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Social Worlds of Premodern Transactions bring together a range of new perspectives on social and economic history. They show how exchange is not only about commodities or items, but also about interactions and relationships between people. The essays span a broad time frame, starting from the early historic and extending into the medieval. They range from studies of sites and micro-regions to translocal communities and transcontinental voyages.

This volume is a collection of eighteen ethnographic essays on Anthropological Explorations in East and South-East Asia, reprinted from Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, published during 1886-1936. Divided into five parts, it includes works on history, religion, tea cult, the Torii of Japan and the Torans of India; on the veneration of the dead in China; on Tibet and its customs and practices, the Lamas and folklore in eastern Himalayas; on the monastic institution of Burma and its Phongys; Malay folklore, folk medicine, etiological folktales; and Burmese and Indian folk beliefs.

The religious order named Dādūpanth, which originated in Rajasthan, produced a wealth of manuscripts from about 1600 onwards. From the begining of this manuscript culture, huge codices were produced representing a chorus of voices, and reflecting the decisions made by the compilers or copyists regarding the validity of texts or entire traditions. These codices also served as the study manuals and homiletic tools of the compilers and copyists, all of them sadhus, who were more often than not also the users of these books. The discourse generated by them represents the intellectual and religious cosmos of their makers. In these codices, bhakti texts and the vernacular works of yogis are transmitted simultaniously, along with works representing a broader Vaishnava tradition, thereby documenting the dialogue of bhakti and yoga, and how commonalities and boundaries between the two were negotiated

This volume contains well researched papers based on primary sources and archaeological explorations and presents new findings on medieval Indian administration, culture, science and technology. It also has a study of new literary sources, both Persian and Europeans, with a full section to literary sources.The section on state and administration highlights Central Asian and European influence on state craft and the army. Mysticism and its impact on medieval policy, architecture and the new genre of literature known as 'Shahr Ashob' helps in the reconstruction of the eighteenth-century history of Shah- Jahanabad. The chapter on science and technology studies the military technology of the Delhi Sultanate and the impact of metal technology of the later Mughal period on the state of Bikaner in the skill development of both urban and rural workers. This chapter also includes a study of water harvesting and agricultural produce. This volume covers a large canvas of medieval Indian history examining many unexplored aspects of the period.

"The contributors to this book met at the first Conference on the Jews of Goa, which I convened at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East at Jerusalem, during 18-19 December 2016"--Page xi.

In this book, he has delved into his diary and put together sketches of those who left a lasting impression on him, in effect creating a portrait of contemporary India, showing the attractive features of this fascinating country, which Dietmar has come to love. He has learnt much from the Indian people he has met, and wishes to share his experiences with his readers. The text begins with his meeting Jawaharlal Nehru and ends with a short sketch of his life in India. He believes that he has had the good fortune of living in India during the formative stage of its history and becoming a historian of India, devoting his work to tracing the experiences of this great nation.

Set in the theoretical perspective of religious conversion in general, and that of tribal identity of Christians in particular, this volume brings out the complexities of the triangular relationship among tribal Christians, tribal Sarnās, and others. Based on historical records, some rare archival materials of the Church, oral traditions of the Urāoñ Adivasi community as well as fieldwork data, Religion, Conversion and Identity explores the dialectics between the old and the new. It presents insights derived from the processes of Indianization, indigenization and tribalization in the Church from the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and also addresses issues of ethnic and minority studies with a focus on identity formation and articulation.

This volume, focused on Odisha, situates the region in the wider context of its trans-regional background for as the archaeological and epigraphic evidence available shows that it was an integral part of a wider zone from the early historical period. Juxtaposing the patterns obtaining in the region with developments in other parts of the subcontinent, The Making of Regions in Indian History: Society, State and Identity in Premodern Odisha delineates the cultural transactions within and beyond that went into the making of Odisha.

