Bøker utgitt av OUP India

This is a story of a school in the walled city of Old Delhi - the Anglo-Arabic Senior Secondary School. The school has its origins in Madrasa Ghaziuddin established in 1692. Using archival data and personal accounts this book offers a fascinating insight into an institution of historic importance.

This book studies the regional tradition of mathematics in the Tamil-speaking areas of Southern India. It questions the established nature of Indian history of mathematics, which is based only on the Bhatta-Bhaskara tradition. Instead, it brings in practitioners like village accountants and school teachers as primary agents in the practice of mathematics. The author studies these hitherto unexplored historical sources and presents them in a new light. He talks aboutmathematics at the workplace, at the school, and at the village square in precolonial Tamil society. Finally, the author studies what happened to these practices when encountered by the colonial revenue administration and brings out a social history of mathematics in India.

Indian Media Giants is an analytical chronicle of six Indian mega media conglomerates' individual odyssey from their beginnings in the pre-independence era to their transformation into powerful business empires in the digitised modern India. The book traces media metamorphoses, contours of growth and development, travails and trajectories, organizational structures, editorial policies and business dynamics of print majors in India,

Balanced Regional Development has been one of the stated objectives of development strategy in India since the 1950s. Development experience has shown that there are inter-state differences in levels as well as the rate of growth of economic activities. This book looks at these differences through sectoral diversity, regional value added and skills at not only the State but also a sub-state, viz., NSS region level. The analysis directs to the need for promotingaspirational regions approach to achieve all round development in the country.

What histories do objects like coins or gems help us to trace? How can we read photographs and paintings? How do fictional tales, imaginative biographies, basic lexicons, or accounts of Sufi masters code intellectual worlds and reveal cultural and religious shifts? What range of sources is available to the historian of medieval and early modern India? How can textual sources illuminate material objects, sites, and practices, and vice versa? What historicalmethods do the different sources and material objects require?Drawing on the rich scholarship of Simon E. Digby (1932-2010) on South Asian medieval history and culture, the essays in this volume offer method lessons in a wide range of historical fields.

Twenty-first century life is increasingly governed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning, big data analysis, facial recognition, and robotics. For decades, an ideology of apocalyptic progress and cosmic transformation has accompanied the advancement of AI in the United States; that vision is intimately connected to transhumanism, the idea that humanity can transcend its limits, even mortality, using technology. Based on contributionsfrom science and science fiction, advocates of such apocalyptic AI suggest that the world will soon see godlike machine intelligence and that human beings will upload their minds into immortal machine bodies. The arrival of this ideology in India raises questions about how global cultures cancontribute to AI technology and our beliefs about AI. These beliefs have gained a foothold in Indian visions of AI, but they have not been accepted uncritically; rather, Indian scientists and futurists revise the transhumanist vision and illustrate how traditional Hindu values can add to the global perspective. By describing the arrival and reconfiguration of transhumanist ideas in India, this book reveals how the nexus of religion and technology contributes to public life and our modernself-understanding while suggesting that the apocalyptic approach to AI should be tempered by other visions. By tracing the movement of apocalyptic AI into India and exploring Indian efforts to redefine those transhumanist aspirations, Futures of Artificial Intelligence opens the door for rethinking ourglobal approach to AI and advocates for technologies and visions of technology that advance human flourishing.

The British Empire transported thousands of Indian convicts to form a penal colony in the Andaman Islands. The formation of the penal colony involved a wide range of documentation. Administrative studies, reports, and commentaries were regularly produced on a variety of subjects such as prison reforms, convicts and their families, aborigine peoples of the land, local agriculture and trade, and Indian Ocean politics. All these constitute the Andaman Archives. Apartfrom official sources, different kinds of private sources also come within the ambit of the Archives. These include letters and autobiographical narratives written by prisoners and serving officials, documents prepared by the Indian National Congress on the condition of the political prisoners as wellas newspaper reports on the Colony published in India and Britain.With a detailed critical introduction that recounts the genesis of the penal settlement in the nineteenth-century and follows its story till the arrival of the Azad Hind army of Subhas Chandra Bose in the Andamans during the Second World War, Across the Black Water, for the first time, brings to the readers a collection of key documents from the Andaman Archives. These documents have stood witness to historic events not only of the penal colony but also of the Indian national freedom movement.They help to reconstruct the relationships of important figures such as V.D. Savarkar, R.N. Tagore, and M.K. Gandhi with imperial court of law and penal systems. The book will be of vital interest to academic scholars who pursue research as well as to wider public who are curious about the history ofmodern South Asia at large.

This book provides intimate insights into the lives of farmers in Garo Hills, North-East India. Based on a long-term ethnographic engagement, it focuses on followers of traditional Garo animism, whose land constitutes their most important resource. In response to new economic and political opportunities, as well as to changes in the ontological landscape, people continually reinterpret the multiple relationships that connect them as a community, as well as to thespirits, and the land.

