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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 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.

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.

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.

Making Officers out of Gentlemen aims to study the emergence and evolution of the military training and feeder institutions, beginning in the early twentieth century, which were central to the project of Indianization-a key political and nationalist process aimed at opening up of the officer ranks to Indians in the Indian Army.

Mathura is most famous for its association with Vasudeva-Krsna, an important deity of the Hindu pantheon. In ancient times, however, this site contributed towards the production of exquisite pieces of sculpture, inscriptions, and terracottas associated with Buddhism, Jainism, and the Naga and Yaksa traditions as well. The literature and art inspired by these traditions make the religious landscape of Mathura a fascinating subject of study. Before Krsna is one suchwork that entails an epigraphic analysis of Mathura from the early historical till the early medieval period. It examines the content of inscriptions from Mathura, correlates it with other archaeological and literary sources, and assesses the available data in the context of the social, political, andeconomic processes underway in the Indian subcontinent at that time. This monograph not only provides the reader a taste of Mathura's religious diversity and plurality over time, but is also relevant for understanding the history of specific religious traditions and the threads of interaction between them.

This volume is a testament to the breadth and policy relevance of development economics today. It grapples with questions on how to design anti-poverty policies and under what conditions we can expect them to be successful. It concentrates on programmes and policies for India and covers international experience with cash transfer programmes. The work in this area applies core theoretical insights to policy discussions surrounding poverty measurement, incomeinequality, rural unemployment, and compares alternative growth strategies in terms of their impact on poverty and inequality.

This volume brings together some of the world's leading experts to analyze some of the most complex challenges facing survival and health in India and what it would take to address them.

The three plays collected in this volume not only span Karnad's creative graph from his first play, Yayati, to his most recent, Boiled Beans on Toast, but also chart out the themes that have disturbed and shaped Indian drama since Independence. The volume includes an extensive introduction by theatre scholar Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker, which analyses Karnad's work in the context of modern Indian drama.

This a collection of four history plays by the eminent author late Girish Karnad. The volume offersKarnad's readers and critics an opportunity for the kind ofdiscerning assessment of his drama that he has favoured andpracticed for several decades.

This a collection of four history plays by the eminent author late Girish Karnad. The volume offersKarnad's readers and critics an opportunity for the kind ofdiscerning assessment of his drama that he has favoured andpracticed for several decades.