In this collection of essays, the late Professor Mohammad Ishaq Khan (1946-2013) caps a lifetime of research into the history of Kashmir, especially of its cultural heritage. These essays are a broad selection from years of scholarship and give a clear view of Professor Khan's contribution to the field. Their main theme is Kashmiriyat, the essence of Kashmiri culture that can be traced through history. Professor Khan forcefully argues that Kashmiri Islam is 'neither syncretism nor synthesis'. In other words, Kashmiri culture should not be understood as a watered-down version of a 'pure' Islam, but rather the result of a cultural transformation in no way at odds with Islam as a religion. Professor Khan traces Kashmir's history as an outward looking and culturally self-assured society, tied closely to the rest of the Indian subcontinent, but maintaining unique traditions available to both Muslims and non-Muslims. The essays address the range of available historical sources, the relationship between Brahmanism and Islam, the role of saints and ritual in Kashmiri Islam, the Persian influence on Kashmir, and other topics. Professor Khan ends with a candid examination of his own experience as a Kashmiri living through the second half of the twentieth century.

This book attempts to comprehend the history of the Delhi Sultanate with reference to its Islamic identity.The Turkish chiefs, despite having a military advantage due to their expertise in horsemanship, could only consolidate their rule through adjustment and sharing of power with local kshatriya rulers, and, therefore, tended to incorporate an increasing number of Hindu chiefs in the ruling establishment. This process was sought to be made durable by conceding to the chiefs many of the pecuniary gains and social clout they had enjoyed before the conquests. According to Barani, the ulema endorsed the view that in the given situation, provisions of fiqah evolved in Arabia were not practicable in the Delhi Sultanate. By the same logic, settlements conceding to the village chiefs' important roles in the fiscal administration of rural tracts were justified. Additionally, the Islamic characteristics of the State system in the Delhi Sultanate were profoundly impacted by Sassanid and Turkish traditions of statecraft. With the passage of time many notions of Hindu caste culture also became influential in the mental makeup of the ruling elites of the Delhi Sultanate.

The essays in this volume deal with caste reform movements in Kerala of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which form the most significant development in the history of caste in modern times. The core of this book Caste in Kerala consists of four essays on cast reform movements among the Namputhiris, Nairs, Ezhavas and Dalits. They are prefaced by two essays which discuss the origin of the caste system in Kerala and the historical process of its fragmentation and proliferation. The closing essay throws light on the role caste plays in contemporary politics. Over time, most of the external attributes of caste system have been rendered irrelevant by the changes that have occurred in society with the decline of the feudal order and the subsequent movements for caste reform. Yet, caste has persisted. An analysis of the internal contradictions within these movements throws light on the enigma that caste continues to be.

Alternative Arguments is a tribute to Professor Surendra Gopal, a truly extraordinary historian, well-known for his undisputed and sterling scholarship. This collection of essays by his former colleagues, students and friends from India and abroad, comprises 37 scholarly contributions that have been broadly grouped into six sections: the Idea of India; Bihar: Ancient, Medieval and Modern; Indian Economy, Trade and Commerce; Nationalism and Freedom Struggle; Original Sources; and History through Art and Media.

Reconstructed history of three villages separately studied (Vrindavan, Radhakund and Rajpur), Mathura District, Western Uttar Pradesh, India.

Nowhere on earth is the relationship between man and land more complicated and seemingly as intractable as in South Asia. India alone, with some 1.37 billion people, most of whom work the land for a living, has known famine and scarcity on a scale unknown elsewhere. This has mocked humanity, threatened world peace and urged need to investigate causes and remedies. Chapters in this volume look at issues of land, tenure, and peasant from a variety of different disciplines-history, anthropology, economics, geography, political science, sociology. They furnish fresh insights on discrete localities and problems. Each is by a specialist who deals with intricate ways in which land and lord and labour have been combined and changed. Poverty and scarcity are not the same. Abolishing poverty by economic development alone, without coming to grips with conflicts, can beg the question and end in futility. Contributors emphasize the fallacy of thinking that, with just a little more money, fertilizer or know-how (often coming from an alien environment), problems of land tenure and distribution can be resolved. Socio-economic engineering, however well intentioned, is prone to end in frustration and failure, quite oblivious of how or why.

Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal is the third volume produced under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust (London) funded documentation project 'Western Medicine and Indigenous Society: History of Disease, Medicine and Public Health Policy in Colonial Eastern India, (1757-1947)'. While the first volume documented the context in which hospitals were established in Calcutta during the rule of the British East India Company, and the second analysed the trauma caused by tuberculosis in the public health system of twentieth-century India, the present volume brings together selections from official reports on cholera, malaria and smallpox-the three diseases which repeatedly struck colonial Bengal as epidemics. Its objective is to provide a useful resource for researchers, with ready entry points for reconstructing the incidence of these diseases, their mortality rates, social and economic effects as well as colonial medical interventions to contain them. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying epidemics that have struck human society in a historical continuum and the significance of the present collation needs to be viewed in this context. The book will be a welcome contribution to the rapidly developing field of History of Medicine.

In this volume, whose first edition won wide scholarly acclaim in India, nine distinguished Indian historians re-examine what is perhaps the central problem throughout India's history. In a general introduction, Frykenberg points out some of the broader aspects of the relations between land control and social structure. This is followed by a theoretical examination of the meaning of the concept of 'land' in an Indian milieu. Also included are essays on more specific themes: the zamindars under the Mughals; the disruption of land-holding under the British; the fate of the 'dispossessed'; the transformation of local rajas into landlords in Oudh; the Permanent Settlement in operation in a Bengal District; the integration of agrarian life in south India; the Ryotwari system in the Madras Presidency and the endurance and tenacity of village influences within south India from regime to regime. Specially new in this edition is an essay about persistent historical tendencies leading to structural disintegration entitled 'Traditional Processes of Power in South India'

This collection of essays, presenting various dimensions of research in social statistics, includes articles that are important from a historical as well as modern perspective. Beginning with a discussion on the changing role of statistics in social sciences and the importance of a methodological approach, the articles in this volume include a paper evaluating the theories prescribed in Kautilya's Arthashastra from a contemporary perspective. The cutting edge research techniques developed by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer, Nobel Laureates in Economics for 2019, such as exogenous natural experiments and instrumental variable techniques (IV) using two-stage least squares (2SLS) are also discussed in this volume.

Where the Dreams Cross: T.S. Eliot and French Poetry reconstructs the poetic career of one of the major poets of the twentieth century by closely analysing his creative responses to his favourite French poets and critics, who were influential in Eliot's development, and of their interrelations with each other, together with the contexts in which Eliot was exposed to their works-all of which enabled the author to cast a new light on an insufficiently considered area and unearth much that was draped in mystery. Vivid, amusing, and in a sense warm and consistently interesting, this book seems to have unmistakable Ancient Mariner gifts- it grips one and convinces. Regarded by Frank Kermode and others as a landmark in Eliot criticism, this book is, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement, 'an epiphany which unlocked a genius'.

Two hundred years after his birth, Īśvarcandra Vidyāsāgar remains a compelling figure in the history of modern Indian social change. The most widely acclaimed reformer of the nineteenth century after Rammohun Roy, Vidyāsāgar is renowned as both a Sanskrit pandit and an innovative modern thinker. Revered and reviled for his role in promoting the marriage of Hindu widows, he was also responsible for establishing new patterns in education, literature, and publishing. Idioms of Improvement offers such an account, making the case for a religious dimension to Vidyāsāgar's worldview that can explain both his impatience with orthodoxy and his respect for dharma. As one compelling species of liberal Hindu modernity, this worldview deserves careful explication and on-going critical reflection.

