Early Dalit Literature and Culture in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Western India

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Early History ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Western India ◽  
Cultural Struggle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Separate Identity

The formation of the Dalit Panthers and the flourishing of Dalit literature in the 1970s saw the advent of a new connotation for the Marathi word ‘Dalit’. Chosen by the Mahar community leaders themselves, the title ‘Dalit’ was used by them to replace the titles of untouchable, Backward or Depressed Classes and Harijans, which had been coined by those outside the Dalit communities to describe the Mahar and Chambhar jatis. ‘Dalit’ identified those whose culture had been deliberately ‘broken’, ‘crushed to pieces’ or ‘ground down’ by the varna Hindu culture above them. As such, it contained an explicit repudiation of all the Hindu cultural norms of untouchability, varna structure and karma doctrine which varna Hindu society had imposed. The adoption of this new title was an affirmation of the Dalit community's struggle for cultural independence and separate identity. Yet this struggle for an independent cultural identity was not merely a cultural struggle of the 1970s, but one which stretched back almost a century to what, retrospectively, must be seen as the inception of Dalit literature and culture in the activities of the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal and the first Dalit writings of Gopal Baba Valangkar in 1888. This article aims to recover this much-neglected early history of the Dalit communities of western India at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, it examines how these early Dalit communities came to articulate an emergent Dalit cultural identity through the construction of a syncretic form of bhakti Hindu culture.

scholarly journals Translating the Buddha: Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia and Its Indian Publics

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Douglas Ober
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early History ◽  
Western World ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
Regional Languages ◽  
Varied History

In this article, I examine the popular Victorian poem The Light of Asia (1879) and its reception and adaptation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial India. Authored by the popular writer, Sir Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia is typically regarded as one of the foundational texts of modern Buddhism in the western world. Yet significantly less has been said about its influence in Asia and especially in India, where it has as an equally rich and varied history. While most scholarship has focused on its connections to the Sinhalese Buddhist leader Anagarika Dharmapala and his popular campaigns to ‘liberate’ the MahaBodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, the singular focus on Dharmapala has obscured the poem’s much more expansive and enduring impact on a wide array of colonial Indian publics, regardless of caste, region, religion, ethnicity or language. The article explores the early history of its numerous adaptations, dramatizations, and translations in various regional languages. In providing an analysis of the poem’s Indian publics, the article shows how regional, political, and cultural idioms formed in multilingual contexts enable different readings and how literary and performative cultures interacted with colonial conceptions of religion, nation, and caste.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

Collecting Chinese Objects in Slovenia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Nataša Vampelj Suhadolnik
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Specific Position ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Connections ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract This article addresses the practices of collecting Chinese objects that were brought to the territory of present-day Slovenia by sailors, missionaries, travellers, and others who travelled to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the time, this territory was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; we will, therefore, begin with the brief historical context of the Empire and its contact with China, followed by a discussion on the nature of collecting Chinese objects in Slovenian territories at that time. We will further examine the status of the individuals who travelled to China and the nature and extent of the objects they brought back. The article will also highlight the specific position of the Slovenian territory within the history of Euro-Asian cultural connections, and address the relevant issues—locally and globally—of the relationship between the centres and peripheries with regard to collecting practices.

The Southern Levant and the Ancient Near Eastern Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-65
Author(s):  
Rachel Hallote
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Southern Levant ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Narratives ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

Educating

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-159
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Rotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
History Of Empire

The chapter provides a sensory history of empire in the two countries, India and the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. By that point, the process of visualizing Indian and Filipino subjects was well underway by their colonizers. The chapter looks at sight and sound and how they can be used to narrate the story at this point. The dynamics of Anglo-American soundscapes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred readily and deliberately to sites of empire, to India and the Philippines. In particular, it looks at the music in the two empires at this time.

Gay Affections

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard P. Loughlin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Gay Identities

This chapter considers how gay identities—and so gay affections—were formed in the course of the twentieth century, building on the late nineteenth-century invention of the ‘homosexual’. It also considers earlier construals of same-sex affections and the people who had them, the soft men and hard women of the first century and the sodomites of the eleventh. It thus sketches a history of continuities and discontinuities, of overlapping identities and emotional possibilities. The chapter resists the assumption that gay identity and experience can be reduced to anything less than the multitude of gay people, and that as Christians they have to give an account of themselves in a way that heterosexual Christians do not. The chapter warns against thinking gay identity undone in Christ.

Concepts of race in the Historicography of northeast Africa

1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wyatt Macgaffey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Development ◽  
Physical Anthropology ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ideal Types ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Recent accounts of the proto-history of Africa use data from physical anthropology, but also concepts of race which physical anthropologists in general have abandoned as unsatisfactory; the paper seeks to explain this phenomenon sociologically. Late nineteenth-century political and sociological trends helped to produce patterns of thought which can no longer be regarded as affording adequate explanations of social processes. These patterns combined idealism, or the method of contrasting ideal types, with pseudo-Darwinism, which sought the origins of political development in the interaction of differently endowed groups. In African ethnography of the early twentieth century such concepts led to the view that the continent was inhabited by two groups, Caucasoids and Negroids, and by mixtures of the two which remained mixtures, to be analysed as such. The Caucasoid and Negroid types were regarded as absolute and universal, represented equally in the biological, linguistic, cultural and political aspects of man.

Debating the Legal Status of the Ornaments Rubric: Ritualism and Royal Commissions in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century England

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 434-454
Author(s):  
Dan D. Cruickshank
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Royal Commission ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Parliamentary Oversight ◽  
The Church

This article uses the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to explore the emergence of claims to self-governance within the Church of England in this period and the attempts by parliament to examine how independent the legal system of the church was from the secular state. First, it gives an overview of the history of the Ornaments Rubric in the various editions of the Book of Common Prayer and the Acts of Uniformity, presenting the legal uncertainty left by centuries of Prayer Book revision. It then explores how the Royal Commission into Ritualism (1867–70) and the Public Worship Regulation Act (1874) attempted to control Ritualist interpretations of the Ornaments Rubric through secular courts. Examining the failure of these attempts, it looks towards the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline (1904–6). Through the evidence given to the commission, it shows how the previous royal commission and the work of parliament and the courts had failed to stop the continuation of Ritualist belief in the church's independence from secular courts. Using the report of the royal commission, it shows how the commissioners attempted to build a via media between strict spiritual independence and complete parliamentary oversight.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document