Download or read book Precolonial India in Practice written by Cynthia Talbot and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-20 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The society of traditional India is frequently characterized as static and dominated by caste. This study challenges older interpretations, arguing that medieval India was actually a time of dynamic change and fluid social identities. Using records of religious endowments from Andhra Pradesh, author Cynthia Talbot reconstructs a regional society of the precolonial past as it existed in practice.
Download or read book Precolonial India in Practice written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study on India shows that the medieval era was a period of dynamic change during which the regional societies that characterize India today began to take recognizable shape. It focuses on the region of Andhra Pradesh.
Download or read book Garden and Landscape Practices in Pre colonial India written by Daud Ali and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2020-11-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials. The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.
Download or read book Kingship and Political Practice in Colonial India written by Pamela G. Price and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a cultural history which considers the transformation of south Indian institutions under British colonial rule in the nineteenth century, Pamela Price focuses on the two former 'little kingdoms' of Ramnad and Sivagangai which came under colonial governance as revenue estates. She demonstrates how rivalries among the royal families and major zamindari temples, and the disintegration of indigenous institutions of rule, contributed to the development of nationalist ideologies and new political identities among the people of southern Tamil country. The author also shows how religious symbols and practices going back to the seventeenth century were reformulated and acquired a new significance in the colonial context. Arguing for a reappraisal of the relationship of Hinduism to politics, Price finds that these symbols and practices continue to inform popular expectation of political leadership today.
Download or read book Producing India written by Manu Goswami and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-01-26 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and interstate dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment. Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.
Download or read book Political Violence in Ancient India written by Upinder Singh and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gandhi and Nehru helped create a myth of nonviolence in ancient India that obscures a troubled, complex heritage: a long struggle to reconcile the ethics of nonviolence with the need to use violence to rule. Upinder Singh documents the tension between violence and nonviolence in ancient Indian political thought and practice, 600 BCE to 600 CE.
Download or read book The Religion and Beliefs of Ancient India written by Susan Henneberg and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India is home to the world’s oldest religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Jainism. All three evolved from shared beliefs and traditions, such as reincarnation, karma, and liberation and achieving nirvana. These beliefs and traditions evolved in the Indus River Valley around 3500 BCE. This volume explores the religions of ancient India, including rituals practiced and deities worshipped, to provide students with an understanding of the beliefs of the peoples of ancient India. With engaging text, rich and colorful illustrations, and an enhanced e-book option, this title is a valuable resource for reports.
Download or read book Religions of Tibet in Practice written by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-25 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1997, Religions of Tibet in Practice is a landmark work--the first major anthology on the topic ever produced. This new edition--abridged to further facilitate course use--presents a stunning array of works that together offer an unparalleled view of the Tibetan religious landscape over the centuries. Organized thematically, the twenty-eight chapters are testimony to the vast scope of religious practice in the Tibetan world, past and present. Religions of Tibet in Practice remains a work of great value to scholars, students, and general readers.
Download or read book Stages of Capital written by Ritu Birla and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Stages of Capital, Ritu Birla brings research on nonwestern capitalisms into conversation with postcolonial studies to illuminate the historical roots of India’s market society. Between 1870 and 1930, the British regime in India implemented a barrage of commercial and contract laws directed at the “free” circulation of capital, including measures regulating companies, income tax, charitable gifting, and pension funds, and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading. Birla argues that this understudied legal infrastructure institutionalized a new object of sovereign management, the market, and along with it, a colonial concept of the public. In jurisprudence, case law, and statutes, colonial market governance enforced an abstract vision of modern society as a public of exchanging, contracting actors free from the anachronistic constraints of indigenous culture. Birla reveals how the categories of public and private infiltrated colonial commercial law, establishing distinct worlds for economic and cultural practice. This bifurcation was especially apparent in legal dilemmas concerning indigenous or “vernacular” capitalists, crucial engines of credit and production that operated through networks of extended kinship. Focusing on the story of the Marwaris, a powerful business group renowned as a key sector of India’s capitalist class, Birla demonstrates how colonial law governed vernacular capitalists as rarefied cultural actors, so rendering them illegitimate as economic agents. Birla’s innovative attention to the negotiations between vernacular and colonial systems of valuation illustrates how kinship-based commercial groups asserted their legitimacy by challenging and inhabiting the public/private mapping. Highlighting the cultural politics of market governance, Stages of Capital is an unprecedented history of colonial commercial law, its legal fictions, and the formation of the modern economic subject in India.