Facets of Public Health in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay focuses on some aspects of public health in the first three decades of the twentieth-century in Bombay Presidency. We begin with a review of the Western and Ayurvedic medicines, infant foods, tonics, and toiletries, advertised in contemporary English language newspapers, to evaluate how far the copy reflected contemporary social perceptions and notions of health. An attempt is made to understand the health of men and women textile mill workers of Bombay and Ahmedabad and the welfare measures provided to them.

Exploring the links between medicine and migration, Health, Medicine and Migration: The Formation of Indentured Labour, c.1834-1920 examines the ways in which medical knowledge, practice, and policies circulated between colonial India, thesource of indentured labourers, and the colonies to which they were transported as coolies. It argues that Western science, which itself was a product of modernity and the Enlightenment, acted as an instrument of social and cultural control over the migrants, and worked on the basis of racial categorizations of inferiority and superiority. The understanding of tropical diseases was shaped by a very biased Western perception of the hotter regions of the Southern Hemisphere. The indentured body was seen as the reservoir of diseases, which it had acquired from its unhealthy surroundings in India, and which were later carried overseas by it. The world of medical science and technology helped in the legitimatization and regularization of their body in the plantations. Engaging with the various spaces of the coolie world, depot, voyages, quarantine, and plantations, through a medical lens, this volume visualizes the body of labouring masses and the basic qualities of a 'healthy body' defined on these spaces. The shifting role of Western medicine from 'making labour to disabling labour', from 'masculine to feminine', and from 'valid to invalid' is also explored. Based on primary sources, this book will interest scholars, researchers and students of modern Indian history and social history of medicine, as well as the interested reader of migration history.

This book presents nine essays and two appendices on both, the 'history of ' and the 'history in' the Indian Ocean prior to c.1500 CE by identifying the factors of change and continuity with reference to particular cases and overviews alike. The third largest maritime space, with the subcontinent and Sri Lanka at its centre, the Indian Ocean has been regularly traversed at least since the third millennium BCE. The book discards the notion of the perceived efficacy of Brahmanical taboos against Indic seafaring and the Eurocentric perspective of 'the age of discoveries', in the history of the Indian Ocean.

Urban studies or urban history has recently emerged as a compelling framework for historical inquiry as it is a potent tool for the discovery of variations in urbanism and urbanization in the early modern and modern period. Urbanisms in South Asia: Northeast India Outside-In focuses on space syntax and social identity, power and governance, environment and ecology, culture and modernity, lived experiences, and the establishment of the transnational as pivotal for understanding the process of urbanization in the local as well as global context. With several chapters based on primary sources, the book offers new information on cities evolving on diverse topographies such as coastal areas, plains and even hilly states, as it attempts to examine the inner dynamics of cities and beyond. As the developing countries of South Asia undergo rapid urbanization, and urbanism takes on an increasingly global perspective through interactions and developments between cities and the environment, beyond nation-states and across continental boundaries, this volume strives to help its readers to look 'Outside-In' through comparative, transnational or crosscultural approaches. With an interdisciplinary approach, which includes sociology, the natural sciences, environmental history, archaeology, geography, history and psychology to understanding urbanism, these essays, variegated in outlook and geographical settings, tease out further research prospects while stimulating interest on urban studies in general.

This volume argues that concepts and ideologies shaped the practice of British rule in India; impacted policies and laws, and were embodied in institutions and practices, affecting both governance and Indian experience. Engaging with questions of historiography, it calls for a balanced assessment of India's growth or decline under British rule. Ideas Matter examines revenue policies and their consequences, generally but particularly in Bihar, stressing continuities from pre-colonial times but also discussing major changes deriving from British laws. Two chapters analyse the rationale and impact of the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885. Others discuss communal identities and the effects of colonial categorization, probing the significance of interpretations of the 1857 revolt and the Amritsar massacre of 1919, and considering the overtly non-communalist Abdul Latif (1828-93) and educational reforms intended to benefit Bengali Muslims.