Recounting the story of the Oraons and Tana Bhagats of Chhotanagpur in the present-day state of Jharkhand, this book questions postcolonial understandings of the category of ''tribe'' and unravels the threads of a hierarchical adivasi world. It unpacks colonial ethnography, missionary narratives, and anthropological writings; explores issues of adivasi identity and resistance; and demonstrates how contemporary adivasi protest draws upon memoriesof the past. Dasgupta argues that nineteenth and early twentieth-century ideas of ''tribe'' were not abstract imaginaries but structured colonial interventions. These affected the shaping of customary rights; the understanding of the rural world; and the perception of customs and practices. She analyses the ways in which Tana Bhagats questioned hierarchies among the Oraons; opposed landlords, moneylenders, and the colonial state; and engagedwith Gandhi and the Congress. Dasgupta delineates how Tanas allude to their diverse experiences and distinctive memories to negotiate with the sarkar even today.Using colonial archives, oral narratives, and contemporary pamphlets, this book examines the contending ''truths'' produced around adivasi protest, and the complex interplay between the past and the present, the oral and the written.

Combining archival research with ethnographic fieldwork, The Boundary of Laughter explores how spaces of popular performance have changed with the emergence of national borders in modern South Asia. The author traces the making of the popular theater form called Gambhira by Hindu and Muslim peasants and laborers in colonial Bengal, and explores the fate of the tradition after the Partition of the region in 1947. Drawing on a rich and hitherto unexplored archive ofGambhira songs and plays, this book provides a new approach for studying popular performances as shared spaces-that can accommodate peoples across national and religious boundaries.

Is it true that the ancient Indians had no sense of History? The book begins with this question, and points out how the ways of perceiving the past could be culture-specific and how the concept of historical traditions can be useful in studying the various ways of memorising and representing the past, even if those ways do not necessarily correspond to the methodology of the Occidental discipline called 'History'. Ancient India had several historical traditions, andthe book focuses on one of them, the itihasa. It also shows how the Mahabharata is the best illustration of this tradition, and how a historical study of the contents of the text, with comparison with and corroboration from other contemporary sources and traditions, may help us restore the text inits original context in the bardic historical tradition about the Later Vedic Kurus. Is the Mahabharata then an authentic history? This book does not claim so. However, it shows how the text had originated as a critical reflection on a great period of transition, how it dealt with the conflicting philosophies of the transitional period, how it propounded its thesis by creating new kinds of heroes such as Yudhisthira and Krsna, and how the text was reworked when it was canonized by thebrahmanas

This volume brings together scholarship from different disciplines on the theme ofneoliberalism.

India is increasingly becoming a battleground for "text wars", as puritanical revisionists try to impose their nationalist agenda. In this lively collection, distinguished Indian and non-Indian contributors tackle the major questions of free expression, communication, censorship and social pressure, but also social and media responsibility. The book contains essays, poems, and a cartoon comic-strip, most of them originals written specially for thispublication.

Rammohun Roy (c.1772-1833) is counted amongst the most influential intellectuals of Modern India. But even after a century of debate and enquiry, scholars are still not quite sure whether he was a consistent and articulatepolitical thinker, or a man of intellectual compromise and paradox. This book argues that Rammohun was a consistent thinker who creatively responded to the political challenges of the East India Company's government in India by reading deeply into Sanskritic and Indo-Persian intellectual traditions to develop a political thought of his own.

Alexander Cunningham, India's first professional archaeologist, became the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1871. This volume contains a collection of 193 letters he wrote between 1871 and 1888 to his Archaeological Assistant, J. D. M. Beglar. The letters, published here for the first time, edited and with an introduction by Upinder Singh, offer exciting, new insights into Cunningham's life and career, telling the story of the birth ofIndian archaeology and some of its greatest discoveries in real time, in Cunningham's own words.

The Idu Mishmi people of Dibang Valley, Arunachal Pradesh, believe that tigers are their elder brothers. Killing tigers is, for the Idu Mishmi, a taboo. While their beliefs support wildlife conservation, they also offer a critique of the dominant mode of nature protection. Tigers Are Our Brothers places the Idu Mishmi experience at the centre of a global network of cultural, economic, and political tensions to contribute to our understanding of human-non-humanrelations.

Starting with the period prior to the cityΓÇÖs birth in 1591, the book presentsan unbroken and colourful chronicle of Hyderabad, one of contemporaryIndiaΓÇÖs most important cities. Charting the cityΓÇÖs fascinating march fromBhagnagar to Hyderabad to ΓÇÿCyberabadΓÇÖ, this story is replete with diverseengaging, eccentric, and often daring characters, some of whose lives arestranger than fi ction. With a new chapter and updated information, thisedition will appeal to anybody keen on learning more about the city,including scholars, researchers, journalists, and historians.

