scholarly journals Re-Presenting the Past in the Hindi Novel: The Darkness in Bhīṣma Sāhnī’s Tamas

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Delacy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
North India ◽  
British India ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
The Past

While the modern literary novel in Hindi has traditionally grappled with contemporary issues impacting society in north India, Bhīṣma Sāhnī’s famous novel Tamas (“Darkness”) may be considered a unique endavour to revisit the horrific events that marked the transfer of power and partition of British India in 1947. This article represents a preliminary attempt to consider the emergence of a work of literary fiction in Hindi approximately 25 years after the events on which it is based.

scholarly journals A place for the Bodhisatta: The local and the universal in jātaka stories

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Appleton
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Teaching Career ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
The Individual

Oxford UniversityJātakas—stories about the past lives of the ‘historical’ Buddha—are often associated with specific locations, both within the land of Buddhism’s birth, and in other parts of Asia. There are records suggesting that such locations became early pilgrimage sites; contemporary sources also make reference to ‘local’ jātakas, which in many cases help to assimilate Buddhism into the local culture through its geography. In this article I will argue that it is the structure of jātaka stories that allows this localisation to take place all over Asia. I contend that since the jātakas themselves are lacking in specific external referents they can easily be given a location, whilst their framing in the ‘present’ time of the Buddha’s teaching career grounds the stories in both time and place, without infringing on the flexibility of the individual stories. This ability to provide centrally legitimated relevance for each and all contributes greatly to the popularity and endurance of the jātaka genre. The layering of meanings must remain if the stories are to accomplish this: if the stories become formally localised, for example by 19th century scholars who celebrate the jātakas’ worth as records of life in early India, the power of the stories to transcend boundaries of time and place for their multiple audiences is lost. Yet if the jātakas were not anchored in the Buddha’s teaching career in the 5th century BCE North India, their significance for Buddhists would in any case be negligible.

scholarly journals On Memory of Plates and Dishes

Fluminensia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Krystyna Pieniążek-Marković
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Western World ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common

The aim of the article is to discuss how elements of food narratives meals and kitchen tools used for cooking are used in order to consolidate and shape the Croatian cultural memory, especially in the context of its Mediterranean heritage.For this reason, the texts by Veljko Barbieri, collected in the four volumes under the common and significant title Kuharski kanconijer. Gurmanska sjećanja Mediterana, are analysed. His circum-culinary narratives are a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge, references to historical and literary sources, personal memories and literary fiction. They can be easily inscribed in the Croatian (collective and individual) identity discourse since they are able to strengthen the collective (either national and supranational, or geo-regional) identity, and to construct the cultural memory. They also show Croatia's affiliation to the Western world along with its cultural-civilization rooting in antiquity, the Mediterranean region and Christianity, thus forming a part of the founding memory that develops a narrative about the very beginnings of Croatian presence on this land. The gastronomic narratives serve to create the cultural memory and this version of history which is to stabilize the social identity described by Pierre Nora and Andreas Huyssen. Through his stories, Barbieri shapes memory based on the representation of the past. In the analysed narratives, the memory carriers are dishes and plates which find reference to the oldest history of Croatia rendered by myths and other narratives. Associated with dishes, the pots enable the narrator to recall the past and the identity coded in individual dishes. They also participate in the processes of repeating, storage and remembering which generate a symbiotic relationship between man and thing. The memory carriers that is, food and plates depicted in Barbieri's culinary narratives do not convey their content in a neutral way, but construct their marked images.

