{"title":"The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia","authors":"Veena Naregal","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2183626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2183626","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"516 - 518"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43301534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inspectors of the Raj: A Pedagogy of Critical Conservatism in Odisha","authors":"Umasankar Patra","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2176596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2176596","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay investigates new articulations of belonging and community identity that emerged in Odisha, on the eastern coast of India, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through the works of an inspector of schools. Largely taken in the historiography to be mere bureaucrats, inspectors of schools, especially in colonial Odisha, were an important component in the administration of the province, and emerged as arbiters of taste, doyens of Odia literature, and public intellectuals. This essay proposes that their negotiation with the colonial apparatus and prevalent Odia linguistic nationalist spirit was carried out through a novel cultural ideology, ‘critical conservatism’. Deploying a comparative framework with the development of conservatism in Bengal, this essay examines the uniqueness of the conservative impulse in Odisha, thereby suggesting a rethinking of conservatism as a cultural enterprise. Moving away from the focus on the literary works of Fakir Mohan Senapati, this article throws light on the works and lives of other figures of modernity such as Radhanath Ray, Nanda Kishore Bala, Madhusudan Rao, and the Satyabadi School, a unique intervention in pedagogy taken up in Odisha in the early twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"318 - 335"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44952429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Famine in a Rice Economy: Natural Calamities, Grain Scarcity and the Company-State in Bengal, 1770–1803","authors":"Baijayanti Chatterjee","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2178186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2178186","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper analyses the conjuncture of factors that led to famines in late eighteenth century Bengal, a province in which, due to the fluvial ecology and monsoonal climate, the cultivation of rice predominated. I demonstrate that the exclusive dependence on rice crops created conditions of agricultural insecurity, which in turn was taken advantage of by merchants and hoarders of grain in a bid to profit from artificially enhanced prices. The East India Company, acquiring political authority in Bengal in the mid eighteenth century, was unable to break through the monopolies of the grain dealers. In addition, its experiment with grain storage in large public granaries (golas), intended to overcome food shortages, also failed on account of mounting costs and the irrevocable tension between laissez-faire and state interventionism, which ultimately led to the abandonment of the granary system. I argue that a combination of rice monoculture, mercantile strategies, and lack of effective state intervention was ultimately responsible for transforming natural calamities and the ensuing food shortages into full-scale famines in Bengal in the eighteenth century.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"370 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44085874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theorising Marginality: Discourses on the Making of Modern Adivasi Communities in Kerala","authors":"K. Rajesh","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2177001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2177001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Despite the accepted usage of ‘marginality’ as a subcategory of subalternity, seldom has the meaning of marginality as a concept been expounded. This paper sets out to address this lack by conceiving of ‘marginality’ as a condition, by focusing on the lived experiences of Adivasis in Kerala through the discourses constructed by a contemporary social movement, the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS). Discourse analysis is the methodological frame that I have used in this paper to analyse the descriptions produced by the AGMS and the state of Kerala, and this is broadly situated within the post-colonial political-sociological approach. Premised on this, I argue that while marginality is an essential concept for looking at contemporary Adivasi movements in India, it is productive to interrogate and explore expanding the varied meanings attached to this concept.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"336 - 352"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"58928731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Leaving Comrades to Die: Shahadat, Soldiering and Accidental Death on the Siachen Glacier","authors":"S. Khan","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2180897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2180897","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Siachen glacier, one of the longest non-polar glaciers in the world, turned into the world’s highest battlefield in 1984, when both the neighbouring countries, India and Pakistan, deployed their troops for control over the glacier. The nature of warfare since then has changed from active operations to one of low-intensity warfare. In this changing nature of warfare, the article explores how meanings of death are reconfigured in personal recollections and public representations, when the terrain continues to inflict injuries, high-altitude illnesses and death in the absence of any direct enemy confrontation. The article compares personal experiences of death with media representations. While personal experiences of soldiers and officers who have served on the glacier show their grievances about having left comrades to die after they fell into deadly crevasses, media representations reinsert the Indian soldier and depict death in the company of comrades and family to justify the expensive and extremely difficult war over the glacier.