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A commitment to modernity is the underlying theme of this volume. Through interpretive and theoretical essays, Geeta Kapur seeks to situate the modern in contemporary cultural practice. The essays here propose resistance to the depoliticization of narratives and affirm an open-ended engagement with the avant-garde.

Taking the instability of all identities as its point of departure, this collection of essays probes the enigmas of identity politics. How does 'identitarian' politics, trying to homogenize identities around some cultural or ethnic name, deal with unstable and diverse identities? And what are the kinds of identity formations that resist identity-based projects? Drawing from theoretical perspectives on communal polarization and its relation to early nationalism, the author examines a range of seemingly dissimilar subjects, such as the teaching of Keats in a Delhi college, the Indian novel in the English language, nineteenth-century Banglasahitya, inter-community love, communalism, Tagore and globalization, and inter-disciplinarity.Some of the essays in this book are especially concerned with the recent decades that have witnessed the rise of Hindutva, and which have also marked the author's own growth from a student of English Literature at Delhi University to his later interest and scholarship in history and politics. Pradip Datta begins with his reading of Keats, the quintessential Romantic poet, under the tutelage of a teacher of English with a vernacular background, at a time that witnessed the capitalist expansion of the middle class as well as the spread of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement across the cities and towns of India. His interest in plotting the coordinates of heterogeneity and interrogating identity formations led him to travel to Ayodhya in the early 1990s and interact with kar sevaks there.This book is therefore a part of the author's ongoing attempt at examining how literary and politico-cultural representations of identities can reinforce rigid boundaries. Juxtaposing these with knowledge systems and their respective methods, Pradip Datta argues in favor of practices and spaces that facilitate exchange and reciprocity among a range of disciplines. By proposing the idea of a disciplinary 'commons', he offers the pedagogic as a model for recognizing and validating the heterogeneous elements in the formation of our identities.

The global financial crisis that exploded around September 2008 was just one more in a series of crises that have affected more than sixty countries in the era of financial liberalization. Of course the latest crisis is particularly significant in a number of ways: it originated in the core of capitalism, in the United States; it has spread dramatically across the world, even to countries that earlier seemed to be relatively secure; it calls into question many of the mainstream economic dogmas that have dominated economic policy-making for more than two decades. Yet, in some other ways, the current crisis is not very different from those that have preceded it in the recent past.July 2007 marked a decade since the onset of financial crisis in several East and Southeast Asian countries. The crisis of 1997 focused attention on the dangers associated with a world dominated by fluid finance. It brought home the fact that financial liberalization can result in crises even in so-called 'miracle economies'. Prior to the crisis, the pace and pattern of growth in many countries in that region were challenging the dominance of the original capitalist powers over the global economy. The 1997 crisis set back that process, and even after a decade many of these countries have not been able to recover their pre-crisis dynamism. In hindsight, it is clear that currency and financial crises have devastating effects on the real economy. The ensuing liquidity crunch and wave of bankruptcies result in sever deflation, with attendant consequences for employment and the standard of living. The adoption, post-crisis, of conventional IMF stabilization strategies tends to worsen the situation: governments become so sensitive to the possibility of future crises that they continue to adopt very restrictive macro-economic policies and restrain public expenditure even in crucial social sectors. Finally, asset-price deflation and devaluation pave the way for foreign capital inflows that finance a transfer of ownership of assets from domestic to foreign investors, thereby enabling a conquest by international capital of important domestic assets and resources.This book delineates the alternative trajectories of post-crisis development in different economies, the lessons they offer and the implications they have for alternative policies. It is important to take stock of these processes not only for understanding the experience of the 'crisis economies' of East and Southeast Asia, but also because it is becoming evident that the international financial system has still not evolved effective ways of preventing such crises among emerging economies and of reducing their damaging effects. Indeed, an examination of the post-crisis experience of countries outside East Asia reveals important similarities (as well as some differences) that have implications for all developing countries that have undergone a significant degree of global economic integration. This book therefore has a wider focus than the East Asian 'crisis economies' alone: it tries to situate post-crisis developments in a broader analysis of the recent political economy of international capitalism, in particular the role of mobile finance. It also offers comparative perspectives on post-crisis restructuring in other developing countries that have experienced crisis; as well as on the experience of other Asian countries that were affected by, but did not experience financial crisis. While the essays in this book were originally written in 2007, they still remain extraordinarily relevant to the present times, not least because they anticipate the processes that led to the global financial meltdown in 2008. A key insight of much of the analysis in this book is how market-oriented strategies to cope with the crisis created further financial fragility in many post-crisis economies. To that extent many of these papers effectively predict the severe impact the current global crisis is having on both financial variables and the real economy, in developing countries in particular.

