Janabai and Gangakhed of Das Ganu: Towards ethnic unity and religious cohesion in a time of transition

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462110411
Author(s):  
Irina Glushkova

The Varkari tradition of the Marathi-language area of Western India is characterised by devotion to the god Vitthal of Pandharpur as well as the medieval saint-poets who praised him in songs and longed for his company. Modern narratives present Janabai, a poetess who lived presumably during the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries, as one of the Varkari saint-poets. Her rise to fame started in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and by the 1920s, although of obscure origin, she had been geographically pinned to Gangakhed on the Godavari River. The association with this tiny settlement in Marathwada was established by the famous Das Ganu, an itinerant minstrel and preacher. Janabai’s own celebrity reached its peak by the 1960s, when a sign of sanctity in the form of symbolic sandals was installed at the site which went on to become her temple in Gangakhed. In 1975 a new procession, that of Saint Janabai, was added to the list of more than 100 processions travelling at the same time each year to Pandharpur. This article looks into the process of nationalist ‘awakening’ and the manner in which fostering bonds of ethnic unity and religious cohesion have been essential for shaping shared identity. The Varkari tradition and its poets, including Janabai, became the main tools for the creation of a Marathi-language cultural environment and for the domestication of the terrain by and through the power of comprehensible Hindu symbols.

Target ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Weissbrod

Abstract Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Hebrew underwent a process of revival. Despite the growing stratification of the language, literary translations into Hebrew were governed by a norm which dictated the use of an elevated style rooted in ancient Hebrew texts. This norm persisted at least until the 1960s. Motivated by the Hebrew tradition of employing the elevated style to produce the mock-epic, translators created mock-epic works independently of the source texts. This article describes the creation of the mock-epic in canonized and non canonized adult and children's literature, focusing on the Hebrew versions of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls, Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise and A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Visa Immonen ◽  
Elina Räsänen

Abstract The Finnish diplomat Harri Holma and his wife Alli, along with their son, art historian Klaus, created a private collection of 554 items. They acquired antique pieces and works of art in Berlin, Paris and Rome from the 1920s to the 1950s. The collection consists of Western and Southern European paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles and tableware, dating from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Initially the objects were acquired by the Holmas to decorate diplomatic residences, but eventually they came to form a deliberately assembled collection. Following Klaus’s death, Harri and Alli Holma donated the collection to the Lahti City Museum in the 1950s and the 1960s. Here the creation of the collection is first traced then followed on its journey to Finland, with a focus on the developing relationship between objects, family history and museum institution. The shifts in the collection’s narrative from hobby to an expression of grief, and finally to a formal museum assemblage and a subject of academic research generate epistemological tensions.


Author(s):  
Zinaida V. Pushina ◽  
Galina V. Stepanova ◽  
Ekaterina L. Grundan

Zoya Ilyinichna Glezer is the largest Russian micropaleontologist, a specialist in siliceous microfossils — Cenozoic diatoms and silicoflagellates. Since the 1960s, she systematically studied Paleogene siliceous microfossils from various regions of the country and therefore was an indispensable participant in the development of unified stratigraphic schemes for Paleogene siliceous plankton of various regions of the USSR. She made a great contribution to the creation of the newest Paleogene schemes in the south of European Russia and Western Siberia, to the correlations of the Paleogene deposits of the Kara Sea.


2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable

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.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-39
Author(s):  
LaNada War Jack

The author reflects on her personal experience as a Native American at UC Berkeley in the 1960s as well as on her activism and important leadership roles in the 1969 Third World Liberation Front student strike, which had as its goal the creation of an interdisciplinary Third World College at the university.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-129
Author(s):  
Catherine Losada

The latter part of the 1950s saw a major change in Boulez's compositional approach: Instead of creating extensive pre-compositional sketches, he increasingly reused previously composed materials as the basis for new works. The shifting aesthetics that characterized this period had a significant influence on Boulez. His works from the late 1950s explore the ideas of mobility embedded in the open work. Balancing the concept of mobility with the ideals of control that form the basis of his compositional ideology led to an economy of means and an associated emphasis on the concept of development in his compositional process. Both facilitated the creation of new works from a more limited array of base materials.<br/> Tracing the concept of development in a sample of Boulez's sketches and works from the late 1950s through the 1960s, this essay presents a preliminary typology of recurring pitch and temporal developmental techniques. By taking a bird's-eye view, I add an additional level of interpretation, emphasizing their formal function, association with aspects of middleground structure and studying their implications in terms of perception. In this way, I present a new perspective on the association between these techniques and the practice of derivation from a limited amount of material that characterizes these works.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-635
Author(s):  
Kristof Loockx

This article examines the migration trajectories of seafarers who worked on Belgian merchant vessels departing from the port of Antwerp during the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on the Antwerp seamen’s registry, which recorded information on voyages of seafarers on Belgian merchant vessels departing from Belgium’s main commercial port, this article shows that Antwerp’s maritime recruitment area vastly expanded with the advent of steam. The proportion of low-skilled seafarers who originated from inland areas increased as a result of the creation of new departments aboard ship and the emergence of ocean liners. However, established migration fields remained important for the supply of skilled labour in deck departments, which indicates that there was also continuity. The findings suggest that each department had its own dynamics and therefore old and new patterns co-evolved during a period of transition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.


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