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We live in a world of controversies, and often wonder what controversies do to a culture. Do they interpret it? Can one conceive of them as a genre? Can they offer serious diagnostic tools to the social scientist or the cultural historian? In this pioneering study, the author addresses these and similar questions, and examines if and how controversies help us understand the ways in which forms of nationalism and identity formation imagine, shape, and construct themselves. Focusing on major controversies at local and the national levels during colonial and postcolonial times, he deals with seemingly unconnected subjects, such as language, khadi, sexuality, textuality and authorship, and also personalities as diverse as Sarala Das, Radhanath Ray, Fakir Mohan, Tagore, Gandhi and Premchand.

Indian Emigrants to Sugar Colonies examines the relationship between the two phases of migration during the nineteenth century that made Calcutta Port the centre of overseas emigration from specific areas of India. It also delves into the reasons that made the migrants settle near the place of embarkation at the end of the century. Starting with an analysis of the causes of large-scale emigration from parts of northern and eastern India and ending with reasons behind changes in the direction of such population movements, this volume presents a new framework for writing migration history, intermingled with industrial expansion in British India during the nineteenth century. It is, thus, a combination of both external as well internal migration histories, enhanced with a cost-benefit analysis of this migration process and its consequences. The book is a compilation of a wealth of extracts, illustrative tables and comparisons gathered mostly from unpublished archival records, which establish its exposure both theoretically as well as statistically.

Mind and Body deals with the relationships between the ancient philosophical schools of Asia and medicine. It explores the mutually dependent relation between the mind and the body, and argues that Asian and Hippocratic medical systems, as well as the body and consciousness, should not be studied in isolation. The volume also demonstrates how ancient medical traditions can be used to improve the physical and mental health of people today. It comprises papers compiled by medical practitioners and researchers, including specialists of ayurveda, siddha, unani, homoeopathy, Sowa-Rigpa, naturopathy, yoga, and acupuncture, from different parts of Asia, including India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Aimed at addressing the lacunae in academic publications on women dancers in India, The Moving Space highlights the idea of the 'space' created, occupied and negotiated by women in Indian dance. It initiates a conversation between dance scholarship and women's studies, and brings together scholars from a multidisciplinary background, emphasizing that research and practice have roots in both these specific areas. This book takes dance as a critical starting point, and endeavours to create an inclusive discourse around the female dancer and the historic, gendered and contested 'space(s)' that accommodate or are created by her. Highlighting the scope and necessity of using feminist theories in understanding complex relationships between individual experiences, gendered representation and cultural constructions in the realm of dance in India, it traces the lived experience of the dancer--her movements, her voice and her subjectivity. This collection of essays contextualizes women dancers from diverse historical and social milieu--from temple to courtyard, from silver screen to dance bars and from national to regional stages--within the larger rubric of dance studies, and brings out stories of survival, struggle, empowerment, subjugation and subversion.

The deeply entrenched image of the interaction between Hindus and Muslims in India's past--as indeed in the present-- has generally been that of two aggressively antagonistic religious communities, with the superior political power wielded by one community defining its dominance over the other. This original colonial notion has often been contested by positing the thesis of syncretism at the religious level; by citing evidence of patronage across religious establishments, and of participation of both communities in the country's administration. Neither approach, however, took up the critical task of examining the viability of the premise of homogeneity in the composition of the two communities, or how contemporary perceptions may be used as a touchstone for 'othering' in heterogeneous societies of the past. Chattopadhyaya's Representing the Other?, originally published almost two decades ago, makes an attempt to construct perceptions of new ethnic groups in India in an important phase of its history, from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The evidence though insufficient, reveals not homogenous religious communities, but ethnic groups of diverse origins, located in different socio-political contexts as traders, raiders and plunderers, as well as rulers and administrators. The contexts define the characterization of these different categories by either invoking terminologies from the past for others or by coining ethnic terms. Based mainly on contemporary Sanskrit epigraphic and textual sources, this book is expected to be a major corrective to the way students are generally taught to read the history of our country of this period and of what followed.

Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India seeks to undertake two kinds of explorations, one methodological and the other thematic. Methodologically, it examines texts of inscriptions--historians' main source for references to ancient villages--from diverse angles to try and understand the morphologies of villages in relation to different terrains across the country. One important aspect of this exploration concerns understanding, to the extent possible, the relationship of village location/s and sources of water, both for fields and habitats. Thematic explorations, apart from looking for possible physical appearances of ancient villages, extend to the search for the re-examination of the concept of village community, the search for hierarchies among village residents and settlements, and the changing nature of relationship between apex political authorities and villages. The conclusion, deriving from these explorations, makes an argument for the need to depart from the image of India's villages as unchanging, inert, insulated and self-sufficient spatial units to viewing them as varied social spaces in interaction with other spaces, which also went through phases of historical change.