Author: Michael S. Dodson Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000365646 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
The book presents a rich and surprising account of the recent history of the north Indian city of Banaras. Supplementing traditional accounts, which have focused upon the city’s religious imaginary, this volume brings together essays written by acknowledged experts in north Indian culture and history to examine the construction of diverse urban identities in, and after, the British colonial period. Drawing on fields such as archaeology, literature, history, and architecture, these accounts of Banaras understand the narratives which inscribe the city as having been forged substantially in the experiences of British rule. But while British rule transformed the city in many respects, the essays also emphasize the importance of Indian agency in these processes. The book also examines the essential ambiguity of modernization schemes in the city as well as the contingency of elements of religious narrative. The introduction, moreover, attempts to resituate Banaras into a wider tradition of urban studies in South Asia. The book will be of interest to not only scholars and students of north Indian culture and urban history, but also anyone looking to gain a deeper appreciation of this remarkable, and complex, city.
Author: Sandria B. Freitag Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520313399 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
This collection of ten essays on Banaras, one of the largest urban centers in India's eastern Gangetic plain, is united by a common interest in examining everyday activities in order to learn about shared values and motivations, processes of identity formation, and self-conscious constructions of community. Part One examines the performance genres that have drawn audiences from throughout the city. Part Two focuses on the areas of neighborhood, leisure, and work, examining the processes by which urban residents use a sense of identity to organize their activities and bring meaning to their lives. Part Three links these experiences within Banaras to a series of "larger worlds," ranging from language movements and political protests to disease ecology and regional environmental impact. Banaras is a complex world, with differences in religion, caste, class, language, and popular culture; the diversity of these essays embraces those differences. It is a collection that will interest scholars and students of South Asia as well as anyone interested in comparative discussions of popular culture. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.
Author: Radhika Seshan Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315401967 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
This book traces connections in pre-modern Asia by looking at different worlds across geography, history and society. It examines how regions were connected by people, families, trade and politics as well as how they were maintained and remembered. The volume analyses these intersections of memory and narrative, of people and places and the routes that took people to these places, using a variety of sources. It also studies whether these intersections remain in later and present times, and their larger impact on our understanding of history. The narratives cover several journeys drawn from archaeology, texts and cultural imagination: trade routes, marts, fairs, forts, religious pilgrimages, inscriptions, calligraphy and coinages spanning diverse regions, including India–Tibet–British forays, India–Malay intersections, corporate enterprise in the Indian Ocean, impacts of slave trade in Southeast Asia shaped by the Dutch East India company, movements and migrations around Indo-Iranian borderlands and those in western and southern India. The book will greatly interest scholars and researchers of history and archaeology, cultural studies and literature.
Author: Amar Farooqui Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739108864 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
Smuggling as Subversion is the first comprehensive account of the opium industry in western India during the colonial period, from its beginnings to the mid-19th century. This is an in-depth examination of the use of opium during colonial times, and at the same time the fascinating story of how Indian merchants developed a smuggling enterprise that subverted the East India Company's monopoly in the drug, setting in motion a chain of events that led to the first Opium War in China.
Author: Manuela Ciotti Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136704418 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
Firmly situated within the analytics of the political economy of a north Indian province, this book explores self-fashioning in pursuit of the modern amongst low-caste Chamars. Challenging existing accounts of national modernity in the non-West, the book argues that subaltern classes shape their own ideas about modernity by taking and rejecting from models of other classes within the same national context. While displacing the West — in its colonial and non-colonial manifestations — as the immanent comparative focus, the book puts forward a unique framework for the analysis of subaltern modernity. This builds on the entanglements between two main trajectories, both of which are viewed as the outcome of the generative impetus of modernisation in India: the first consists of the Chamar appropriation of socio-cultural distinctions forged by 19th-century Indian middle classes in their encounter with colonial modernity; the second features the Chamar subversion of high-caste ideals and practices as a result of low-caste politics initiated during the 20th century. The author contends that these conflicting trends give rise to a temporal antinomy within the Chamar politics of self-making, caught up between compulsions of a past modern and of a contemporary one. The eclectic outcome is termed as ‘retro-modernity’. While the book signals a politics of becoming whose dynamics had previously been overlooked by scholars, it simultaneously opens up novel avenues for the understanding of non-elite modern life-forms in postcolonial settings. The book will interest scholars of anthropology, South Asian studies, development studies, gender studies, political science and postcolonial studies.
Author: Peter Manuel Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ. ISBN: 9788120806733 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
As thumri moved from the courtesan salon to the Public concert hall, its style and image changed drametically in accordance with the evolving aesthetic of its new bourgeois patrons. Thumri in Historical and stylistic perspectives constitutes a welcome and significant contribution to the study of Hindustani music and south Asian culture in general.
Author: Matthew Clark Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9047410025 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
This book provides an account of the organisation, practices and history of the Daśanāmī-Saṃnyāsīs, one of the largest sects of sādhu-s (‘holy men’) in South Asia, founded, according to tradtion, by the legendary philosopher Śaṅkarācārya.
Author: Dirk H.A. Kolff Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004188029 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 662
Book Description
Scholarship on the pre-Bentinck period of Indian history has taken little notice of the inevitable dilemmas of colonial rule as they became visible in the districts. This book argues that the disdain the eighteenth-century Westminster parliaments expressed both for Indians and the East India Company induced the Bengal civil service to formulate for itself a corporate identity that, because of its distant and self-centered character, prevented it to acquire an executive hold on most levels of the Indian administration. The core of the book consists of superbly-detailed studies of the ways in which, in the Ganges-Jumna doab, villagers, revenue farmers, Indian policemen and revenue officials, bankers and judges struggled to overcome or profit from this feature of the colonial administration.
Author: Kamala Prasad Mishra
Author: Michael S. Dodson
Author: Jonathan P. Parry
Author: Sandria B. Freitag
Author: Radhika Seshan
Author: Amar Farooqui
Author: Manuela Ciotti
Author: Peter Manuel
Author: Matthew Clark
Author: Dirk H.A. Kolff