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Published By Sage Publications

0973-080x, 0257-6430

2022 ◽  
pp. 025764302110691
Author(s):  
Rakesh Ankit

When the Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gave the clarion call of Total Revolution, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded heavy-handedly by imposing the Emergency in India in 1974–5. This all-encompassing duel has dominated politics and political scholarship since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for the contemporary public sphere in India, particularly personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship, and student/youth movements versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also highlighted their differences in a way that has served to bury their affinities and agreements—not only on obscure matters. This article seeks to soften this dichotomy on the basis of their correspondence, and complemented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows that before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110691
Author(s):  
Sudipto Basu

How does the state govern a territory which has rapidly grown to become one of the most densely populated regions of the province? How does the state account for the governance of a place which has only recently transitioned from a rural or a semi-rural tract to a town? Most importantly, how does the state govern a region where the main source of power resides with the proprietors of private enterprises? These were some of the questions the colonial state had to deal with when it was faced with the prospect of administering some of the most rapidly ‘urbanizing’ or expanding regions of Bengal. This included the industrial belt—the riparian municipalities of the districts of 24 Parganas and Hooghly—and the mining and railway junctions of Ranigunj and Asansol, which developed from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. How did their administration differ, if at all, from other mofussil municipalities which also had a semi-rural character? This article will examine these questions and try to understand how, through the process of municipalization, the colonial state was trying to control newer territories. It shall also analyse how local communities reacted to these attempts. This paper will argue that any attempt at improvement in these mofussil municipalities was hindered by alack of understanding, on the part of the provincial government, of the local socio-economic conditions and the ineffectiveness of the local self-government in these towns.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110421
Author(s):  
Sanghamitra Misra

The discourse around indigeneity, customary rights of possession and claims to political autonomy in Northeast India conventionally traces the postcolonial protectionist legislation for ‘tribes’ to various acts passed under the late colonial state, the most significant precursor being seen as the Government of India Act, 1935. This article will argue that one can in fact trace the ‘original moment’ in the idea of customary law for ‘tribes’ much further back in history, to the early decades of the nineteenth century. This historical moment was anchored in the beginnings of the East India Company’s conquest of the Garo hills in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the appropriation of the land and revenue of the Garos and in the ethnogenesis of the ‘hill Garo’. The article will explore the ways in which the beginning of the invention of customary law and traditional authority in Northeast India under East India Company rule was impelled by the Company’s demands for revenue and was shielded and secured by the deployment of military power across the hills. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the strategies of imperial control first introduced in the region were reproduced across the rest of Northeast India, underscoring the significance of the Garo hills as the first ‘laboratory’ of colonial rule in the region as well as sharpening our understanding of the character of the early colonial state. The article thus takes as its task the historicization of the categories of ‘customary law’, ‘traditional/indigenous authority’ and the ‘hill tribe’, all of which form the basis of late colonial and postcolonial legislation on the ‘tribe’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110421
Author(s):  
Sudipto Basu

How does a state govern a territory which has seen a sudden spurt in population and become the most densely populated regions of the province? How does the state account for the governance of a place which very recently has seen the transition from a rural or a semi-rural tract to a town? And most importantly, how does the state govern a place where the main source of power resides with the proprietors of private enterprises? These were some of the questions which the colonial state had to deal with when it was faced with the prospect of administering some of the most rapidly ‘urbanizing’ or expanding regions of Bengal, that is, the industrial belt or the riparian municipalities of the districts of 24 Parganas and Hooghly and the mining and railway junctions of Ranigunj and Asansol from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. How was their administration going to be any different from the other mofussil municipalities, which also had a semi-rural character? This article will look at these questions and try to understand how through the process of municipalization the colonial state was trying to control the newer territories and how the locals reacted to these attempts. This article will investigate and hence argue that any attempt at improvement in these mofussil municipalities was being throttled due to the lack of understanding, on the part of the provincial government, of the local socio-economic conditions and the ineffectiveness of the local self-government in these towns.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Shaik Mahaboob Basha

