Tag Archives: History

Epigraphy, Literary Criticism, Cultural Studies and Ethnohistory. Influenced by Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies tradition, the contributors argue that oral narratives, ritual practices, pilgrimage customs, songs, and collective memory can serve as legitimate historical sources when supported by independent evidence. The chapters move logically from the political and cultural settings of first-century North-West India and South India to discussions of the Acts of Thomas, the Seven Churches, Mylapore Archaeology and Syriac, Arabic, Patristic, Portuguese and Papal sources. The loss of Syriac and Malayalam manuscripts destroyed by Portuguese colonizers during the

where the earlier generation sought structures, they seek subjectivities. These are legitimate and productive shifts. The difficulty arises only when such approaches are presented as superseding structural history. The two are inseparable. Faizi’s self-fashioning cannot be understood without imperial patronage, and Anand Ram Mukhlis cannot be understood apart from the fiscal and political fragmentation of eighteenth-century Mughal India. Diplomats existed because states existed. Munshis emerged because bureaucracies required them. The self is never autonomous

Rosen offers a critique of Eric Stokes’s 1959 classic, English Utilitarians and India. Rosen argues that Stokes went along with Élie Halévy’s interpretation of Utilitarianism, mistakenly assuming that James Mill, as a follower of Jeremy Bentham, uncritically endorsed autocracy. Dube’s essay reassesses the relationship between Bentham’s Utilitarianism and the ideas of the Mills. In the case of James Mill, Bentham’s opinion was that ‘His creed of politics results less from love of the many, than from the hatred of the few’ (p. 47). Majeed suggests that we need to take into account the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions that had a bearing on James Mill’s views about Britain’s empire in India. He was critical of William Jones’s romanticization of Indian culture, which created difficulties for undertaking reform.

This involves pooling funds, advancing informal loans, and adhering to social expectations and religious norms. Although driving is an overwhelmingly male occupation, Chillia women in Pathanwadi undertake maal, small-scale piecework for sale that is conducted from the confines of the home. Some women also serve as religious teachers in the community. Bedi highlights the centrality of women’s work to the family economy, sustaining households in the face of constant precarity.

A widely loved version of an armed Buddhist deity is Bodhisattva Manjushri, the face serene, the arm wielding the sword of wisdom. The battles here are metaphoric, the sword cutting through the obstacles to spiritual liberation—ego, attachment, greed, ignorance and delusion. I couldn’t help feeling some unease at the generalized deployment of an image from the Vajrayana tradition—with its complex intersection of Buddhist psychology and visual arts left unexplored here—for a book that focuses largely on forms of state-sponsored violence and monastic deviations in the Sri Lankan, Burmese, and Thai contexts.
But then this slim volume is by a journalist, not a historian or a sociologist or philosopher of religion.

Four named khattats carry the chapter from there: Mohammed Ghalib, who still writes out the Quran and volumes of verse by hand outside a shop numbered 4181, and speaks of the work as inheritance rather than income; Shiraz Hussain of Khwab Tanha Collective, whose studio still finds buyers for his poster-calligraphy at exhibitions and fairs; Mohammed Zubair, who learned the craft from an older brother as a boy, was once turned away from formal training for being too young, and is not teaching it to his own daughter; and Mushtaq Ahmed, who has taught the discipline to some two thousand students across fifty years and says, plainly, that none of it has ever been enough to live on. The chapter is proof, in miniature, of how the whole book works: patient attention, a named source behind every claim of significance, and testimony given room to speak for itself

‘It is, of course, fashionable to blame a stepmother for most of the misfortunes of the world, but Frenchman Claude Martin’s stepmother appears to have inspired in him a veritable obsession.’ This opening statement of one of the chapters should give the reader an idea of the delightful prose that characterizes The Lion and the…

Indian weavers were not totally oblivious of the idea of cooperative societies as panchayats or shrenis had existed in India since ancient times. Moreover, panchayats also used to control transactions and prices of goods till as late as the early nineteenth century. Yet these very weavers could not associate themselves with the new organizations formed by the government. The formation of new organizations and societies interfaced with the existing social relations. In a community where ustads, grihastas and sardars had always played an important role in decision making, and where panchayats were included within the public sphere of the community, attempts to elect or nominate

This led, further, to disintegration of large kingdoms. Shrimali, while following Sharma’s formulations closely, pushes the beginnings of feudalism to circa 100 CE. This timeline removes Sharma’s key causative factor, i.e., the Hun invasions, from the frame of analysis because these took place only around the fourth-fifth century. This leads to the situation of a solution emerging about four hundred years before the crisis. Secondly, the early centuries of the Common Era are associated with the high point of international trade. Shrimali airbrushes both anachronisms by saying, ‘…the rise of the toiling, subject and immobile peasantry and artisans…are the hallmark of the feudal apparatus…’ (p. 427). If agrarian relations alone were to define the nature of society,

Further strength of the monograph lies in its integration of environmental history into political analysis. Kundan Kumar’s close reading of inscriptional references to rivers, forests, irrigation structures, and agrarian categories allows him to reconstruct the ecological contexts of state formation. The transformation of forested zones into agrarian villages emerges as a crucial dimension of early medieval expansion. Political authority was inseparable from environmental modification, rulers and their beneficiaries reshaped landscapes to generate revenue and sustain ritual institutions. In this sense, territoriality was materially grounded in processes of cultivation and ecological reordering.

