scholarly journals Dyeing the Springtime: The Art and Poetry of Fleeting Textile Colors in Medieval and Early Modern South Asia

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 627
Author(s):  
Sylvia Houghteling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Devotional Poetry ◽  
Literary Arts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
South Asian Art ◽  
Regional Histories ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotional poetry to demonstrate how the existence of ephemeral dyes opened up possibilities for mutability that cannot be found within more stable, mineral pigments, set down on paper in painting. While the relationship between the image and the word in South Asian art is most often mutually enhancing, the relationship between words and color, and particularly between poetry and dye color, operates on a much more slippery basis. In the visual and literary arts of South Asia, dye colors offered textile artists and poets alike a palette of vibrant hues and a way to capture shifts in emotions and modes of devotion that retained a sense of impermanence. More broadly, these fragile, fleeting dye materials reaffirm the importance of tracing the local and regional histories even of objects, like textiles, that circulated globally.

Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750

1995 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 750-780 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
State Building ◽  
Government Service ◽  
Northern India ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

How best might one address the relationship between trade and state building in early modern South Asia? The question is hardly a new one. To some, like Anand Ram ‘Mukhlis’ (d. 1751), a Khatri from northern India who, though not Muslim, had been educated in Persian letters and accounting (siyâgat), trade was more honourable and safer than statecraft or government. The fortunes of the nobility were fluctuating ones, and the means by which they had been accumulated were of a questionable legitimacy. Doubts of this sort did not of course prevent his Khatri brethren from entering into government service during the later Mughal period, and several of them can be counted among the a'yân (notables) of the reign of the Mughal, Muhammad Shah (1719–48) (Alam 1986:169–75). They maintained a tradition begun in the reign of Ak-bar with the famous Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), also a Khatri from the Punjab.

What is military labour? War, logistics, and the Mughals in early modern South Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452091861
Author(s):  
Pratyay Nath
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Early Modern South Asia

The category of ‘military labour’ has traditionally been used to designate ‘combat labour’ – the labour of soldiers. Focusing on the case of early modern South Asia, the present essay argues that this equivalence is misplaced and that it is a product of a distorted view of war defined primarily in terms of combat. The essay discusses the roles played by the logistical workforce of Mughal armies in conducting military campaigns and facilitating imperial expansion. It calls for broadening the category of ‘military labour’ to include all types of labour rendered consciously towards the fulfilment of military objectives.

Development of verb-verb complexes in Indo-Aryan

2021 ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Benjamin Slade
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
History Of ◽  
Verb Compounds

This chapter discusses the historical development and properties of verb-verb compounds in Indo-Aryan, with reference to verb-verb compounds in Dravidian. The history of modern Indo-Aryan verb-verb compounds is explored, including an examination of the precursors of such constructions in early Indo-Aryan, as well as the apparent earliest examples in late Middle and early modern Indo-Aryan. A number of morphosyntactic and lexical differences between verb-verb structures in different modern Indo-Aryan languages are examined, focusing particularly on differences between Hindi and Nepali. The larger picture of South Asian verb-verb compounds is examined through comparison of lexical inventories of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, with some evidence pointing to independent developments within South Asia, with some later partial convergence.

Protection Rackets and Party Machines

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 693-723 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Martin ◽  
Lucia Michelutti
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Uttar Pradesh ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Protection Rackets ◽  
The Relationship

Control over means of violence and protection emerge as crucial in much research on corruption in non-South Asian contexts. In the Indian context, however, we still know little about the systems of organised violence that sustain the entanglement of crime, capital and democratic politics. This timely comparative ethnographic piece explores two different manifestations of what our informants identify as “Mafia Raj” (“rule by mafia”) across North India (Uttar Pradesh and Punjab). Drawing on analytical concepts developed in the literature on bossism and “mafias”, we explore protection and racketeering as central statecraft repertoires of muscular styles of governance in the region. We show how a predatory economy together with structures of inter- and intra-party political competition generate the demand for and the imposition of unofficial and illegal protection and shape different manifestations of Mafia Raj. In doing so, the paper aims to contribute to debates on the relationship between states and illegalities in and beyond South Asia.

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