You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A rare look at the history of Himalayan peasant society and the relationship between culture and environment in the Himalayas. Himalayan Histories, by one of Indias most reputed historians of the Himalaya, is essential for a more complete understanding of Indian history. Because Indian historians have mainly studied riverine belts and life in the plains, sophisticated mountain histories are relatively rare. In this book, Chetan Singh identifies essential aspects of the material, mental, and spiritual world of western Himalayan peasant society. Human enterprise and mountainous terrain long existed in a precarious balance, occasionally disrupted by natural adversity, in this large and diffic...
This basic guide and resource book targets four fieldsreligious studies, history, world literature, and ethnic or migration studiesin which Sikhism is now receiving greater attention. The authors explain the problems of studying and interpreting Sikhism, and opportunities for integrating Sikh studies into a broader curriculum in each field. They also provide a sense of the Sikh communitys own approach to education, and evaluate materials and approaches at the North American university level. Included are a sample syllabus with an explanatory essay, a bibliographical guide, a glossary, and a general bibliography. Gurinder Singh Manns review of his course on Sikhism is an effective mini-guide to the field as a whole.
This edited volume is a detailed and critical study of Indian diaspora writings and its diverse themes. It focuses on dynamics and contemporary perspectives of Indian diaspora writings and analyzes emerging themes of this field like the experience of the Bihari diaspora, migration to Gulf countries, the relation between diasporic experience and self-translation, uprootedness and resistance discourse through ecocritical praxis and many more. With the aid of a subtle theoretical framework, the volume closely examines some of the key texts such as 'Goat Days, Baumgartner’s Bombay, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, The Circle of Reason', and authors including Shauna Singh Baldwin, M.G. Vassanji, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, V.S. Naipaul and others. The book also explores diaspora literature written in regional language and later translated into English and how they align with the fundamental Indian diaspora writings. A significant contribution to Indian diaspora writings; this volume will be of great importance to scholars and researchers of diaspora literature, migration and border studies, cultural, memory, and translation studies.
Originally published in 1999, David Ludden's book offers a comprehensive historical framework for understanding the regional diversity of agrarian South Asia. Adopting a long-term view of history, it treats South Asia not as a single civilization territory, but rather as a patchwork of agrarian regions, each with their own social, cultural and political histories. The discussion begins during the first millennium, when farming communities displaced pastoral and tribal groups, and goes on to consider the development of territoriality from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent chapters consider the emergence of agrarian capitalism in village societies under the British, and demonstrate how economic development in contemporary South Asia continues to reflect the influence of agrarian localism. As a comparative synthesis of the literature on agrarian regimes in South Asia, the book promises to be a valuable resource for students of agrarian and regional history as well as of comparative world history.
This book deals with the British discovery of Sikhs, their literature and history. Further, it reminds us of the Sikh political success after the occupation of Lahore by Ranjit Singh in 1799. True that the British enquiry was diplomatic and military during the 18th century. However, the Anglo-Sikh relations after the fall of Delhi and Hansi into the hands of the Company in 1803 and more so the Anglo-Sikh Treaties of January 1806 and April 1809 widened the scope of the enquiry. With Malcolm's work published in 1810, the Punjabi and Sikh writings especially the Bani of the Gurus or its elaborations by the Bhai's such as Gurdass and Mani Singh entered the field under investigation. Sikh History...
A powerful reassessment of a seminal moment in the history of India and the British Empire--the Amritsar Massacre--to mark its 100th anniversary The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the British Empire, yet it remains poorly understood. In this dramatic account, Kim A. Wagner details the perspectives of ordinary people and argues that General Dyer's order to open fire at Jallianwalla Bagh was an act of fear. Situating the massacre within the "deep" context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.
The Yeats -Tagore friendship and the eventual curious fallout between the two remain a mystery; the focus of this volume is a postcolonial reading of the two writers’ friendship, the critical reception of Tagore in 1912 England, and Tagore’s erasure from Western literary discourse. The essays in this volume take a decolonial turn to critically analyze the two writers in the discourse of power that is a part of their larger story. The nuances that appear in the pages of this illuminating book explore the meaning of "the politics of friendship" and the sense of intercultural relationship marred by colonialism. The volume re-envisions what the "postcolonial" can mean, be, and do. We can lea...
Through the concept of ‘Romantic nationalism’, this interdisciplinary global historical study investigates cultural initiatives in (British) India that aimed at establishing the nation as a moral community and which preceded or accompanied state-oriented political nationalism. Drawing on a vast array of sources, it discusses important Romantic nationalist traits, such as the relationship between language and identity, historicism, artistic revivalism and hero worship. Ultimately, this innovative book argues that because of the confrontation with European civilization and processes of modernization at large, cultivation of culture in British India was morally and spiritually more important to the making of the nation than in Europe.
Hindu nationalism has been responsible for acts of extreme violence against religious minorities and is a dominant force on the sociopolitical landscape of contemporary India. How does such a violent and exclusionary movement recruit supporters? How do members navigate the tensions between the normative prescriptions of such movements and competing ideologies? To understand the expansionary power of Hindu nationalism, Kalyani Menon argues, it is critical to examine the everyday constructions of politics and ideology through which activists garner support at the grassroots level. Based on fieldwork with women in several Hindu nationalist organizations, Menon explores how these activists use g...