Appropriations and Contestations of the Islamic Nomenclature in Muslim North India

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-110
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ruling Elites

This article comprises a twofold attempt: the first is to establish a semantic field that revolves around the concept of siyāsat—roughly equivalent to the political—in Muslim South Asia; the second is to trace semantic shifts in this field and to identify circumstances that may have prompted those shifts. It is argued here that the terms that constitute the semantic field of the political oscillate between two sociolinguistic traditions: a strongly Islamicate Arabic one, and a more imperially oriented Persian one. Another linguistic shift is indicated with the replacement of Persian by Urdu as the dominant literary idiom in and beyond North India since the eighteenth century. The aim is to serve only as a starting point for a more intensive discussion that brings in other materials and perspectives, thus helping to elucidate the tension between normative aspirations by ruling elites and actual political praxes by variant socioeconomic groups.

scholarly journals Who were the urban gentry? Social elites in an English provincial town, c. 1680–1760

2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
JON STOBART
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Social Elites

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the identity and social worlds of the ‘urban gentry’ of Chester as they developed from the late seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century. In place of the political and cultural definitions which characterise analyses of this group, it takes the self-defined ‘occupational’ titles of probate records as a starting point for an investigation into the background and activities of those styling themselves ‘gentleman’. Central to their identity were networks of friendship and trust. These reveal the urban gentry to have been closely tied with both the urban middling sorts and the rural gentry: a position which at once reflected and underpinned their particular situation within eighteenth-century society.

Means and beginnings: Voicing revolution in Solomos’s early work

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simos Zenios
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Order ◽  
Political Event ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Testing Site ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Voice

In this article I read the figurations of poetic voice in Solomos’s early lyric ‘Spiligga’ as a testing site for the conceptualization of the Greek Revolution as a modern political event. Perusing its thematic, intertextual and formal strategies, I argue that two distinct poetic voices are operative in the poem. The first model is commensurate with the voice of nature. The second is a medium of reflective and expressive human speech able to herald the revolution. In order to ascertain the political significance of this juxtaposition, I procure insights from seminal studies in intellectual history that outline the transformations of the term ‘revolution’ at the turn of the eighteenth century (Arendt, Koselleck). The period’s new understanding of the term as an absolute and inaugurating break from an existing state of affairs (which supplanted the previous meaning of revolution as quasi-natural experience that precludes innovation) illuminates the juxtaposition by Solomos of the two models of voice: they represent the revolutionary fissure as an exit from the state of nature and as the innovation of a new order. This reading not only elucidates the encounter of modern revolution and poetry in ‘Spiligga’ but also establishes the latter as a necessary starting point for the examination of this encounter in Solomos’s later works.

The Guru as Śiva

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-376
Author(s):  
Hamsa Stainton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Prolific Author ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kashmir Śaivism ◽  
Supreme Deity

Abstract This article introduces and analyzes the Gurustutiratnāvalī, a sophisticated eighteenth-century Sanskrit hymn composed by Govinda Kaula of Kashmir in praise of his teacher’s teacher, the prolific author Sāhib Kaula. It evaluates the evidence for Govinda Kaula’s dating, lineage, and literary activity and presents the first published edition and translation of select verses of his Gurustutiratnāvalī based on four manuscripts. The analysis of the hymn focuses on the ways the author equates a specific guru in his lineage—Sāhib Kaula—with the supreme deity Śiva. Using this hymn as a starting point, the article considers the history of guru-praise (gurustuti) and guru-devotion (gurubhakti) in Kashmir as well as in South Asia more broadly. Lastly, it suggests that further work on this lineage and the religious dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century will prove crucial for helping us understand the emergence of what came to be popularly known as “Kashmir Śaivism.”

scholarly journals Urbanity in the Vernacular: Narrating the City in Modern South Asian Literatures

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Harder
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Regional Languages ◽  
City Representations ◽  
The City