Download or read book Asian Medical Systems written by Charles M. Leslie and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1998 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asian Medical Systems provide fascinating opportunities to observe directly practices that continue ancient scientific modes of thought, and to analyse the historical processes that meditate their relationship to modern science and technology. Three great traditions of medical science evolved during antiquity in the Chinese, Indian, and Mediterranean civilizations, all based on humoral conceptions of health and illness. Folk curers throughout the world continue to practice humoral medicine, but in Asia along educated physicians maintain its learned traditions. Thus, in these societies the great and little traditions of humoral medicine coexist with cosmopolitan medicine, which draws upon modern science and modes of professional organization. This volume has been designed to show how research on Asian medicine opens a new field of scholarship, the comparative study of medical systems. Such a book requires the skills of authors with many kinds of training, and those who have contributed essays to this volume are trained in history, sociology, anthropology, public health, pharmacology, epidemiology, cosmopolitan medicine, and philosophy.
Download or read book TILLING THE LAND written by Deepak Kumar and published by Ratna Sagar. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume sheds light on systems of agricultural knowledge, inherited agricultural practices and allied activities, adoption of new knowledge as well as attempts at modernization, and the involvement and perception of the key historical players and agricultural pioneers who initiated the process of transformation of the system of agrarian production and the creation of a new agrarian knowledge base against the backdrop of burgeoning Western scientific knowledge. Going beyond the scope of work of those who have written agrarian histories of colonial India focussing primarily on issues related to control over land, organization of agrarian production, agrarian relations, rural credit and agrarian commercial network, this volume attempts to examine the productionist discourse in the colonial period as well as throws new light on hitherto unexplored issues related to the colonial impact on indigenous agrarian systems.
Download or read book Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient India written by Ram Sharan Sharma and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publ.. This book was released on 1991 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present work Aspects of Political Ideas and Institutions in Ancient Indian discusses different views on the origin and nature of the state in ancient India. It also deals with stages and processes of state formation and examines the relevance of caste and kin-based collectivities to the construction of polity. The Vedic assemblies are studied in some detail, and developments in political organisation are presented in relation to their changing social and economic background. The book also shows how religion and rituals were brought in the service of the ruling class.
Download or read book Castes of Mind written by Nicholas B. Dirks and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-09 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.
Download or read book The Courts of Pre colonial South India written by Jennifer Howes and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates how the material culture of South Indian courts was perceived by those who lived there in the pre-colonial period. Howes peels away the standard categories used to study Indian palace space, such as public/private and male/female, and replaces them with indigenous descriptions of space found in court poetry, vastu shastra and painted representations of courtly life. Set against the historical background of the events which led to the formation of the Ramnad Kingdom, the Kingdom's material circumstances are examined, beginning with the innermost region of the palace and moving out to the Kingdom via the palace compound itself and the walled town which surrounded it. An important study for both art historians and South India specialists. The volume is richly illustrated in colour.
Download or read book Kingship And Political Practice In Colonial India written by Price and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Colonial Terror written by Deana Heath and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on India between the early nineteenth century and the First World War, Colonial Terror explores the centrality of the torture of Indian bodies to the law-preserving violence of colonial rule and some of the ways in which extraordinary violence was embedded in the ordinary operation of colonial states. Although enacted largely by Indians on Indian bodies, particularly by subaltern members of the police, the book argues that torture was facilitated, systematized, and ultimately sanctioned by first the East India Company and then the Raj because it benefitted the colonial regime, since rendering the police a source of terror played a key role in the construction and maitenance of state sovereignty. Drawing upon the work of both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, Colonial Terror contends, furthermore, that it is only possible to understand the terrorizing nature of the colonial police in India by viewing colonial India as a 'regime of exception' in which two different forms of exceptionality were in operation - one wrought through the exclusion of particular groups or segments of the Indian population from the law and the other by petty sovereigns in their enactment of illegal violence in the operation of the law. It was in such fertile ground, in which colonial subjects were both included within the domain of colonial law while also being abandoned by it, that torture was able to flourish.
Download or read book India The Ancient Past written by Burjor Avari and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India: The Ancient Past provides a clear and systematic introduction to the cultural, political, economic, social and geographical history of ancient India from the time of the pre-Harappan culture nine thousand years ago up until the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era. The book engages with methodological and controversial issues by examining key themes such as the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, the Aryan controversy, the development of Vedic and heterodox religions, and the political economy and social life of ancient Indian kingdoms. This fully revised and updated second edition includes: Three new chapters examining the differences and commonalities between the north and south of India; Extended discussion on contested issues, such as the origins of the Aryans and the role of feudalism in ancient India; New source excerpts to introduce students to the most significant works in the historiography of India, and questions for discussion; Study guides, including a list of key issues, suggested readings and a selection of internet sources for each chapter; Specially designed maps to illustrate different time periods and geographical regions This richly illustrated guide provides a fascinating account of the early development of Indian culture and civilization that will appeal to all students of Indian history.