The Place of Tulsī dās in North Indian Devotional Tradition

1966 ◽  
Vol 98 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. R. Allchin
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
North India ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
The Past ◽  
Whole Process ◽  
Great Body ◽  
Small Measure ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of

To the outside observer the history of Hindu sectarianism often appears as a disorganized tangle, lacking clarity and precision. The whole process is made if anything more complex by the ill-defined relationship of sect and non-sect. As Renou remarks: Though no statistics are available, even for the present day, we have grounds for supposing that the most active sects were themselves only isolated groups within the great body of believers. From another point of view, however, the history is more understandable. A considerable part of sectarian activity during the past 1,500 years has been concerned with the spread and regional development of a single great devotional movement. Seen from this position, the uniformity and theological coherence of the sects, whether they be called Vaiṣṇavite, Śaivite, or by some other name, is remarkable and often overrides the no less real disparities of doctrine or detail at another level. Again, in this process regional variations have arisen in no small measure as a result of the popular character of the writings of particular saints. Thus, for example, Basava or Purandara Dāsa hold pride of place in the Karnāṭka, the one Vīra Śaiva, the other Vaiṣṇava; in Mahārāṣṇra devotion has in no small part been moulded by the thought of Jāân Dev or Tukā Rām; in the Pañjāb by Nānak; and in the Hindī region by Kabīr Dās, Tulsī Dās, and Sūr Dās. Throughout north India the influences which lay behind the movement were largely, but by no means exclusively, Vaiṣṇavite; yet other streams contributed, Śaivite, Buddhist, Tāntrika, Yogī, etc.

scholarly journals Sayyids and Social Stratification of Muslims in Colonial India: Genealogy and Narration of the Past in Amroha

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-487
Author(s):  
SOHEB NIAZI
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Asian Context

AbstractWhile Islamic scriptures like the Quran and Hadith are often quoted to negate the existence of social stratification among Muslims, authors of genealogical texts rely on the very same scriptures to foreground and legitimise discussions on descent and lineage. In the South Asian context, several conceptions of hierarchy as practised by Muslims in north India evolved over the course of colonial rule and were deployed interchangeably by Sayyids. These were based on notions of race, ethnicity, respectability and nobility, and occupational distinctions as well as narratives that referred to the history of early Islam. This article contributes to the study of social stratification among South Asian Muslims by exploring the evolution of Urdu tarikh (historical texts) produced by Sayyid men in the qasbah of Amroha in the Rohilkhand region of the United Provinces during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Sayyid authors narrated the past through the medium of nasab (genealogy). While their texts place emphasis on lineage and descent to legitimise a superior social status for Sayyids, they also shed light on the changing social and material context of the local qasbah politics with the discourse on genealogy evolving into a form that engaged with social contestations.

scholarly journals “Carlo Ginzburg, microhistoria y escala. El caso del vinatero calvinista / Carlo Ginzburg, Microhistory and Scale: the Case of the Calvinist Vintner

2017 ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Blanca Fernández García
Keyword(s):  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Epistemological Crises

Over the past forty years historiography has been affected by typically postmodern epistemological crises, which have questioned two of its basic principles: the universality and the possibility to reach the truth in its narratives. In this article, we shall reflect on the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg’s answer to this crossroads. His works, from the first steps of microhistory to the most recent debates on literary fiction, combine a methodology, which may be considered in principle as postmodern, with rigorous historical investigations. We analyze how this methodology contributes however to the revaluation of the modern historiographical principles prior to postmodernityKey WordsCarlo Ginzburg, Eric J. Hobsbawm, postmodernity, historiography, story, fiction, proof.ResumenEn los últimos cuarenta años, la historiografía se ha visto afectada por crisis epistemológicas típicamente posmodernas que han cuestionado dos de sus principios básicos: la universalidad y la posibilidad de alcanzar la verdad en sus relatos. En este artículo se reflexiona sobre la respuesta del historiador italiano Carlo Ginzburg ante esta encrucijada. Sus trabajos, desde los primeros pasos de la microhistoria hasta los debates más recientes en torno a la ficción literaria, combinan una metodología que, en principio, se puede juzgar posmoderna con rigurosas investigaciones históricas. Se analiza en qué modo esta metodología contribuye, sin embargo, a revalorizar los principios de la historiografía moderna previos a la posmodernidad.Palabras claveCarlo Ginzburg, Eric J. Hobsbawm, posmodernidad, historiografía, relato, ficción, prueba 

scholarly journals Beyond the Battlefields of Memory: Historical Traumas and Hungarian Literature

