A Caribbean Visionary and His Literary Collection, Karlene Saundria Nelson

The voices of West Indian writers in the 1950s changed the landscape for Literature emerging out of the West Indies. These powerful literary voices were a means of creating and recording a facet of West Indian history and cultural heritage. West Indian writers wrote their stories through their own eyes. John Hearne was one of the most eloquent voices among them. He became a known voice in the West Indian literary world, using his recognition to facilitate the indigenous West Indian Literature genre’s development. He was also a prominent Jamaican political and social commentator. The John Hearne archive not only produced an important historical picture of the development of the West Indian Literature genre, but West Indian political history, and changes in the cultural and social fabric of the West Indian society, with special emphasis on Jamaica. This paper aims to present this archive as a fundamental body of primary resources for historical research.

Monuments and Monumentality in a Changing Socio-Political Landscape: A View from Udaypura

This work intends to explore the nature of socio-political change in historical periods usually referred to as interregnal which, for the purposes of this paper, is defined as a period of discontinuity or gap in political and social organization. It traces the survival of a historical monument through two interregnal centuries of medieval Indian sub-continental history (11th–12th and 14th) to argue that modern historiographical templates which study these periods as precursors or remnants of succeeding and preceding centuries, respectively, do not sufficiently explore the socio-political possibilities innate in these periods of distributed political agency. In the context of Indian history, while historians have focused on the confrontational aspect of Hindu-Muslim polities or communities in interregnal centuries, I suggest that these periods provided fertile ground for political innovation and negotiation, thus breaking the confrontational stasis usually associated with regnal centuries.

The Huns (‘Hūṇas’) in India: A Review

Limited attention seems to have been paid in Indian historical work to the Hūṇas (Huns) except for the general assumption that they played a very destructive role in Indian history. There is need for a fresh appraisal of the Hūṇa polity in the light of the Schūyen copper scroll, and further work on the numismatic evidence, while the details of their conflict with the Guptas need to be properly worked out. Finally, the objective behind their deep intrusion into central India (especially Malwa) has to be located in a broader context.

Book review: Bhairabi Prasad Sahu, The Making of Regions in Indian History: Society, State and Identity in Premodern Odisha

Bhairabi Prasad Sahu, The Making of Regions in Indian History: Society, State and Identity in Premodern Odisha (New Delhi: Primus Books), 2020, xxvi + 274 pp., ₹931.00 (hb).

Cultural Ecological Attitudes in Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra

One of the sparkling stars in the galaxy of Indian writers, Gita Mehta is the brightest. Her novels are written with Indian perspectives and they are explorations of the tension generated by the east-west encounters. Her novel A River Sutra is a colourful fictional account of India that mirrors Indian history and culture. It connects Indian mythology with various depictions of love in its many aspects. It told through a pen-pusher and his encounter with six pilgrims on the banks of the Narmada. In Western Feminist studies, the woman is always portrayed with a quest for freedom from the urban exploitative society to nature. It is appealing to determine that this concept receives a new dimension in a different cultural context. In this novel, Mehta has shifted her focus from the interactions between India and the west to exploring the diversity of cultures within India. Gita Mehta uses the Narmada as the thread, which holds together the main story and the six sub-stories. The present paper discusses in detail the theory of eco-criticism and it aims at highlighting an understanding of various terms like green studies and nature studies, as well as describes in fair detail, the different subfields of eco-criticism, namely, Cultural ecology, Eco-feminism and Gyno-Ecology.

The Ghaznavid Empire of India

Almost all of our information on the Ghaznavids comes from two contemporary chronicles (one in Persian and one in Arabic) and a divan (poetic anthology) from the early eleventh century. The Arabic text is the Tarikh-i Yamini written by Abu Nasr al-ʻUtbi, and the Persian chronicle is the Zayn al-Akhbar by Gardizi. Virtually, all subsequent Persian chroniclers drew on the later Persian translation of the Yamini. After the Mughal period, a few used Gardizi as well. In the nineteenth century, H. M. Elliot translated parts of the Persian translation of ʻUtbi into English, which popularised that particular version of events in modern scholarship. This uncritical overreliance on a single source has led to perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of medieval Indian history. I will argue that the version of the Ghaznavid campaigns in ʻUtbi was meant strictly for the court of the ‘Abbasid caliph in Baghdad where a sufficiently learned audience could actually be expected to understand the very difficult Arabic of the text. The Yamini did not simply embellish reality but was actually trying to create a narrative that was in contradiction to and even independent of reality. It was part of a campaign of misinformation to hide the fact that the Ghaznavids were creating an Indian empire both as a network of tributary kings and as an open trade zone ruled by a king of kings symbolised by the elephant.

The “Imagined Other”

In 2014, the National Democratic Alliance, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the general election with the highest number of seats won by any party since 1984 and went on to win a second term victory in 2019. Since the rise of the BJP, Hindu nationalist interventions into education have increased. Their agenda has been to “indigenise, nationalise and spiritualise” education in India. To this end, textbooks were written to promote a Hindu majoritarian idea of India that sees Hindus as the primary citizens of India and categorizes Muslims as the “other”. This article outlines the political context in which Hindu nationalists have recently attempted to rewrite Indian history by focusing on the period of Muslim rule in India. It looks at textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and media reports about regional history rewriting in India.

Caste-Less Tamils and Early Print Public Sphere: Remembering Iyothee Thass (1845–914)

Responding to the history of Dalit invisibility in print public sphere, this article explores one of the earliest Dalit articulations in print in South Asia during the colonial period. Extending studies on anti-caste thought by foregrounding the Tamil cosmopolis, this conceptualises how the most oppressed by caste engaged with print in the early twentieth century, through studying the works on and of Pandit Iyothee Thass and his movement. The article proposes that these experiments with print opened the chance of a political to emerge, which was otherwise foreclosed, towards wording a caste-less community at this earlier time in Indian history.