Nowhere is that tension clearer than in the contested legacy of Chhatrapati Shivaji, claimed in turn by Hindu nationalists, by high-caste Brahmins, and by Bahujan-Dalit movements. Deshpande’s careful reading shows instead a practical and tolerant ruler who respected all faiths, built a mosque in his capital for his Muslim subjects, and trusted Muslims with the command of his navy. That record sits awkwardly with every party that invokes his name to divide people. Beneath the portrait runs a sharper argument, which is that the icon was itself manufactured over time,

The book would be a remarkable tool-book for those walkers or others (whether in Delhi or distant from it) keen on knowing Delhi, especially the monuments in Old Delhi, and the general ambience around them—street food, transport facilities, the people. A valuable aspect of the book is that it ‘creates a roadmap for a feminist lens of reading the city’, and focuses on ten powerful, influential women of the historical past, particularly the Mughal past, who contributed to the cityscape and architecture of Delhi. These women, erased from the patriarchy-driven contemporary popular accounts, perhaps because of their non-conformism and daring emboldened spirit, are retrieved by Jain from behind the purdah, the walled harem.

. Bordeaux urges caution in numismatic studies, emphasizing the need for chemical analysis in addition to the usual focus on visual representations, scripts and the external forms of coins so as to arrive at surer conclusions. Kazim Abdullaev’s discussion, highlighting the problems when the provenance of coins is unknown, is in a sense complementary; he also touches on the untidy, and occasionally murky world of markets for antiquities. François Thierry provides a glimpse of premodern ‘numismatists’—Chinese scholars who described,

The next two chapters are about the archaeological remains of the greater Varanasi zone covering Sarnath and Saidpur-Ghazipur area on the left bank of the Ganga and Vindhya-Kaimur Hill zone on the southern side. These contain information about a lesser-known Gupta temple at Bhitari in Ghazipur district and stone quarries at Chunar and other places on the southern side which supplied sculptural and architectural elements to Sarnath and other places. Then there is a short essay on the clay bull figurines from the early historic period at Hastinapur which, according to Jayaswal, formed part of fire rituals or yagnas.
The concluding essay,

Amalananda Ghosh would be involved in the Bikaner survey, and he would present some of his findings to the Indian History Congress in Jaipur in 1951: ‘The discovery of these mounds brings the Harappa culture much closer to the heart of India and reveals how deeply it had taken its roots in the Indian soil.’ The authors however also point out that Ghosh was not, in referring to India,

In this context, she emphasizes the role of natal affiliations, marriage alliances, affect and emotions in the political process. Tazkiras, when compared with information in the Mughal official records, are extremely valuable for studies on elite Mughal women, who are presented as politically influential, with vast personal economic power, creativity, self-expression, and as patrons of political and cultural activities, particularly, architectural enterprise and building construction. The tazkiras,

who visited the site in 2021 when thousands of villagers were in town in double-decker trolleys for a mela. One of the stops before the Swarn Mandir (Golden Temple) was the Bagh. But where was the Bagh I saw as a child? In its place was a shiny new memorial with museums cooled by Chinese air conditioners. The entry has been widened, and the walls of the entry passage are adorned with murals. An exit is provided, possibly to aid tourists.

‘Punjab ka Khoon’ written by Kavi Das in 1922 expresses the pain of families whose relatives were killed in this massacre, and challenges the British saying, ‘dekhenge tere kaam, karishme apne bhi dikhla denge, tu aankh nikal dekh, ahinsha se swarajya ham pa lenge’.
The fourth chapter includes only one poem, ‘Gaurang Gunanuvad’ written by Sree Muktajeev. The poet describes the quality of the Whites in his poem of 52 lines.

‘The Serpent in the Melting Pot: Kuṇḍalinī in North American Counterculture’ examining the concept of ‘experience’ is perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated and engaging. Drawing on thinkers such as William James, Michel Foucault, and Talal Asad, the section contends that religious experiences are not raw, unmediated phenomena. Instead, they are always articulated within particular discursive frameworks. Kuṇḍalinī, therefore, becomes a case study in the historicity of interiority itself.

who enjoyed the support of influential figures within the imperial harem. Despite the shift, the Jesuits continued to carry out their duties and were able to translate further portions of the Gospel into Persian. By 1582, however, the debates at the Ibadat Khana had been suspended. In the same year, hostilities between the Mughal and Portuguese further complicated the situation, leading the Jesuits Provincial in Goa to consider recalling the missionaries