Showing papers in "Studies in History in 2001"
TL;DR: As the bubonic plague epidemic raged and retreated in Bombay during the last years of the nineteenth century, colonial ruling authorities grew increasingly concerned about the threat to 'public health’ posed by the squalid housing conditions of the city’s labouring classes.
Abstract: As the bubonic plague epidemic raged and retreated in Bombay during the last years of the nineteenth century, colonial ruling authorities grew increasingly concerned about the threat to ’public health’ posed by the squalid housing conditions of the city’s labouring classes. The inadequate sanitary conditions in the dwellings inhabited by the poor were perceived as a primary cause for the spread of the epidemic in the city. Finding solutions to the problems of overcrowding and insanitary housing became matters of critical importance if Bombay was to continue
27 citations
TL;DR: To explain the fragility of modernity in India, the authors attributed this fragility to the contradictory role of the colonial state in creating these institutional arenas and ideas determining modern Indian political and intellectual life.
Abstract: to attributing this fragility to the contradictory role of the colonial state in creating these institutional arenas. Valid as these observations may be, they are simply too large to explain the ways in which modernity in India works. Besides attempting to secure its economic interests, colonial power also involved itself in a distinct set of ideological initiatives aimed at restnicturing cultural and political codes and practices. In reshaping the political imagination in South Asia, the policies of the colonial state redefined the institutional arenas and ideas determining modern Indian political and intellectual life. However, given the constraints of the colonial situation, the political impact of these efforts to transfer modern rationality was mainly displaced on to the realm of culture. Evidently, the colonial encounter moulded not just ’external’ institutional arrangements but also the proclivities of the new intelligentsia, especially the ways in which it thought about the social world and its own position within it. Impelled by the shifts in ruling ideas and structures that formed part of the vernacularization of the liberal imagination in nineteenth century India, the emerging regional intelligentsias gradually learnt to make strategic choices about the ensuing possibilities within the new political arenas. These decisions, which included judgements about ruling 61ites and subordinate groups, were important because they demonstrated the processes by which
22 citations
TL;DR: Sontheimer was interested in the application of this duality to historical processes, especially to the construction of religious articulations such as the parallels between tribal fertility cults and Tantricism or the Devi cults as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: to the ksetra. These could be opposing concepts contrasting the habitat of the ascetic and the renouncer on the one hand, and the established settlement reflecting attempts at a regularly ordered social system, on the other. Or, in some cases, they could be seen as a continuum. The grama (which would fall under the category of ‘settlement’) was not static, and could include a mobile village or migrating cattlekeepers, the emphasis in both being on large numbers of people and domestic animals. The dichotomy as well as the complementarity between the forest and the settlement has often been commented upon. Sontheimer was interested in the application of this duality to historical processes, especially to the construction of religious articulations such as the parallels between tribal fertility cults and Tantricism or the Devi cults, as also in the relationship of this duality to pastoralism.1 His study of pastoral activities led him to suggest a link between the forest and the settlement, and to attempt to understand the influences on the responses of the ksetra or griima to the vana or arat:lya. This dichotomy between the vana and the grcima evolved in early times when the village constituted the settlement. With the emergence of urban centres, and particularly in the early centuries A.D., there was also a growing dichotomy between the grama and the nagara-the village and the town respectively. At the same time, vana and aranya had an ecology different from that of the settlement, and would have included the desert and the semi-arid pastoral regions as well. Another dichotomy, discussed in the context of ecology and medical knowledge, was that of
15 citations
TL;DR: The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS) as mentioned in this paper was established by M.L. Sircar in 1876 to promote the cultivation of and research in science by Indians.
Abstract: On 15 January 1876, M.L. Sircar established the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS). Sircar had broached the project of a national science association in 1869 in his famous article ’On the desirability of a national institution for the cultivation of science by the natives of India’, in the Calcutta Journal of Medicine (which was started by him in 1868). This was followed by pamphlets, letters to the Hindu Patriot and public addresses. Sircar wanted his institute to perform two functions; one was cultivation of and research in science by Indians while the other was the popularization of science among the general populace. He articulated his goals in his first article:
9 citations
TL;DR: The crowing of the cock awoke Sir William Jones, puisne (or junior) judge at the Supreme Court at Calcutta, on the morning of 2 February 1786, as indeed it had every morning since his arrival in India barely two and a half years earlier as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The crowing of the cock awoke Sir William Jones, puisne (or junior) judge at the Supreme Court at Calcutta, on the morning of 2 February 1786, as indeed it had every morning since his arrival in India barely two and a half years earlier.1 Leaving his wife Anna Maria to her dreams, he rose silently from his bed and stepped out of his palatial garden house in the exclusive suburb of Garden Reach. Dawn had not quite broken as he walked up the road to Fort William, three miles to the north-east. A palanquin bore him from there to the Court House, where a cold bucket bath, dressing, and breakfast took up the next hour. At seven, Jones met Ramlochan, his sixty-six-year-old private Sanskrit teacher from Nadia and remained till eight with him reading the Hitopadesa, learning a few dozen more words from the Amarakosa and grammar from Durgadas’s Mugdhabodhatika. Although he found Panini too abstruse in the original, Ramlochan’s patient introduction to Paninian grammar was decidedly original and exciting: within weeks of learning the notion of segmental morphemes he had applied it to the other classical languages—the results were startling and he was going to let the world know of them this very evening.
