Linguistic Movements and Political Heterogeneity: Rethinking Unification Movement across British and ‘Princely’ Karnataka

2021 ◽  
pp. 239386172110541
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Democratic Values ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The North ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Heterogeneous Nature ◽  
Political Differences

Subsequent to the Partition of Bengal in 1905, the consolidation of linguistic identities and movements emerged as an important assertion of core democratic values, positing that governance must be in a language intelligible to the majority. Like other linguistic movements in late-colonial India, the Karnataka Ekikarana (Karnataka unification) movement did not proceed with a spatially uniform logic nor followed a uniform temporality in realising its objectives of uniting Kannada speakers from disparate sub-regions. Attempting to reconcile elite literary ambitions, popular aspirations and political differences, the movement shifted gears through several phases as it worked across multiple territorial jurisdictions and political systems, including the demarcations of British India and princely India. Focussing on the period between 1860 and 1938, the present article examines the heterogeneous nature of the unification movement across British-Karnataka and two Kannada-speaking princely states, namely, Mysore in the south and Jamakhandi in the north. It explores the ways in which the ruling family of ‘model’ Mysore sought legitimacy in embracing their Kannada heritage; in contrast, the Jamakhandi rulers resisted any concession to Kannada linguistic sentiments. The article shows how, in arriving at monolingually indexed territorial entities, the bridging of ‘internal’ frontiers across these divergent political and linguistic contours proved just as crucial as the claiming of dominance over other language groups within an intensely polyglot world.

Provincializing the International: Communist Print Worlds in Colonial India

2020 ◽  
Vol 89 ◽  
pp. 140-153
Author(s):  
Ali Raza
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Western Province ◽  
The North ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The One ◽  
North Western ◽  
Global Project

Abstract This paper charts communist print worlds in colonial India during the interwar period. Beginning in the early 1920s, self-declared ‘Communist’ and ‘Bolshevik’ publications began surfacing across India. Through the example of the Kirti Kisan Sabha (Workers and Peasants Party: a communist group in the north-western province of Punjab), and its associated publications, this paper will provide a glimpse into the rich, diverse and imaginative print worlds of Indian communism. From 1926 onwards, Kirti publications became a part of a thriving print culture in which a dizzying variety of revolutionary, socialist and communist publications competed and conversed with the equally prolific and rich print worlds of their political and ideological rivals. Removed on the one hand from the ivory towers of party intellectuals, dense treatises and officious theses, and on the other hand from the framing of sedition, rebellion and fanaticism in the colonial archive, Kirti publications show how the global project of communist internationalism became distinctly provincialized and vernacularized in British India.

scholarly journals Politicized Literature: Dramas, Democracy and the Mysore Princely State

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Vijayakumar M. Boratti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Social ◽  
Princely State

Literary writings such as poetry, drama or novel in colonial India manifest themselves into, react or subscribe to the larger discourse of colonialism or nationalism; rarely do they hold uniformity in their articulations. As colonial experiences and larger nationalist consciousness varied from region to region, cultural articulations—chiefly dramas—not only assumed different forms but also illustrated different thematic concerns. Yet, studies on colonial drama, thus far, have paid attention to either colonialism/orientalism or nationalism. There is a greater focus on British India in such studies. However, the case of princely states demands a momentary sidestep from the dichotomy of colonialism versus nationalism to understand the colonial dramas. The slow and gradual entry of nationalism in the princely states did not have to combat the British chiefly and directly. Much before its full blossom in the princely states, it had to grapple with a range of issues such as monarchy, democratic institutions, constitutionalism, bureaucracy and other pressing issues locally. In the present article, the Kannada dramas of Devanahalli Venkataramanaiah Gundappa (DVG) in the early decades of the twentieth century are examined to throw light on the ways in which they act as political allegories which imagine and debate democracy and its repercussions in the social and political spheres of the Mysore princely state.

