Bodhisattva Kar

Bio: Bodhisattva Kar is an academic researcher from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. The author has contributed to research in topics: Assamese & Vernacular. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 19 citations.

Historia Elastica: A Note on the Rubber Hunt in the North-Eastern Frontier of British India

Abstract: From scattered references in government documents and contemporary academic articles, this paper constructs a rough history of the wide and largely paralegal trade in Ficus elastica, or India-rubbe...

‘Tongue Has No Bone’ Fixing the Assamese Language, c. 1800–c. 1930

Abstract: This article deals with the politics of envisioning a vernacular for Assam proper during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through a small, connected history of orthographic contests, grammarians’ debates and print-culture, it tries to understand the various ways in and through which the boundaries of a vernacular were drawn, policed and violated during this period. Rather than narrating the complexities of the question in terms of stable and ever-present languages, this article attempts to show how the metropolis-oriented production of linguistic knowledge came to hypostatize an abstract grid of standard languages within which the mutable, heterogeneous and fluctuating speech practices (and the corresponding scribal culture) of a frontier province had to be definitively mobilized. The article explores the debates regarding the alleged dialectal status of the ‘Assamese’ and traces some connections between spatial sequence, linguistic imagination and proprietorial logic.

Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962

Abstract: Since the mid-twentieth century China and India have entertained a difficult relationship, erupting into open war in 1962. Shadow States is the first book to unpack Sino-Indian tensions from the angle of competitive state-building - through a study of their simultaneous attempts to win the approval and support of the Himalayan people. When China and India tried to expand into the Himalayas in the twentieth century, their lack of strong ties to the region and the absence of an easily enforceable border made their proximity threatening - observing China and India's state-making efforts, local inhabitants were in a position to compare and potentially choose between them. Using rich and original archival research, Berenice Guyot-Rechard shows how India and China became each other's 'shadow states'. Understanding these recent, competing processes of state formation in the Himalayas is fundamental to understanding the roots of tensions in Sino-Indian relations.

Provincial Urbanity: Intellectuals and Public Life in Patna, 1880-1930

Abstract: Author(s): Boyk, David Sol | Advisor(s): Bakhle, Janaki | Abstract: Scholarly and popular discussions of cities tend to concentrate on the largest exemplars—Bombay and Calcutta, in the case of South Asia—and to neglect the smaller cities and towns where most urban people live. This dissertation examines the history of Patna, a small city in the north Indian region of Bihar, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Patna had been a bustling center of trade, culture, and administration for much of the early modern period but, like many cities in the Gangetic plains, it was marginalized by the political and economic changes of the nineteenth century. To many observers, it seemed to have become part of the provincial hinterland or, to use the term that developed under colonial rule, the "mofussil."Even a diminished and demeaned Patna, however, remained a major center. Despite the city's apparent decline, it sustained its connections with other mofussil towns and with the rest of the world, and maintained ways of being urban and urbane that distinguished it from larger cities as well as from more rural places. Patna was still Bihar's economic and political hub and a central node in the dynamic public culture that linked Patnaites with readers and writers in nearby towns and distant cities. Questions of the "backwardness" of Patna and Bihar entered national politics when activists based in the city began to call for Bihar to be separated from Bengal and established as a new province with Patna as its capital. When they succeeded in 1912, the city itself was reshaped along with its forms of community and authority. The same transformations that seemed to reverse Patna's decline also weakened its links with the networks that had defined its public culture.This dissertation documents Patna's distinctiveness and vitality by combining several approaches. First, it is a cultural history of provinciality and urbanity that shows how these concepts were formed through social practice. Secondly, it is an urban history that examines the city's politics and social geography together with its relationships with its region. And thirdly, it is a social history of intellectuals that locates their literary and scholarly activities within their urban community. Ultimately, it argues, Patna's urbanity was inextricably linked with its provinciality.

Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909

Abstract: Malaria was considered one of the most widespread disease-causing entities in the nineteenth century. It was associated with a variety of frailties far beyond fevers, ranging from idiocy to impotence. And yet, it was not a self-contained category. The reconsolidation of malaria as a diagnostic category during this period happened within a wider context in which cinchona plants and their most valuable extract, quinine, were reinforced as objects of natural knowledge and social control. In India, the exigencies and apparatuses of British imperial rule occasioned the close interactions between these histories. In the process, British imperial rule became entangled with a network of nonhumans that included, apart from cinchona plants and the drug quinine, a range of objects described as malarial, as well as mosquitoes. Malarial Subjects explores this history of the co-constitution of a cure and disease, of British colonial rule and nonhumans, and of science, medicine and empire. This title is also available as Open Access.