Author: Michel Boivin Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780195477191 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For more than thirty years, there has not been a project that consolidates international university-level scholarship on Sindh and Sindhis into a single forum. This book seeks to unite the wide community of scholars who work on Sindh and with Sindhis. The book's interdisciplinary focus is onhistory and society. It represents a 'snap shot' of contemporary research from different disciplines and locations. It combines interdisciplinary and multi-local approaches to describe the diversity of Sindh's 'voices' and to raise questions about how they are historically and socio-culturallydefined. Conventional studies of Sindh and Sindhis often bend the region and its people upon themselves to analyze society and history. This collection of essays treats Sindh and its people not as isolated regional entities, but rather entries in a wider socio-cultural and historical web. Sindhisare a global community and this collection generates new perspectives on them by integrating detailed studies on Pakistan with those from India and the diaspora. Such an approach contrasts with other writings by celebrating rather than erasing multi-cultural faces from Sindh's human tapestry. Byrethreading unheard socio-cultural and historical voices into understanding Sindh and its people, this collection disputes the vision of Sindhis as a monolithic Muslim population in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
Author: Churnjeet Mahn Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319645161 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 287
Book Description
This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present. The collection is situated at the intersection of narratives connected to memory and commemoration in order to ask how memories have been formed and perpetuated across the imposition of these borders. It explores how national boundaries both silence memories and can be subverted in important ways, through consideration of physical sites and cultural practices on both sides of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh borders that gesture towards that which has been lost – that is, the cultural whole that was the cultural regions of Punjab and Bengal before Partition, as well as broader cultural "wholes" across South Asia, across religious and linguistic lines – alongside forces that deny such connections. The chapters address issues of heritage and memory through specific case-studies on present-day memorial, museological and commemoration practices, through which sometimes competing memorial landscapes have been constructed, and show how memories of past traumas and histories become inscribed into diverse forms of cultural heritage (the built landscape, literature, film).
Author: Clinton Bennett Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1441184740 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Often described as the soul of Islam, Sufism is one of the most interesting yet least known facet of this global religion. Sufism is the softer more inclusive and mystical form of Islam. Although militant Islamists dominate the headlines, the Sufi ideal has captured the imagination of many. Nowhere in the world is the handprint of Sufism more observable than South Asia, which has the largest Muslim population of the world, but also the greatest concentration of Sufis. This book examines active Sufi communities in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh that shed light on the devotion, and deviation, and destiny of Sufism in South Asia. Drawn from extensive work by indigenous and international scholars, this ethnographical study explores the impact of Iran on the development of Sufi thought and practice further east, and also discusses Sufism in diaspora in such contexts as the UK and North America and Iran's influence on South Asian Sufism.
Author: Anjali Gera Roy Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000829243 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
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, memoirs, biographies, films, fiction, oral histories, and testimonies. The book examines the Partition’s complex effects in regions, localities and contexts and its material and psychological ramifications. This book is a unique and comprehensive contribution in enabling a more complex understanding of how Partition played out and continues to do so for groups and generations across India. It will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience, including history, literature, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, modern Asian studies, studies of South Asia, and studies of memory and trauma.
Author: Justin Jones Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1316338878 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
While most studies of Shi'i Islam have focused upon Iran or the Middle East, South Asia is another global region which is home to a large and influential Shi'i population. This edited volume establishes the importance of the Indian subcontinent, which has been profoundly shaped by Shi'i cultures, regimes and populations throughout its history, for the study of Shi'i Islam in the modern world. The essays within this volume, all written by leading scholars of the field, explore various Shi'i communities (both Isna 'Ashari and Isma'ili) in parts of the subcontinent as diverse as Karachi, Lucknow, Bombay and Hyderabad, as well as South Asian Shi'i diasporas in East Africa. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives including history, religious studies, anthropology and political science, they examine a range of themes relating to Shi'i belief, practice, piety and belonging, as well as relations between Shi'i and non-Shi'i communities.
Author: Daniela Berti Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000083683 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
The book reflects on the discreet influence of Hindutva in situations/places outside or at the margins of its organisational and mobilisational arena, where people denying any commitment to the Sangh Parivar, incidentally, show affinities and parallelisms with its discourse and practice. This study looks at Hindutva’s entrenchment not so much as an orchestration from above but more as an outcome of a process that evolves in relation to specific social and cultural milieus. The contributors analyse Hindutva’s entrenchment, emphasising on the ethnography of the forms of mediation and/or convergence produced in certain contexts. The 11 case studies highlight three different dynamics of Hindutva’s cultural entrenchment. The first section gathers cases where RSS-affiliated organisations have set up specific cultural or artistic programmes at the regional level, involving the meditation of local people whose interest in these programmes does not necessarily mean that they endorse the Hindutva agenda completely. The next deals with convergence and refers to cases where the followers gather around a charismatic personality, whose precepts and practice may bring them towards a closer affinity with the Hindutva programme. The last section deals with the contexts of resistance, where social milieus engaged in opposing Hindutva may, in fact, paradoxically, and even inadvertently, imbibe some of its ideas and practices in order to contest its claims.
Author: Omar Kasmani Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 1478022655 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 128
Book Description
In Queer Companions Omar Kasmani theorizes saintly intimacy and the construction of queer social relations at Pakistan’s most important site of Sufi pilgrimage. Conjoining queer theory and the anthropology of Islam, Kasmani outlines the felt and enfleshed ways in which saintly affections bind individuals, society, and the state in Pakistan through a public architecture of intimacy. Islamic saints become lovers and queer companions just as a religious universe is made valuable to critical and queer forms of thinking. Focusing on the lives of ascetics known as fakirs in Pakistan, Kasmani shows how the affective bonds with the place’s patron saint, a thirteenth-century antinomian mystic, foster unstraight modes of living in the present. In a national context where religious shrines are entangled in the state’s infrastructures of governance, coming close to saints further entails a drawing near to more-than-official histories and public forms of affect. Through various fakir life stories, Kasmani contends that this intimacy offers a form of queer world making with saints.
Author: Jürgen Schaflechner Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190850523 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 361
Book Description
In this book, Jürgen Schaflechner examines the political and cultural influences at work at the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan, Hinglaj Devi. The unique character of this pilgrimage site and its modern importance not only for Hindus, but also for Muslims and Sindhi nationalists, brings to the fore the lives of Hindu minorities in the Islamic Republic.
Author: Deepra Dandekar Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317435958 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 435
Book Description
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.
Author: Ramachandra Guha Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674365410 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
The twenty-first century has been dubbed the Asian Century. Highlighting diverse thinker-politicians rather than billionaire businessmen, Makers of Modern Asia presents eleven leaders who theorized and organized anticolonial movements, strategized and directed military campaigns, and designed and implemented political systems.
Author: Michel Boivin
Author: Churnjeet Mahn
Author: Clinton Bennett
Author: Anjali Gera Roy
Author: Justin Jones
Author: Daniela Berti
Author: Omar Kasmani
Author: Jürgen Schaflechner
Author: Deepra Dandekar
Author: Ramachandra Guha