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"407 - 424"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42349829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Leaving the Hindu Far Right","authors":"Felix Pal, Neha Chaudhary","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2179817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2179817","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Why do people leave the world’s largest far-right organisation? In this article, we analyse six autobiographical defection accounts of ex-members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the apex organisation of the Indian Hindu nationalist movement. Compiled here for the first time, an analysis of these accounts reveals that even the most disciplined and ideologically coherent far-right organisations suffer from internal organisational messiness and attrition. These accounts challenge the unique mythology that surrounds the RSS and gesture towards the methodological possibilities of discarding the ideology-driven analyses of the far right in favour of material analyses of the lives of far-right organisational members.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"425 - 444"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47009676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Of Loss, Belonging and Remembrance: Indian Poetic Responses to World War I","authors":"A. Banerjee","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2178754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2178754","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article undertakes a critical exploration of the Indian poetic responses to World War I. The most striking feature of this poetry was its uniquely diverse nature, which reflected in full the multicultural character of the Indian army at the Western Front and elsewhere in the world. The immense diversity of Indian soldiers triggered a wide range of emotions and ideas from combatants and civilians alike. While we have established writers like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu on the one hand, we have a poetic miscellany of lesser known creative voices on the other, some even documenting their first-hand experiences of the War. Poems, lyrical propaganda, folk-songs, epistolary verse, elegies and even verses accompanying posters make up the various modes of literary circulation during this time of unprecedented global turmoil. Making use of both original compositions and various other works in translation, this article argues that most of this poetic evidence often serves as crucial testimonies, chronicling not only the major historical events of the War years, but also assiduously recording the wide gamut of feelings and emotions associated with the conflict.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"464 - 480"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46476172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New Lives in Anand: Building a Muslim Hub in Western India","authors":"Aishani Khurana","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2184566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2184566","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"514 - 516"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48804769","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Communist Internationalism to a ‘New Humanism’: On M.N. Roy’s Confrontation with Fascism","authors":"Christopher Balcom","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2177806","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2177806","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper investigates the thought of the Indian revolutionary and philosopher M.N. Roy (1887–1954). The essay argues that Roy’s pivot from Marxism to a liberal ‘New Humanism’ over the course of the 1930s and 1940s was shaped by his thinking about fascism and represents a broader turn away from a materialist reading of history and loss of confidence in the Indian working class. The paper begins with an analysis of Roy’s early communism, and considers his later critique, elaborated from the 1930s onwards, that ‘Gandhism’ represented an Indian form of fascism, and explores how these arguments led to his rejection of Marxism.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"46 1","pages":"353 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41578926","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Why Can’t Our <i>Bhuta</i> Have a Mask?’ Caste Contestations and Ritual Practice in Tulunadu","authors":"Vijayashree C.S.","doi":"10.1080/00856401.2023.2179816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2179816","url":null,"abstract":"The paper describes caste contestations around the Bhutaradhane tradition in the Tulunadu region of coastal Karnataka. Bhutaradhane is a pantheistic tradition of spirit worship which has been a key site for the assertion of regional identity claims in Tulunadu. The Bhutas (spirits) are ranked along a graded hierarchy that reflects the caste structure of the region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the paper describes the interventions of a Dalit caste, the Mundalas, to rupture this hierarchical structure and challenge their low assigned status in the tradition and in society. It explores how they draw on narratives of the past to appropriate and reshape the Bhutaradhane tradition in line with their aspirations for upward mobility. The paper situates current contestations around the caste’s patron Bhuta within the growing socio-political consciousness of the Mundalas, who have challenged the hegemonic discourse of Bhuta heritage, laying bare the operations of caste within the ritual as well as caste inequalities and exclusions in the region.","PeriodicalId":46457,"journal":{"name":"South Asia-Journal of South Asian Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135185087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}