Philology was everywhere and nowhere in classical South Asia. While its civilizations possessed remarkably sophisticated tools and methods of textual analysis, interpretation, and transmission, they lacked any sense of a common disciplinary or intellectual project uniting these; indeed they lacked a word for 'philology' altogether.

While Bollywood continues to be part of the psyche of Indians and South Asians the world over, the cinematic representation of identities, particularly of the Muslim as a cultural category, also contains within ideas about visualities and their impact. The contribution of cinema to ideological milieus is immense. Hindi cinema-through its romantic narratives and culture of myth-making-has tended to be one of the most powerful tools of political communication and propaganda.This book aims to bring cinematic narratives under the analytical lens and contextualize the representation of the Muslim in popular Hindi cinema. It also argues in favour of a noticeable transformation in the representation of Muslims in films through the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the emergence of a secularized portrayal which is far from unproblematic. Can one discern an attempt to construct a visual binary where the Muslims can be categorized as 'good' and 'bad'?

Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in which we think about environmental politics and human history. Intense discussions have already begun over whether we need to reconsider what we understand by the term 'environmental change' and if humans have truly become a 'geo-physical' force. Put differently, how should we recast our understanding of the planet's varied environmental pasts in order to make sense of the Anthropocene present? This collection of 19 essays on forestry and environmental change in the erstwhile colonies of the British Empire builds on Richard Grove's quest for achieving a 'global synthesis' as efforts towards writing environmental histories on a planetary scale. The Commonwealth of Nations as a single environmental bloc for study, enquiry and historical scrutiny, explores connected environmental histories, compares dissimilar ecological regions and debates ideologies for environmental management.

This book shows how gender is central to our imagination and understanding of modernity. The essays in this volume unravel the complexities of modernity's relationship to femininity and the cultures of gender construction amidst the diverse manifestations of colonialism and nationalism.The essays cover varied aspects of gender identities, including the private spheres of elite women who expressed their freedom through their subversive, restricted sexuality, thus shaking off the shackles of domination; the debates regarding dress codes for women; the deplorable condition of girls after marriage; legislative battles to achieve the right to divorce; challenges to notions of sports as a masculine activity; the different meanings of modernity for women writers; the implications of print cultures and cinema on women; gendered meanings of peace and partition; women's preferences, perceptions and practices; the politics of resistance; and questions of agency and autonomy.

India's Historic Battles: From Alexander the Great to Kargil focuses on the decisive battles that have shaped the course of Indian history. Taking into account recent research, especially in the fields of technology, military theory and demography, this book is an attempt to analyse the twelve great battles that have had a crucial impact on the fate of the subcontinent. Moving freely across time and space, and focusing on cross-continental analysis to bring out the uniqueness of the big battles fought in India as well as their commonality, each chapter dwells on the nature of the weapons used, type of leadership displayed, and the experience of the soldiers in each battle. An attempt has also been made in this book to construct counterfactual scenarios for most of the battles to show how often luck and chance decide the course of history. Parallel imageries are constructed on 'ifs' and 'buts'.

The 22 essays in this volume, written between 1974 and 2010, deal with the religious history and culture of Gujarat. The first part of this book focuses on Gujarati devotional literature: Vaiṣṇava pad-bhajan, Vallabhite dhoḷ, Sant-vāṇī Ismā'īlī Ginān, Ciśtī Gujarati bhajan, all with textual and thematic convergences. The second part analyses stories of saints and sacred places. Their constructions are in no way authentic historical accounts, but they provide a vivid picture of the time and society that produced them.The focus of these essays is more on an explortation of popular religions (lok-dharma) mainly in Saurashtra and Kutch, both in their oral and written transmission. Gujarat has a rich variety of religious currents (all of which are not treated here; some are merely evoked). They are reflected in literary sources and local observation and they demonstrate Gujarat's capacity to promote a regional culture nourished by a multiplicity of religions.