The question of widow remarriage, which occupied an important place in the social reform movement, was hotly debated in colonial Andhra. Women joined the debate in the early twentieth century. There was a conservative section of women, which bitterly opposed the widow remarriage movement and attacked the social reformers, both women and men. Pulugruta Lakshmi Narasamamba led this group of women. Lakshmi Narasamamba treated widow remarriage (punarvivaham) with contempt and termed it as an affront to the fidelity (pativratyam) of Hindu women. According to her, widow remarriage was equal to ‘prostitution’, and the widows who married again could not be granted the status of kulanganas (respectable or chaste women). Lakshmi Narasamamba’s stand on the question of widow remarriage led to the emergence of a fiery and protracted controversy among women which eventually led to the division of the most famous women’s organization, the Shri Vidyarthini Samajamu. She opposed not only widow remarriage but also post-puberty marriage and campaigned in favour of child marriage. This article describes the whole debate on the widow remarriage question that took place among women. It is based on the primary sources, especially the woefully neglected women’s journals in the Telugu language.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302199896
Author(s):  
Jesse Ross Knutson

This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly ka-vya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110019
Author(s):  
Vasileios Syros

State failure has been an enduring topic in the history of political thought. This article will revisit modern debates on the characteristics of state failure and the factors conducive to successful leadership by focusing on political ideas that evolved in fourteenth-century India. I will discuss two works with the same title, i.e., Tārīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī ( The History of Fīrūz Shāh) of the distinguished historians of the Delhi Sultanate period Ziyā’ al-Dīn Baranī (ca. 1285–1357) and Shams Sirāj ‘Afīf (d. 1399) about Sultans Muḥammad b. Tughluq and (his successor) Fīrūz Shāh as instantiations of state failure and good governance, respectively. The deployment of the concept of state failure has often been construed as an effort to impose a political straitjacket; the examination of authors like Baranī and ‘Afīf demonstrates the value of reflecting on lessons from history and exploring how societies in the past evolved their own patterns of thinking about effective or failed leadership.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302110017
Author(s):  
Sheena Panja

The study of history as a genre became important not only as an academic concern but to recover the lost pride and dignity of the indigenous people in a colonized land. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Bengal, the study of the past assumed prime importance in the context of nationalism to counter the disdain of colonial historians and revive national pride. History as a ‘scientific’ discipline functioned as a tool in this regard, where the vernacular emerged as the principal medium of communication. Individuals from diverse backgrounds debated whether a more rigorous understanding of the past through Western ‘scientific’ methods could supplant the information from traditional texts and legends. Material culture or ‘hard’ evidence considered more suitable for a ‘modern’ objective historical account gained precedence over the traditional texts, dismissed as imaginary and mythical. A heated debate emerged between two groups, the archaeologists who believed in the objectivity of material evidence and the traditionalists who subscribed to the view that classical literature was not irrelevant to understanding the past. However, this division remained nebulous, and both groups remained in a liminal interstitial space engaging and contesting with their notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘science’. It was from this contested space that emerged an ambivalent archaeological method which formed an important characteristic of Indian archaeology in the post-Independence era.


2021 ◽  
pp. 025764302199893
Author(s):  
S. Gunasekaran

Societies interpreted their dreams in various ways. While dream interpretation has always been an essential part of medical and philosophical discourse, it was only recently that historians began to show certain interest in writing what is called the cultural history of dream interpretation. In fact, dreams, rituals, myths, social memories and consciously constructed histories all share certain similarities since they engage with the past and are expressed in a narrative form. Dream psychology, therefore, may provide a useful analytical tool for historians who are interested in mapping the mental structure of societies. This article is an attempt to unearth the patterns of dream interpretations by analysing the dream expressions found in Tamil literature up to the twelfth century ad. The social attitude towards dreams in the Sangam literature, early Tamil epics and Bhakti literatures is studied in the sociocultural context of their times. One can presume that the literary language of dreams more or less reflected the contemporary cultural beliefs and social practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-126
Author(s):  
Ranjeeta Dutta,

Whitney Cox, Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi (South Asian Edition), 2017, 309 + i–xv pp., ₹470.


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