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In the immediate aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, an armed struggle ensued in its remote south-eastern corner. The hill people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, more commonly referred to as paharis, demanded official recognition, and autonomy, as the indigenous people of the Tracts. This demand for autonomy was primarily based on the claim that they were ethnically distinct from the majority 'Bengali' population of Bangladesh, and thereby needed to protect their unique identity. This book challenges the general perception within existing scholarship that indigenous claims coming from the Tracts are a recent and contemporary phenomenon, which emerged with the founding of the Bang...
In the immediate aftermath of the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, an armed struggle ensued in its remote south-eastern corner. The hill people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, more commonly referred to as paharis, demanded official recognition, and autonomy, as the indigenous people of the Tracts. This demand for autonomy was primarily based on the claim that they were ethnically distinct from the majority ‘Bengali’ population of Bangladesh, and thereby needed to protect their unique identity. This book challenges the general perception within existing scholarship that indigenous claims coming from the Tracts are a recent and contemporary phenomenon, which emerged with the founding of the ...
The rise of India and China as two major economic and political actors in both regional and global politics necessitates an analysis of not only their bilateral ties but also the significance of their regional and global pursuits. This book looks at the nuances and politics that the two countries attach to multilateral institutions and examines how they receive, react to and approach each other’s presence and upsurge. The driving theme of this book is to highlight the enduring and emerging complexities in India-China relations, which are multi-layered and polygonal in nature, and both a result and reflection of a multipolar world order. The book argues that coexistence between India and Ch...
A revised and updated edition of Willem van Schendel's state-of-the-art history, revealing the vibrant and colourful past of Bangladesh.
This book expands the scope of understanding of the vast, albeit uneven, experience of the 1947 Partition of India by including localities and life stories from and beyond the regions of Punjab and Bengal. Building on existing research on Partition, the chapters present and analyse the consequences of Partition displacement and the resilience of communities in different parts of the nation. Regions discussed include the Chitmahals, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Andaman Islands, and Jammu and Kashmir. The contributors show that the heterogeneity of people’s experiences reside in spaces of the family, home, neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities refugee settlements, letters, memoir...
This book is an enquiry into the elision of the figure of the sovereign, cotton-producing Garo in the colonial archive and its savage transformation into imperialism’s quintessential ‘primitive’ in the period between 1760 CE and 1900 CE. The precolonial political economy of hill cotton produced by the Garos, its unhinging from the exercise of Garo sovereignty and its eventual commodification twined with the deterritorialization of the community as it made way for elephant mehals and reserved forests form the kernel of the book. This history is seen as participating in and mirroring analogous processes of colonization across vast contiguous swathes of India, including Mymensingh, Chitta...
An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, c. 1798–1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and Christianity; speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or slash-and-burn agriculture. This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as botany, natural history, gender, enumerative statistics, and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map, and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race, and nation.
This book critically examines the causes of the increase in insurgent violence in Balochistan and explores the relations between the national government of Pakistan and the province of Balochistan. Based on historical analysis, the book argues that the national government of Pakistan and the leaders of Balochistan both use a standard narrative when dealing with each other. According to the Baloch narrative, Islamabad exploits Balochistan’s natural resources without giving Balochistan its due share and has never accepted and granted Balochistan equal rights. The centre’s narrative emphasizes the tribal character of the Baloch society and suggests that the Baloch elite hinder Balochistanâ€...
The study of the political economy of development in India is significant as India has emerged as one of the fastest-growing countries during the last three decades and the rate of economic growth and poverty reduction have not been matched in India’s subnational states. Although the Union Government has introduced and implemented several economic reforms since 1991 to enhance the economic development, the results of implantation have varied. Governance and Development in India compares two Indian subnational states, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. The book does not consider the state as an aggregate entity; rather, it disaggregates the state relationally and spatially. Concentrating on the micr...
This book looks at the study of ideas, practices and institutions in South Asian Islam, commonly identified as ‘Sufism’, and how they relate to politics in South Asia. While the importance of Sufism for the lives of South Asian Muslims has been repeatedly asserted, the specific role played by Sufism in contestations over social and political belonging in South Asia has not yet been fully analysed. Looking at examples from five countries in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan), the book begins with a detailed introduction to political concerns over ‘belonging’ in relation to questions concerning Sufism and Islam in South Asia. This is followed with sections on Producing and Identifying Sufism; Everyday and Public Forms of Belonging; Sufi Belonging, Local and National; and Intellectual History and Narratives of Belonging. Bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines, the book explores the connection of Islam, Sufism and the Politics of Belonging in South Asia. It is an important contribution to South Asian Studies, Islamic Studies and South Asian Religion.