Porównania ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-58
Author(s):  
Tamás Kisantal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Hungarian Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Canons

One can describe the contemporary Hungarian collective memory as an interpretational field of some traumatic historical events of the twentieth century. The essay aims to sketch some important tendencies of the literary representation of these events after the millennium. At first, it outlines the wider social and political contexts of these literary works. Secondly, it models the current Hungarian cultural field as an opposition between two strategies of memory labeling them in Michael Rothberg’s terminology as competitive and multidirectional ones. These approaches to the past are also associated with different ideological implications and literary canons. Finally, with a brief overview of some recent novels, the essay demonstrates some pathways of representing multidirectional attitudes to the past in the Hungarian literary fiction of the 2000s.

Disputed Waters: India, Pakistan and the Transboundary Rivers

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Ranjan
Keyword(s):  
Hydraulic System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Transboundary Rivers ◽  
British India ◽  
The Past ◽  
Limited War ◽  
Political Relationship ◽  
Water Treaty

Water disputes between India and Pakistan reflect the political relationship between the two countries since partition of British India in 1947. That partition broke the interdependent hydraulic system. In following decades, tensions between India and Pakistan have led to emergence of ‘water nationalism’ in both countries. In the past, many groups, in both countries, have made appeals to their respective government to scrap the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) of 1960, but no steps were taken in such direction by either of the two states. The IWT has survived two full wars (1965 and 1971), one limited war (1999) and a series of political-cum-military tensions (1987, 1989–90, 2002 and 2008) between India and Pakistan.

Conspiracy Rises Again

Qui Parle ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-333
Author(s):  
Poulomi Saha
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Central Valley ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of California ◽  
British India ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
Revolutionary Violence ◽  
The University ◽  
Indian Students

Abstract This essay takes up conspiracy as a discursive, political, and philosophical concept. By tracing the ideological and textual kinship between anticolonialism in India and Ireland and radicalism in the United States, it illuminates transcolonial circuits of a curiously shared revolutionary project. Rather than simply offer a historical account of those interconnections, it theorizes a practice of reading revolutionary violence as perpetual, repetitive haunting, a politics of the undead. It argues for a historiographical live burial by which violences of the past reappear to disrupt the imperial promise of futurity and continuity. From the 1916 “Hindu-German Conspiracy Trial” in San Francisco, during which members of the Ghadr Party—consisting of diasporic Indian students at the University of California, Berkeley, and Punjabi farmers in the Central Valley—were accused of conspiring with German diplomats to arm anticolonial revolt in British India, this essay tracks forms of radical sympathy that emerge, flourish, and stutter in an era of ethnonationalist constriction.

“To Make Them Serve”: The 1871 Transvaal Commission on African Labour as a Source for Agrarian History

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 39-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan S. Bergh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Preliminary Attempt ◽  
Industrial History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

In the past twenty to twenty-five years valuable contributions have been made to southern African agrarian history. Stanley Trapido's publications, for example, opened up stimulating perspectives on the processes and forces inherent to nineteenth-century Transvaal agrarian history. Although he was modest in his 1980 chapter, “Reflections on Land, Office, and Wealth in the South African Republic, 1850-1900,” and referred to it as “a tentative and preliminary attempt to outline some important aspects of these social relationships,” it has provided historians and others with an important instrument of analysis.However, there are still themes, regions, and periods that need attention, one of these being the central districts of the Transvaal before the industrial revolution. In this regard a little-known source which may contribute to our knowledge of the pre-industrial history of the Transvaal, and which will be published this year as an annotated source publication, should be taken note of. This is the 1871 Commission on African labor in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR). Despite the valuable information contained in its documents on agrarian history and various aspects of race relations, especially with regard to the central districts of the Transvaal, it has been neglected by historians in the past. Of the few historians who refer to the 1871 Commission, most have merely utilised the report of the commission and have probably missed the important testimonies, correspondence, and minutes. Very few have managed to locate these documents, which are concealed among the supplementary documents of the State Secretary for 1871 in the Transvaal Archives.

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