter-discourse representing labour for those who cater for this leisure is invisibilized as is their transactional nature.The volume dwells on the attitudes, prescribed and proscribed, and brings to the fore the differences across religious ideologies Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jaina and Muslim in various periods. Further it looks at leisure in the various classes and cultural spaces like the elite, women, the king in the bedchamber, and the court with dancing girls, public such as orchards, garden and performance spaces.