6. Globalizing south, inward north

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-126
Author(s):  
Michael J. Seth
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The South ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Stagnation

‘Globalizing south, inward north’ shows that from the 1980s the two Koreas grew further apart, economically, politically, and culturally. Few states moved faster from poverty to ‘developed’ status than South Korea, none developed a more totalitarian, isolated society than North Korea. South Korea’s economy expanded impressively well into the 2000s, becoming a wealthy consumer society, while North Korea went through economic stagnation and decline. Both started with authoritarian political systems; however, the South evolved into an open, democratic society while the North remained authoritarian and closed. Most Koreans continued to see themselves as part of one nation united by common ethnicity and ancestry, and regarded the political division as unnatural and unacceptable. Is reunification possible?

Sotho-Nguni Orthography and Tone-Marking

1949 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Tucker
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Wishful Thinking ◽  
The South ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
The Past ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Different Parts

FOR years now the question of orthography in the South African Bantu languages has kept the authorities busy. It flares up periodically in different parts of the country, and local committees are called from time to time to deal with the conflagration.In the past, unfortunately, these committees have too often concerned themselves with the problems of one language only, and apparently ignored both the effect their decisions would have on literature exchange and the attempts of previous committees to solve similar problems in related languages. Thus we have Zulu and Xhosa, very closely related languages, with considerable orthographical differences, while North Sotho and Tswana now differ from each other and from South Sotho, which (perhaps wisely) has set its face against orthographic change since 1906.Until Dr. Jacob Nhlapo launched his campaign for Southern Bantu linguistic unity, few people had seriously considered the possibility of an orthographic system which would cover both the Nguni and Sotho groups, the feeling being that such unity lay in the realms of wishful thinking in view of the virtual impossibility of achieving unity within the groups.The present article is an attempt to combine the experience of past efforts into a system that would actually be applicable to these two language groups. The acceptance of such a system would naturally involve great sacrifices of tradition and prestige from both parties. This aspect is not to be ignored, but at the same time can have little connection with the scientific elaboration of an alphabet. Consequently the argument “The Sotho (or the Nguni) would never accept such a solution” must be relegated to the sphere of practical politics.

The Carian Coast III

1957 ◽  
Vol 52 ◽  
pp. 58-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Bean ◽  
J. M. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Other ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
Previously Treated

This article concludes the account of our joint researches in Caria. In ‘The Cnidia’ (BSA xlvii (1952) 171–212) we treated of the Cnidian Peninsula, and in ‘The Halicarnassus Peninsula’ (BSA 1 (1955) 85–171) of the other salient peninsula of the west Carian coast. Caunus with its environs has been treated by Bean in ‘Notes and Inscriptions from Caunus’ (JHS lxxiii (1953) 10–35, lxxiv (1954) 85–110), and the mainland territory of Rhodes in southern Caria in Fraser and Bean, The Rhodian Peraea and Islands (1954). In the present article we attempt to cover the parts of the west Carian coast not previously treated in our two joint articles, together with the islands adjacent to that coast. In the south we have retrodden some of the ground covered in Rhodian Peraea, especially around and inland from the inner part of the Ceramic Gulf; and in the north we have carried our joint researches into Ionia as far as Teichiussa on the mainland and Leros and Lepsia in the Icarian Sea. We also include some observations on the Cnidian and Halicarnassian peninsulas, supplementing our previous work. In conclusion we discuss briefly the distribution of west Carian dynasties in classical times; and extending our previous observations on Mausolus' remodelling of the habitational network of west Caria, we have tried to give a fuller account of the scope of Hecatomnid enterprise in this direction.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

Nilo-Saharan and Its Limits

2020 ◽  
pp. 363-382
Author(s):  
Gerrit J. Dimmendaal
Keyword(s):  
Common Origin ◽  
African Continent ◽  
The South ◽  
Specific Language ◽  
The North ◽  
Language Groups

Interspersed between two other major phyla on the African continent, Afro-Asiatic (mainly to the north) and Niger-Congo (mainly to the south), lies the Nilo-Saharan phylum. In this chapter a survey is presented of the major groups classified as members of this phylum by Greenberg and other authors in subsequent contributions. The present chapter also addresses the methodological background to the establishment of this phylum as well as controversies over the inclusion or exclusion of specific language groups. In addition, it discusses the most prominent and convincing grammatical (and, to a lesser extent, lexical) features pointing towards a common origin for languages classified as Nilo-Saharan today.