8 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors highlight the significance of the landgrant charters of the Maitraka dynasty in the process of regional state formation in early medieval Gujarat and argue that this period of decentralization in north India coincided with a very intensive process of state formation at the local, sub-regional and regional levels in some parts of southern India.
Abstract: This essay highlights the significance of the landgrant charters of the Maitraka dynasty in the process of regional state formation in early medieval Gujarat. The theme of regional state formation needs to be explored, particularly since the dominant historiography on early medieval India has highlighted political decentralization and fragmentation in the post-Gupta period.’ The concepts of ’Indian Feudalism’ and the ’Segmentary State’2 negate the phenomenon of regional state formation in the post-Gupta period. Hermann Kulke questions the very basis of the model of political decentralization in the post-Gupta period: he argues that this model fails to explain the growth of important regional kingdoms and their long duration. Kulke observes that a structural interpretation of the post-Gupta era reveals that this period of decentralization in north India coincided with a very intensive process of state formation at the local, sub-regional, and regional levels in some parts of southern India.3 B.D. Chattopadhyaya, who has discussed the processes of political and
4 citations
TL;DR: The history of the sciences had an important role to play in the crystallization of disciplinary identities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe as discussed by the authors, particularly during the French Revolution, when the identities of emerging scientific disciplines stabilized and modem science entered a new phase of institutionalization and disciplinary differentiation during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Abstract: The history of the sciences had an important role to play in the crystallization of disciplinary identities in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. This was particularly true as the identities of the emerging scientific disciplines stabilized and modem science entered a new phase of institutionalization and disciplinary differentiation during the last decades of the eighteenth century. The present essay is part of a larger study on the changing image of Indian mathematics and astronomy in French Enlightenment historiography. In this essay, we look at the history of astronomy and mathematics after the French Revolution, in a period of institutional reform of the sciences. This attempt at a social epistemology of the disciplinary histories of the exact sciences in Enlightenment France and the place of India in this imagination draws upon a particular archive. The larger archive consists of the histories of mathematics and astronomy produced by France’s leading astronomers and mathematicians during the period 1750-1850, most of whom were members of the distinguished Acad6niie des Sciences. A significant volume of this production’ addresses the history of mathematics and astronomy of the ’Orient’. An appreciation of the mathematics of the
3 citations
TL;DR: The second half of the eighteenth century was a crucial stage in the development of Madras as south India's colonial metropolis as almost perpetual military conflict with France and Mysore forced the East India Company representatives and their allies in urban society to reconstruct the city according to the imperatives of war as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The second half of the eighteenth century was a crucial stage in the development of Madras as south India’s colonial metropolis as almost perpetual military conflict with France and Mysore forced the East India Company’s representatives and their allies in urban society to reconstruct the city according to the imperatives of war. This essay argues that changes in the city’s spatial and socio-political st-uctures were reflected in growing efforts on the part of the colonial administration to restrict the use of urban land by the city’s ’labouring poor’. An extension of historical analysis to the labouring classes of Madras may also help to shake some prevalent assumptions about the city’s historical development in general. According to Susan Neild-Basu, one of the few historians who has taken a closer look at the social history of south India’s colonial metropolis in the last few decades, Madras was a ’city of villages’ in 1800.1 The Imperial Gazetteer ofindia described the Madras of the early twentieth century in very similar terms:
3 citations
TL;DR: A Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, citing the inspirational work of the Indian historians, has declared its intent to instal the subaltern at the centre of Latin American studies, though it is revealing that their programmatic statement appears in a cultural studies journal as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: It is a rare moment indeed when a school of thought, whether in history or in any other discipline, from a formerly colonized nation that is still resoundingly a part of the Third World (whatever its pretensions to nuclear or great power status), receives in the Western academy the kind of critical attention that has been bestowed upon the Subaltern School of historians whose work revolves largely around the colonial period of Indian history. Historians might recall that even the American Historical Review, which is seldom a journal at the cutting edge of theory, or otherwise prone to the bacchanalia of post-modem excesses, devoted the greater part of the pages of one of its recent issues to Subaltern Studies and its rather wide impact not only on historical studies in the Anglo-American academy, but beyond as well.1 A Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, citing the inspirational work of the Indian historians, has declared its intent to instal the subaltern at the centre of Latin American studies, though it is revealing that their programmatic statement appears in a cultural studies journal.2 There is, in the warm reception given to Subaltern Studies in some circles in the Anglo-American world, more than just a whiff of avuncular affection: trained almost entirely in British universities, the original core group of subaltern historians stand forth, or so it is sometimes fondly
2 citations