South Asian History and Culture – serie

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics.The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation.The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

This book explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry. It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which inform even contemporary descriptions of the subcontinent. Using idolatry as a concept-metaphor, the book traverses an ambitious path through the works of William Jones, James Mill, Friedrich Max Müller, John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, E. M. Forster, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee. It reveals how religion and paganism, history and literature, Oriental thought and Western metaphysics, and social reform and education were unfolded and debated by them. The author underlines how idolatry, irrationality and social disorder came to be linked by discourses informed by Enlightenment, missionary rhetoric and colonial reason. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in history, anthropology, literature, culture studies, philosophy, religion, sociology and South Asian studies as well as anyone interested in colonial studies and histories of the Enlightenment.

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics.The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation.The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

This book explores the ‘folk’ performance genre of Kobigaan, a dialogic song-theatre form in which performers verse-duel in contemporary West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. The book shows how the genre, thought to be a nearly extinct form, is still prevalent in the region. The author shows how, like many other ‘folk’ practices in South and South-East Asia, the content and format of this genre has undergone vital changes, thus raising questions of authenticity, patronage, and cultural politics. She captures live performances of Kobigaan through ethnographies spread across borders—from village rituals to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and new media. While understanding Kobigaan from the practitioners’ points of view, this book also explores the crucial issues of gender, marginalisation, and representation that are true of any performance genre. Drawing on case studies, it underlines the issues of artistic agency, empowerment, cultural labour and heritage, rituals, authenticity, creative industries, media, gender, and identity politics.Part of the South Asian History and Culture series, this book is a major intervention in South Asian folklore and performance studies. It also expands into the larger disciplines of literature, social and cultural movements in South Asia, ethnomusicology, and the politics of performance.

The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur.The volume foregrounds the primacy of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’— upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an ‘indigenous mode of feminism’. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution — albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.

This book traces the social and political history of the Muslims of south India from the later nineteenth century to Independence in 1947, and the contours that followed. It describes a community in search of political survival amidst an ever-changing climate, and the fluctuating fortunes it had in dealing with the rise of Indian nationalism, the local political nuances of that rise, and its own changing position as part of the wider Muslim community in India.The book argues that Partition and the foundation of Pakistan in 1947 were neither the goal nor the necessarily inescapable result of the growth of communal politics and sentiment, and analyses the post-1947 constructions of events leading to Partition. Neither the fact of Muslim communalism per se before 1947 nor the existence of separate Muslim electorates provide an explanation for Pakistan. The book advances the theory that micro-level studies of the operation of the former, and the defence of the latter, in British India can lead to a better understanding of the origins of communalism. The book makes an important contribution to understanding and dealing with the complexities of communalism — be it Hindu, Muslim or Christian — and its often tragic consequences.

This book analyses India’s relations with its neighbours (China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and other world powers (USA, UK, and Russia) over a span of 60 years. It traces the roots of independent India’s foreign policy from the Partition and its fallout, its nascent years under Nehru, and non-alignment to the influence of economic liberalization and globalization. The volume delves into the underlying reasons of persistent problems confronting India’s foreign policy-makers, as well as foreign-policy interface with defence and domestic policies.This book will be indispensable to students, scholars and teachers of South Asian studies, international relations, political science, and modern Indian history.

This book explains how access to and use of land, water and language helped shape Andhra politics in India from 1850 down to the present day. After independence, the debate over land reform and policies on irrigation has shaped the fortunes of various governments, while the debate over the make-up of the language-based state has stimulated separatist movements like the one in support of Telangana.The book discusses how British innovations in irrigation in coastal Andhra in the mid-nineteenth century transformed the economy there from food crops to cash crops, and created new markets for local entrepreneurs. This stimulated increased education and social reform in the region, which in turn supported new politics in search of constitutional concessions. The drive for a Telugu language-based province then arose in concert, and those political resources were then used to determine local patterns down to independence. The 1930s ruse of the socialists, then the communist organisations, was an extension of land and water tax debates, which impacted the political nature of development — both before and after — independence. This is one of the first books on Andhra that recounts this story and is based on extensive archival research exploring the deep relationships between land, water, language and politics. It would be of primary interest to those studying modern nationalism in India, natural resource management, Indian politics and economic growth.

This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel, unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It explains how football became a viable popular social force with a rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of anti-imperial nationalist movement and postcolonial political tension and social transformation. In the process, it investigates certain key questions and problems in the social history of football in Bengal, which have hitherto been ignored in the existing works on the subject.The author offers some original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society. It strengthens the premise that social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, has tried to consider some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion. It indicates that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.

Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both rural and urban health care. Charting the history of the development of nursing in India over 100 years, Indian Sisters examines the reasons why nurses have so consistently been sidelined and excluded from health care governance and policymaking.The book challenges the routine suggestion that nursing’s poor status is mainly attributable to socio-cultural factors, such as caste, limitations on female mobility and social taboos. It argues instead that many of its problems are due to an under-achieved relationship between a patriarchal state on the one hand, and weak professional nursing organisations shaped by their colonial roots on the other. It also explores how the recent phenomenon of large-scale emigration of nurses to the West (leading to better pay, working conditions and career prospects) has transformed the profession, lifting its status dramatically. At the same time, it raises questions about the implications of emigration for the fate of health care system in India.An important contribution to the growing academic genre of nursing history, the book is essential reading for scholars and students of health care, the history of medicine, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and migration studies. It will also be useful to policymakers and health professionals.

This volume looks at the interface between ideology, religion and culture in Punjab in the 20th century, spanning from colonial to post-colonial times. Through a rereading of the history of Punjab and of Punjabi migrant networks the world over, it interrogates the term ‘radicalism’ and its relationship with terms such as ‘militancy’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ in the context of Punjab and elsewhere during the period; explores the relationship between left and religious radicalism — such as the Ghadar movement and the Akalis — and the continuing role of radical movements from British Punjab to the independent states of India and Pakistan.Expanding the dimensions on the study of Punjab and its historical impact in the South Asian region, this book will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, politics and sociology.

An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.

This book explores the ‘folk’ performance genre of Kobigaan, a dialogic song-theatre form in which performers verse-duel in contemporary West Bengal in India and Bangladesh. The book shows how the genre, thought to be a nearly extinct form, is still prevalent in the region. The author shows how, like many other ‘folk’ practices in South and South-East Asia, the content and format of this genre has undergone vital changes, thus raising questions of authenticity, patronage, and cultural politics. She captures live performances of Kobigaan through ethnographies spread across borders—from village rituals to urban festivals, and from Bengali cinema to television and new media. While understanding Kobigaan from the practitioners’ points of view, this book also explores the crucial issues of gender, marginalisation, and representation that are true of any performance genre. Drawing on case studies, it underlines the issues of artistic agency, empowerment, cultural labour and heritage, rituals, authenticity, creative industries, media, gender, and identity politics.Part of the South Asian History and Culture series, this book is a major intervention in South Asian folklore and performance studies. It also expands into the larger disciplines of literature, social and cultural movements in South Asia, ethnomusicology, and the politics of performance.

This book explores the myriad diversities of South Asian Islam from a historical perspective attuned to the lived practices of Muslims in various portions of South Asia, outside of Urdu, Persian, or Arabic language perspectives. These perspectives are, in some cases taken both from literal regions rarely noticed within discussions of South Asian Islam, such as Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. In other contributions the perspectives draw on historiographic interventions about the role of fakīrs in South Asian history, qasbahs in South Asian history, and the role of Aligarh students within the Pakistan movement. As a collection of voices aimed at stimulating debate about the range and diversity of South Asian Islam, the book probes meanings and markers of categories like "Indic," "Islamicate," and "local" or "global" Islam within the context of South Asia. Relevant to debates in the history of South Asia as well as Islamic studies, this collection will serve as a reference point for discussions about South Asian Islam as well as the nature and role of vernacularization as a cultural process. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis. The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of ‘being a man.’ Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This book analyses India’s relations with its neighbours (China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and other world powers (USA, UK, and Russia) over a span of 60 years. It traces the roots of independent India’s foreign policy from the Partition and its fallout, its nascent years under Nehru, and non-alignment to the influence of economic liberalization and globalization. The volume delves into the underlying reasons of persistent problems confronting India’s foreign policy-makers, as well as foreign-policy interface with defence and domestic policies.This book will be indispensable to students, scholars and teachers of South Asian studies, international relations, political science, and modern Indian history.

This book explains how access to and use of land, water and language helped shape Andhra politics in India from 1850 down to the present day. After independence, the debate over land reform and policies on irrigation has shaped the fortunes of various governments, while the debate over the make-up of the language-based state has stimulated separatist movements like the one in support of Telangana.The book discusses how British innovations in irrigation in coastal Andhra in the mid-nineteenth century transformed the economy there from food crops to cash crops, and created new markets for local entrepreneurs. This stimulated increased education and social reform in the region, which in turn supported new politics in search of constitutional concessions. The drive for a Telugu language-based province then arose in concert, and those political resources were then used to determine local patterns down to independence. The 1930s ruse of the socialists, then the communist organisations, was an extension of land and water tax debates, which impacted the political nature of development — both before and after — independence. This is one of the first books on Andhra that recounts this story and is based on extensive archival research exploring the deep relationships between land, water, language and politics. It would be of primary interest to those studying modern nationalism in India, natural resource management, Indian politics and economic growth.

This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel, unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It explains how football became a viable popular social force with a rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of anti-imperial nationalist movement and postcolonial political tension and social transformation. In the process, it investigates certain key questions and problems in the social history of football in Bengal, which have hitherto been ignored in the existing works on the subject.The author offers some original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society. It strengthens the premise that social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, has tried to consider some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion. It indicates that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.