AbstractThis article explores some facets of literary urbanity in modern South Asian literatures such as Urdu, Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. Taking the proliferation of megacity research in present-day urban studies as my starting point, I intend to show that literatures in the regional languages of South Asia provide a rich archive of city representations and discourses about urbanity – an archive that is highly neglected particularly if compared to the corpus of English writings along these lines. Sections on genres such as the Urdu šahr āšob, Bengali nakˈśā, Marathi humourism, Bengali theatre and the Hindi and Bengali novel, among others, will provide ample glimpses and some analysis of this archive stretching from the eighteenth century to the present. One of the guiding lines of investigation will be the quest for an alternative urbanism in these non-English sources.

The Political Economy of Power: Approaches to the Analysis of Relationships between the State and Business in Russia

2011 ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
A. Oleinik
Keyword(s):  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Road Construction ◽  
Oil And Gas Industry ◽  
Retail Trade ◽  
Business Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Gas Industry ◽  
The Road ◽  
Ruling Elites

The article deals with the issues of political and economic power as well as their constellation on the market. The theory of public choice and the theory of public contract are confronted with an approach centered on the power triad. If structured in the power triad, interactions among states representatives, businesses with structural advantages and businesses without structural advantages allow capturing administrative rents. The political power of the ruling elites coexists with economic power of certain members of the business community. The situation in the oil and gas industry, the retail trade and the road construction and operation industry in Russia illustrates key moments in the proposed analysis.

Translating the Scribe: Lithographic Print and Vernacularization in Colonial India, 1857–1915

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Amanda Lanzillo
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
North India ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Book Production ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Focusing on the lithographic print revolution in North India, this article analyses the role played by scribes working in Perso-Arabic script in the consolidation of late nineteenth-century vernacular literary cultures. In South Asia, the rise of lithographic printing for Perso-Arabic script languages and the slow shift from classical Persian to vernacular Urdu as a literary register took place roughly contemporaneously. This article interrogates the positionality of scribes within these transitions. Because print in North India relied on lithography, not movable type, scribes remained an important part of book production on the Indian subcontinent through the early twentieth century. It analyses the education and models of employment of late nineteenth-century scribes. New scribal classes emerged during the transition to print and vernacular literary culture, in part due to the intervention of lithographic publishers into scribal education. The patronage of Urdu-language scribal manuals by lithographic printers reveals that scribal education in Urdu was directly informed by the demands of the print economy. Ultimately, using an analysis of scribal manuals, the article contributes to our knowledge of the social positioning of book producers in South Asia and demonstrates the vitality of certain practices associated with manuscript culture in the era of print.

Holism, Chinese Medicine and Systems Ideologies: Rewriting the Past to Imagine the Future

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Volker Scheid
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
Shared Objective ◽  
Definition Of

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.

Issue Dimensions and Cleavages: How the Russian Experience Helps Us to Look for Cross-Points

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-235
Author(s):  
Yury Korgunyuk
Keyword(s):  
Factor Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Issue Salience ◽  
Empirical Base ◽  
Party Positions ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Weak Points ◽  
Alternative Methodology ◽  
Election Results

Abstract The article analyzes the weak points of the Manifesto Project’s methodology, such as its emphasis on issue salience, instead of issue positions; bringing the content of manifestos under too broad categories formulated at the beginning of the project; not quite the appropriate technique of factor analysis etc. An alternative methodology is proposed that focuses on party positions on issues which generate the largest polarization in the political space. It also enriches the empirical base of the studies and adjusts the technique of factor analysis. In order to reveal political cleavages inside these dimensions, the so called electoral cleavages (factors of territorial differences in voting for various parties) are taken as a starting point: factor loadings of parties in the electoral and political spaces are compared through correlation and regression analyses. The proposed methodology is applied to an analysis of election results in Russia (2016) and Germany (2017).

The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Political Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Marie Antoinette ◽  
Louis Xvi ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Political Realm

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

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