Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–914)

2021 ◽  
pp. 026272802110348
Author(s):  
Dickens Leonard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.

scholarly journals On the Russian Concept of Lād, 1830–1945

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ewell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Harmonic Function ◽  
English Language ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Universally translated into English as “mode,” the Russian term лад (“lād”) first appeared in 1830 as a translation from German Tonart, which is usually translated into English as “tonality.” To Tchaikovsky a lād was, in fact, a tonality, but by century’s end lād had come to signify its pre-tonal cousin, mode. Boleslav Yavorsky’s work on the subject in the early twentieth century gave lād new post-modal and post-tonal meaning with respect to quasi-tonal and post-tonal music. In this article, I delve deeply into the history of this uniquely Russian concept, from its inception to its highly modified mid-twentieth century form. Rather than trying to find an English equivalent, I leave “lād” in its transliterated form, which disentangles it from inaccurate translations. I examine a 1945 Chopin analysis by Yavorsky’s student, Sergei Protopopov, which outlines new interpretations for Russian lād. Sketches for this analysis, from the Russian National Museum of Music, provide a backdrop for a reexamination of basic tonal constructs such as cadence, phrase, form, harmonic function, and melodic diminution. I then look at a famous 1930 conference on Yavorsky’s theories as an example of the high stakes involved in creating a Marxist musical science, in which lād played a primary role. I also briefly discuss Yavorsky’s theories as a counterweight to Hugo Riemann’s encroaching functionality, which was brought to Russia by Gregori Catoire in the early twentieth century. It is my hope that this work on lād will fill in many gaps for the English-language reader, and possibly spur further studies on this uniquely Russian concept.

Domestic Anxieties, Recalcitrant Intimacies: Representation of Servants in Hindi Print Culture of Colonial India

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charu Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
North India ◽  
Community Relations ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
History Of

This essay presents a social history of power relations between domestic workers and their employers by examining the representations of servants in a wide array of Hindi print literature, including didactic manuals, popular magazines, reformist writings and cartoons, in the early twentieth-century North India. Exploring possibilities within repertoires of representation, it navigates how a contentious discourse around servant and employer developed in the Hindi print sphere. The essay links the portrayal of servants with changing class, caste and religious dynamics, in which print intersected with material circumstances to shape the hierarchical relationship between servants and employers. While imaging ‘ideal’ servants, the Hindi vernacular was also infused with their negative counterparts and anxieties around personal interactions between mistresses and servants, taking its cue from quotidian life and caste–community relations of the time. Increasing assertion by Dalits and growing antagonism between Hindus and Muslims left its imprints on portrayals of subordinate-caste and Muslim servants by dominant castes and classes. The vernacular straddled these domains of distance/desire and hate/love in the servant–employer relationship.

A New Vision of Jewish History: The Early Historical Writings of Salo Baron

AJS Review ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47
Author(s):  
Robert Chazan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Traditional Belief ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Vision ◽  
Historical Writings

While rejecting the traditional belief that Jewish fate was controlled by God, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of the Jews maintained prior perceptions of post-70 Jewish history as a sequence of unmitigated disasters. Beginning in 1928, the young Salo Baron combatted this perspective on the Jewish past, which he dubbed “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” In his well-known 1928 essay “Ghetto and Emancipation” and more substantially in the 1937 edition of his Social and Religious History of the Jews, Baron vigorously rejected this view. In the process, he formulated a new periodization of the Jewish past and moved beyond the ideologically grounded and programmatic reconstruction of Jewish history to a rigorously descriptive portrayal of the multi-faceted Jewish historical experience. In so doing, Baron laid the foundations of the flourishing contemporary Jewish historiographic enterprise.

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.

ENGLISH LABOUR AND TRADE UNIONISM OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE COVERAGE OF THE BRITISH HISTORIAN G. D. H. COLE

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
First World

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the views of a famous British historian G.D.G. Cole on the history of the British workers' and UK socialist movement in the early twentieth century. The arti-cle focuses on the historian's assessment and the reasons for the workers' strike movement intensi-fication on the eve of the First World War, the specifics of such trends as labourism, trade unionism and syndicalism.

Deuteronomy, Hosea, and the Theory of Northern Origins

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill T. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Deuteronomy appears to share numerous thematic and phraseological connections with the book of Hosea from the eighth century bce. Investigation of these connections during the early twentieth century settled upon a scholarly consensus, which has broken down in more recent work. Related to this question is the possibility of northern origins of Deuteronomy—as a whole, or more likely, in an early proto-Deuteronomy legal core. This chapter surveys the history of the investigation leading up to the current impasse and offers a reexamination of the problem from the standpoint of one passage in Hosea.

A Century of America on Chinese Screens

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiwei Xiao
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Print Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sharp Contrast ◽  
American People ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
New Millennium

AbstractNo serious study has been published on how Chinese filmmakers have portrayed the United States and the American people over the last century. The number of such films is not large. That fact stands in sharp contrast not only to the number of "China pictures" produced in the United States, which is not surprising, but also in contrast to the major role played by Chinese print media. This essay surveys the history of Chinese cinematic images of America from the early twentieth century to the new millennium and notes the shifts from mostly positive portrayal in the pre-1949 Chinese films, to universal condemnation during the Mao years and to a more nuanced, complex, and multi-colored presentation of the last few decades.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document