The primary focus of most scholars in the field of medieval Indian studies has been on economic history. Their judgement and estimate of medieval Indian society are largely based on the data available on economic, social, and politico-administrative institutions. In contrast, processes and phenomena that belong to the spheres of mentality, religion, culture, scientific knowledge - the worldview of medieval Indians - have attracted little attention, and mostly as an appendix to the 'fundamental' themes. The typical historical treatise on the medieval period deals with political events, the economy (agriculture, crafts and trade), major social groups (their relation and life), the administrative system, taxation and, at the end, as a concession, 'a bit of culture' - brief descriptions of religious life, literature, and the fine arts.This volume seeks to create an interest in the mental and behavioral aspects of medieval society in India. The contributors to the volume belong to various schools of thought and follow different methodological approaches in their study of socioeconomic and administrative development of medieval India. The papers presented here make a collective effort to denote several components of the medieval Indian 'mental program'. First, that the medieval Indian state may be viewed not only in terms of control, exploitation, extraction and appropriation, but also in terms of practices, ideas and ideologies that were closely linked (among other things) with religion. Second, that medieval Indian society had a specific understanding of the past and of social experience, and that history, individual or collective, was recorded and reproduced not just to state facts, but also to create patterns for subsequent generations to follow. Third, that a central feature of medieval society was hierarchy - as embedded in the relations not only between social classes and groups but between individuals, and as encompassing even intimate feelings and desires. Further, that the intellectual worlds of medieval India, as revealed by literary, philosophical and grammatical treatises, which are the repositories of intellectual, spiritual and emotional experience, reflect the modes of dissemination and preservation of tradition as well as of dissent. Fourth, the presence of social and communal conflict, and of mechanisms of conflict resolution, that were peculiar to medieval Indian society. The editors of the volume believe that there is need for comparative studies, first, to realize the peculiarities of the medieval outlook in various regional cultures of India, and second, to study what in the worldview under research was specifically Indian and what was typically medieval and common to other pre-modern societies.

The essays collected in this volume explore the relationship between political and social censorship, and, more significantly, the rise of an insidious communal censorship that seeks to divide civil society and intimidate all those who value the gift of free speech as they burn books, silence dissent, destroy works of art, and intimidate the artist, researcher, writer, film-maker, actor, and free thinker. The author reflects on how free speech in India has been compromised by state censorship through 'slapp' suits in court, and on issues of official secrecy, contempt of court, and censorship by intolerance in civil society and government. More specifically he examines the uses and abuses of the law, the case of harassing Husain, the Danish 'Toon' controversy, and the right to strike. The author argues, unrepentantly, that free speech has to be preserved in the overcrowded spaces of the media, on the streets and in the open spaces of our mind, against the onslaught of corporatism, doubtful governance and invidious divisiveness. Freedom of the mind and the right to self-expression and argument can only survive if intolerance is met with tolerance, and tolerance is not seen as weakness.

This is a study of technology as self-help endeavor in the home and the provisioning of the household; as work in the rural workshop that supplies pots or iron tools for the village; and as techniques mastered in the urban workshop feasible not in simple tribal villages but when new production institutions emerge with the development of a political hierarchy. It travels from the agricultural field to the building of the home (with its food-processing and storage facilities), to urban water supply techniques and transport mechanisms, to the use of stone, bronze and iron for tools and weapons. A glimpse is afforded of the difference between the making of pottery by hand and the use of the potter's wheel. The social circumstances required of pottery production are in turn contrasted with those required of metallurgy. The whole is based on the archaeological evidence of the Neolithic to Iron Age cultures of South Asia, and concurrently, on observations of some technological processes followed by villagers today.The book asks if it is the nature of tools available that could have made possible the use of materials such as certain semi-precious stones or ivory. Which were the craft technologies that depended on bronze tools in the Indus cities? Else, it may have been horse-riding that prompted chiefs of southern India to sponsor the production of new kinds of iron weapons. It is, besides, possible that the charcoal requirements of early iron-smelting and forging are connected with localized deforestation, and that this had a role to play in the organization and dispersal of the industry. Why were masonry wells so rare after the Indus Valley civilization? Why is glass production known in the Bronze Age of Western Asia but in the Iron Age of South Asia? In what economic circumstances did people begin to use wheeled transport? Technology is not viewed here as a self-generating phenomenon. Instead, puzzles are explained by social and economic factors such as the nature of the work group and the resultant production process, and by political structures as well.

In Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors, Barnita Bagchi examines writings that focus on female education and development by five representative British women writers who flourished between 1778 and 1814 - Lady Mary Hamilton, Clara Reeve, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, and the early Jane Austen. In a climate in which female education was a subject of anxiety in print culture and fiction a site of contestation, and in which women were emerging as major producers both of educational writing and heroine-centered, ostensibly didactic fiction, these writers produced fictions of female education that were pioneering Bildungsromans. Highly gendered, these fictions explore key tensions generated by the theme of education, including the dialectics between formal and experiential education, between the pliable pupil obedient to pedagogical authority-figures and the more self-sufficient autodidact, and between a desire for greater institutionalization of education and a recognition of the flexibility given by distancing from established structures. There is a congruence between the ambulatory, tension-ridden patterns of female education found in these fictions and the distinctive, miscellaneous fictional knowledge they represent - their creators grappled with the epistemological and ethical status of fiction which they connected with female experience. The writers of these fictions held conservative views on national politics, and categories such as gender, race and class are disturbingly aligned in many of their works. However, Bagchi argues, these women writers should not be straitjacketed as subjects of an emergent hegemonic bourgeois order. Also, the journeys towards emancipation as well as the starkly disturbing closing off of many such possibilities in the writings analyzed here remain reflected in the lives of many women today.

Contributed articles chiefly on cultural history of India; includes articles on education and the state; collection of memorial lectures delivered between 1992 and 2004; lectures organized in honor of Dr. Zakir Husain, scholar, writer, and former president of India.

Translations of author's selected writings in Bengali.

Focuses on how workers and small enterprises in India fare when faced with the processes of globalization and liberalization. This work raises questions about the experience of Indian development since the onset of economic reforms in 1991.