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Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achiev...
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.
In his introduction to this collection of essays by constitutional experts, Philip Bryden says that Canadians can be proud of their commitment to the protection of rights and liberties in the Charter. Canada, he believes, is a better place to live then it would be otherwise. Nevertheless, as the essays in this book reveal, the case in favour of the Charter is not simple or one-sided. For instance, Kim Campbell, minister of justice at the time of writing, and Jeffrey Simpson of the Globe and Mail express concern that the Charter promotes a rights discourse that threatens to overwhelm the ordinary politics of recognizing and accommodating different interests. Dean Lynn Smith of the University of British Columbia law faculty observes that the Charter rights are better understood as complementing than as supplanting traditional mechanisms. The authors, diverse in background and outlook, reflect varying points of view but share a significant degree of consensus on issues that need to be addressed.
He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason - and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation."--BOOK JACKET.
First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.
A multicultural anthology of poems represents the poetic voices, observations, traditions, and stories of people from some sixty countries around the world.
"Examines the rise of the urban right-wing Hindu nationalist ideology in India called Hindutva between 1984 and 2004"--
On the completion of fiftieth year of Sahitya Akademi.