Zwischen Projektion und Dekonstruktion Mediterranismus oder Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer Denkfigur zur Erforschung des ›südlichen Blicks‹

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Dieter Heimböckel
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
The South ◽  
Intercultural Studies ◽  
The North ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Anglo American

Abstract As a reaction to the postcolonial invention of the Mediterranean in the Anglo-American anthropology of the 1960’s and 1970’s and following Edward Said’s ›Orientalism‹, ›Mediterraneanism‹ serves as a concept for exploring the ›southern perspective‹ of scientists from the North. While initially, in the present article, the term was intended to be used in order to capture the intercultural perspective of literature on the South, this was precluded by epistemological and practical reasons. The article discusses these issues by critically examining the background and foundations of the notion in question, by comparing its different conceptualisations depending on the discipline and provenance of their authors, and by analysing the possibilities of its application in Intercultural Studies.

Historical Inferences from the Linguistic Geography of the Nigerian Middle Belt

Africa ◽  
1971 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 294-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Ballard
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The South ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Opening Paragraph ◽  
Eastern Half

Opening ParagraphThis paper examines the distribution of languages in the Nigerian Middle Belt, draws certain historical inferences from the patterns of distribution, and assesses non-linguistic evidence tending to confirm or refute these inferences. The Middle Belt is taken as an area roughly inscribed by the Hausa-speaking area to the north, and the Yoruba, Edo, and Ibo-speaking areas to the south. Geographically it is an area which has a certain climatic coherence, falling between the sahel to the north and the forest to the south (Pullan, 1962; Buchanan, 1953). It is also an area of much more strikingly broken terrain than those to the north or south, with not only the complex relief of the Jos Plateau, but also many ranges of hills, particularly along its northern frontier and in its eastern half. This terrain appears to have militated against the establishment of large coherent political systems in the past and it is only in the plains of the Niger and Benue valleys that there is a record of extensive state systems in recent history, those of the Nupe and Jukun. On the other hand, archaeological evidence indicates that the Nok culture extended over a very large area of the Middle Belt, not by any means confined to the plains (Fagg, 1959, 1969), and there is evidence of a certain measure of cultural unity today (Murdock, 1959).

scholarly journals Taboos of the Ao-Nagas: Change and Continuity

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Resenmenla Longchar ◽  
Imchasenla .
Keyword(s):  
Geographical Distribution ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Language Groups ◽  
Group Form ◽  
Customary Laws ◽  
The Many

The Ao-Naga is also one of the many tribes from Nagaland, North-east of India. The Ao-Naga tribe itself is not homogenous and is divided into six major clans, followed by many sub-clans. The following clans such as <em>Pongen</em>, <em>Longkumer</em> and <em>Jamir</em> of the Chungli group; <em>Imchen</em>, <em>Walling</em> and <em>Longchar</em> of the Mongsen group form the six major clans<strong>. </strong>The Ao-Naga tribe form major populace of Mokokchung district. The geographical distribution of the Ao region is bounded by the <em>Tzula</em> River; <em>Sangtam</em>, <em>Chang</em> and <em>Phom</em> tribes on the East; the <em>Lotha</em> tribes, the Assam plains on the west; <em>Konyak</em> tribe in the north and the <em>Sema</em> tribe in the south. The entire Ao territory is divided into six ranges (<em>Tsükong</em>), each having a name comprising of several villages. The ranges run parallel to one another and are called: the <em>Ongpangkong</em>, the <em>Langpangkong</em>, the <em>Asetkong</em>, the <em>Changkikong</em>, the <em>Japukong</em>, the <em>Tsurangkong</em>. The Ao-Naga consists of many villages and many sub-clans where they have their own rules and customary laws. The Aos fall under four language groups representing <em>Mongsen, Chungli, Changki and Sangpur</em>. However the major languages of the Ao-Naga are <em>Mongsen</em> and <em>Chungli</em>.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document