This volume celebrates three streams of knowledge-psychoanalysis, culture, and religion-and their confluence in Kakar's work.

By the end of the eighteenth century, war-making and the East India Company''s violent conquest of South Asia created an ''early colonial order''. This distinctive early colonial order comprised of a political economy of conquest marked by repeated financial crises, a new regime of laws, ideological innovations justifying expensive warfare, changing conceptions of sovereignty, and the privileging of military over civilian power. This early colonial order was followed byan authoritarian, militarily dominant British Raj and continues to profoundly influence postcolonial South Asian polities.By drawing on a diverse range of archival documents and later studies, Manu Sehgal makes an important intervention in historiographical debates about eighteenth-century South Asian history and the centrality of violence to colonial rule. This work is the first full-length study of how coercive structures of authority trace their origins to this early, missing chapter in the history of modern South Asia.

Ludwig Wittgenstein''s interest in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, is recognized among scholars worldwide though little has been written on his fascination with Tagore''s poetry and symbolic plays. In Language, Limits, and Beyond, Priyambada Sarkar explores Tagore and Wittgenstein''s philosophical arguments on the concept of ''threshold of language and meaning'', highlighting the systematic connections between Tagore''s canon and Wittgenstein''s early works. Situatingher study in the early 1900s, when Tagore''s poetry had just become available in Europe, Sarkar finds similarities between Tagore''s and Wittgenstein''s exploration of the limits of language. She argues that Wittgenstein''s early philosophy can be better understood when juxtaposed with Tagore.Drawing parallels between the worlds of philosophy and poetry, Sarkar identifies the point of convergence of their two philosophies in the realm of language, tracing how they reach surprisingly similar conclusions through entirely different paths of inquiry. Sarkar finally claims that such important points of contact will help one to arrange the pieces of the Tractarian jigsaw puzzle in a manner where all the pieces of logic, language, world, and the mystical will fall into place and form acoherent picture.

Vaadivaasal is a masterful account not only of a traditional sport and the people who engaged in it, but also of the relations of power and how they played out in a bygone era. As a work that captures the tremors of a life-and-death battle between man and animal, it is an outstanding achievement in the annals of Tamil prose fiction.

The Koli community in Mumbai-which has been practising fishing for centuries-has experienced rapid changes over the last few decades, in the forms of increased mechanization, export of fish to global markets, and the pressure of urbanization on their living and work spaces. The capitalist transformation in fishing has altered what was once a caste-based practice to one that brought to it investors from outside the community, migrant workers, and ecologicaldegradation. The resultant loss of revenue, jobs, and catch for artisanal fishers has led to movements demanding fishing rights to be granted to traditional fisher communities alone and for a return to older fishing practices. This call found resonance with populist politics in the city: Koli women organizedthemselves to stridently resist the entry of migrant men into the sector and Koli men-particularly the young-became inclined to move out of the practice of fishing.Through an examination of the lives and struggles of fishers in one of India''s wealthiest cities, this book looks at how contestations around livelihoods map out in the shadow of significant encounters between capitalism and ecology.

The first full length study of India's Ministry of Home Affairs

Situating it at the intersection of vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political reordering of provincial north India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media's characteristic 'disobedience' is marked by a libidinal excess - simultaneously scandalizing and moralizing - to address the inexact calculi of Bhojpuri speaking region's 'underdevelopment'.

Since the time of Socrates to the present, public intellectuals have aligned themselves with the heretical imperative by questioning organized power and opened up social, political, economic, and cultural life to public scrutiny and accountability. This effort is described in this volume through the self-examined lives of philosophers such as Socrates and José Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus, and Yukio Mishima. They serve to elaborate the context of the author'sbold claim that B.R. Ambedkar, the central character of the author's research, is the boldest heretic in Indian political history.

This volume aims to forge interest in the field of sports studies and offers a platform for a wide range of studies on sports, employing a variety of approaches, perspectives, and methodologies.

This book illustrates the continuing paradoxes as well as the new challenges linked to childbirth in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. It brings together anthropologists, historians, and sociologists who reflect on the implications of these new schemes for women's own experiences.

The Sovereign Lives explores what it has meant for India and Pakistan to act as sovereign states entangled at birth by an unsatisfactory partition.

This book analyzes how discourses of cruelty against animals - in veterinary, dietary, and transport registers - inform the colonial imagination of humanitarianism. It argues that debates concerning animals invoked less protectionism, and reflected in microcosm the nature of British Empire and Bengali anxieties over dietetics and identity. Imagining animals as diseased, eaten and overworked, the study reveals that animal cruelty was often enacted in a space wherecontrol and submission were the dominant form of governance.