scholarly journals “Where Is Bhutan?” The Production of Bhutan's Asymmetrical Inbetweenness in Geopolitics

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Nitasha Kaul
Keyword(s):  
Phase I ◽  
Commercial Production ◽  
Small States ◽  
British India ◽  
Successor State ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
India And China

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

The Sikkim–Tibet Convention of 1890 and the Younghusband Mission of 1904

China Report ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 000944552110470
Author(s):  
Thejalhoukho
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
British India ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Status ◽  
British Foreign Policy ◽  
India And China ◽  
Complicated Nature

The controversy surrounding the Simla Conference of 1913–1914 and the legality of the McMahon line, which was produced by the Conference, has been at the centre of the boundary dispute between India and China. Amidst the diverging opinions amongst scholars and political commentators, the main issue rest on the unresolved question of Tibet’s political status. Was Lhasa authorised to sign treaties for Tibet? Was China the sovereign over Tibet? The answers to such questions are murky and complicated, made more so by the politics and conflicts in the post colonial period. This study attempts to highlight the complicated nature of political authority in Tibet through a study of British policy in Tibet towards the end of 19th and early 20th centuries. The signing of the 1890 Convention with China and the 1904 Convention with Tibet represents two extremes in British foreign policy which attest to the confounding situation presented before the British and the diverging opinions within the British official circles. The period between these two conventions provides a glimpse of the historical background in which the relations between British India, China and Tibet developed subsequently.

COMPARING GOPINATH MOHANTY WITH MULK RAJ ANANDFROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF RESISTANCE LITERATURE

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khagendra Sethi ◽  
Tithi Ray
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Harassment ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Political Exclusion

This article aims at a comparative study of GopinathMohanty with Mulk Raj Anand. The article will analyse and examine the works of both the writers from the perspective of Resistance literature. Both of them have significant contribution to Dalit literature. These two writers are non-dalits. But they have comprehensive understanding on the plight of these miserable sections who are on the margin. They have tried their best to fight for their rights. Along with that they have created for them a distinct cultural identity by dismantling their colonial identity. They have raised voice against the ethical issues like bonded labour, economical exploitation, socio-political exclusion, land displacement and sexual harassment which were immanent in dalit’s life in colonial and post-colonial India.

Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan: Critiquing the Dalit

2021 ◽  
pp. 2455328X2199573
Author(s):  
Joydeep Bhattacharyya
Keyword(s):  
Indian Society ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Large Segment ◽  
Art And Literature

This article seeks to understand Indian theatre’s take on Dalit politics of our time through a critical reading of two post-independence plays—Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Vijay Tendulkar’s Kanyadaan. Politically, ‘Dalit’ becomes important only after 1947 in post-independence and post-colonial India or more specifically from the 1970s. In the post-Ambedkar phase of Dalit re/configuration, they begin to self-assert through politics, art, and literature, most effectively and convincingly, only with the rise of Dalit Panthers and in the aftermath of the implementation of Mandal Commission’s recommendation for Other Backward Classes (OBC) reservation. The article tries to examine the fresh critique of the Dalit vis-à-vis the upper caste-centric society, undertaken in this crucial context of reconfiguration and from beyond any traditional parameter of understanding, and map, through the plays, the plurality hidden within the perceived monolith of Dalit consciousness. Consequently, Dalit experiences against the backdrop of their struggle are laid bare, and unfamiliar realities come out to upset our comfortable knowledge about this large segment of Indian society.

Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
British India ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Jainism in Danger? Temple entry and the rhetoric of religion and reform in post-colonial India

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
MANISHA SETHI
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Open The Doors ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract A bitter debate broke out in the Digambar Jain community in the middle of the twentieth century following the passage of the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act in 1947, which continued until well after the promulgation of the Untouchability (Offences) Act 1955. These laws included Jains in the definition of ‘Hindu’, and thus threw open the doors of Jain temples to formerly Untouchable castes. In the eyes of its Jain opponents, this was a frontal and terrible assault on the integrity and sanctity of the Jain dharma. Those who called themselves reformists, on the other hand, insisted on the closeness between Jainism and Hinduism. Temple entry laws and the public debates over caste became occasions for the Jains not only to examine their distance—or closeness—to Hinduism, but also the relationship between their community and the state, which came to be imagined as predominantly Hindu. This article, by focusing on the Jains and this forgotten episode, hopes to illuminate the civilizational categories underlying state practices and the fraught relationship between nationalism and minorities.

Experiments with Khomeini's Revolution in Kargil: Contemporary Shi‘a networks between India and West Asia

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 370-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
RADHIKA GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Local Politics ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Financial Flows ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Religious Networks ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractShi‘i scholars from India have been a sizeable presence in seminaries in Iran and Iraq, both historically and today. Yet there is a dearth of scholarship on Shi‘i linkages between India and West Asia, with the exception of historical work on the patronage of shrine cities in Iraq by centres of Shi‘ism in India. Departing from this geographical and historical focus, this paper lends insight into contemporary religious networks between India and West Asia, using the example of the Twelver Shi‘a in Kargil, a region located on India's ‘border’ with Pakistan in the province of Kashmir. Kargili scholars travelled overland via Afghanistan or by sea from Bombay to Basra to study in seminaries in Iraq and Iran from the nineteenth century onwards. Increasing fluency in Urdu in post-colonial India enabled them to connect with Shi‘i institutions in other parts of India, which mediate religious, cultural, and financial flows from a transnational Shi‘ite realm. These networks ofreligiouslearning are not only conduits for the transmission of textual, doctrinal knowledge, but also for politico-religious ideologies that are selectively harnessed, and often exaggerated, to effect significant social and political changes in micro-locales. While local conflicts are over-determined by the evocation of transnational links, they also reflect, even if only through rhetorical and partial reproduction, doctrinal and politico-religious schisms among Shi‘i leaders in West Asia. This is illustrated by an ethnographic account of the activities undertaken and contestations provoked by the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust in Kargil, a modernist reform movement that has selectively appropriated Khomeini's revolutionary ideologies to instigate social change and shape local politics and religious practice in Kargil.

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