The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur.The volume foregrounds the primacy of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’— upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an ‘indigenous mode of feminism’. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution — albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.

This book traces the social and political history of the Muslims of south India from the later nineteenth century to Independence in 1947, and the contours that followed. It describes a community in search of political survival amidst an ever-changing climate, and the fluctuating fortunes it had in dealing with the rise of Indian nationalism, the local political nuances of that rise, and its own changing position as part of the wider Muslim community in India.The book argues that Partition and the foundation of Pakistan in 1947 were neither the goal nor the necessarily inescapable result of the growth of communal politics and sentiment, and analyses the post-1947 constructions of events leading to Partition. Neither the fact of Muslim communalism per se before 1947 nor the existence of separate Muslim electorates provide an explanation for Pakistan. The book advances the theory that micro-level studies of the operation of the former, and the defence of the latter, in British India can lead to a better understanding of the origins of communalism. The book makes an important contribution to understanding and dealing with the complexities of communalism — be it Hindu, Muslim or Christian — and its often tragic consequences.

Health and medicine cannot be understood without considering the role of nurses, both as professionals and as working women. In India, unlike other countries, nurses have suffered an exceptional degree of neglect at the hands of state, a situation that has been detrimental to the quality of both rural and urban health care. Charting the history of the development of nursing in India over 100 years, Indian Sisters examines the reasons why nurses have so consistently been sidelined and excluded from health care governance and policymaking.The book challenges the routine suggestion that nursing’s poor status is mainly attributable to socio-cultural factors, such as caste, limitations on female mobility and social taboos. It argues instead that many of its problems are due to an under-achieved relationship between a patriarchal state on the one hand, and weak professional nursing organisations shaped by their colonial roots on the other. It also explores how the recent phenomenon of large-scale emigration of nurses to the West (leading to better pay, working conditions and career prospects) has transformed the profession, lifting its status dramatically. At the same time, it raises questions about the implications of emigration for the fate of health care system in India.An important contribution to the growing academic genre of nursing history, the book is essential reading for scholars and students of health care, the history of medicine, gender and women’s studies, sociology, and migration studies. It will also be useful to policymakers and health professionals.

This book explores literary and scholarly representations of India from the 18th to the early 20th centuries in South Asia and the West with idolatry as a point of entry. It charts the intellectual horizon within which the colonial idea of India was framed, tracing sources and genealogies which inform even contemporary descriptions of the subcontinent. Using idolatry as a concept-metaphor, the book traverses an ambitious path through the works of William Jones, James Mill, Friedrich Max Müller, John Ruskin, Alice Perrin, E. M. Forster, Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee. It reveals how religion and paganism, history and literature, Oriental thought and Western metaphysics, and social reform and education were unfolded and debated by them. The author underlines how idolatry, irrationality and social disorder came to be linked by discourses informed by Enlightenment, missionary rhetoric and colonial reason. This book will appeal to scholars and researchers in history, anthropology, literature, culture studies, philosophy, religion, sociology and South Asian studies as well as anyone interested in colonial studies and histories of the Enlightenment.

This book explores the myriad diversities of South Asian Islam from a historical perspective attuned to the lived practices of Muslims in various portions of South Asia, outside of Urdu, Persian, or Arabic language perspectives. These perspectives are, in some cases taken both from literal regions rarely noticed within discussions of South Asian Islam, such as Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. In other contributions the perspectives draw on historiographic interventions about the role of fakīrs in South Asian history, qasbahs in South Asian history, and the role of Aligarh students within the Pakistan movement. As a collection of voices aimed at stimulating debate about the range and diversity of South Asian Islam, the book probes meanings and markers of categories like "Indic," "Islamicate," and "local" or "global" Islam within the context of South Asia. Relevant to debates in the history of South Asia as well as Islamic studies, this collection will serve as a reference point for discussions about South Asian Islam as well as the nature and role of vernacularization as a cultural process. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

This book offers the first substantial critical examination of men and masculinities in relation to political crises in South Asian literatures and cultures. It employs political crisis as a frame to analyze how South Asian men and masculinities have been shaped by critical historical events, events which have redrawn maps and remapped or unmapped bodies with different effects. These include colonialism, anti-colonialism, state formations, civil wars, religious conflicts, and migration. Political crisis functions as a framing device to offer nuances and clarifications to the assumed visibility of male bodies and male activities during political crisis. The focus on masculinities in historical moments of crisis divests masculinity of its naturalization and calls for a heterogeneous conceptualization of the everyday practices and experiences of ‘being a man.’ Written by scholars from a variety of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, and drawing on a range of written and visual texts, this book contributes to this recent rethinking of South Asian literary and cultural history by engaging masculinity as a historicized category of analysis that accommodates an understanding of history as differentiated encounters among bodies, cultures, and nations. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.