Showing papers in "Studies in History in 2005"
TL;DR: This article examined the impact of modern, Western, biomedical systems on traditional, indigenous medical practices in colonial societies by studying the extensive writings of Yashoda Devi, a famous woman ayurvedic practitioner in north India at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Abstract: This article questions neat dichotomies between subaltern/hegemonic and feminine/masculine, which are often made while examining the impact of modern, Western, biomedical systems on traditional, indigenous medical practices in colonial societies. It does so by studying the extensive writings of Yashoda Devi, a famous woman ayurvedic practitioner in north India at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is unfortunate that this remarkable ayurvedic doctor has not found a place in the history of health and medicine in colonial India. Yashoda Devi negotiated the terrain of tradition and modernity in her discourse on women's health, often with contradictory and ambivalent implications. As a moral sexologist, she had a complex relationship to both the indigenous and Western knowledge systems: she praised the indigenous medical system as well as distanced herself from it, she partially affirmed the new systems of public health and hygiene, while simultaneously critiquing Western medicine. She offered indigen...
31 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the present Left hegemony in the state is largely based on the successful construction of a Marxi-inspired social revolution in late colonial Bengal, and they look at the communist engagement with literature in the late colonial period.
Abstract: This article looks at communist engagement with literature in late colonial Bengal, and argues that the present Left hegemony in the state is largely based on the successful construction of a Marxi...
14 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the transition from a divergent and peripheral economic and political space, which had mobility as a defining feature, to a unit of a modern state with permanent boundaries and an undivided sovereignty, more significantly, was its fairly rapid and documented.
Abstract: This article is an attempt to understand the transition to colonial rule in the region of Goalpara, a historically transitional space between the colonial provinces of Assam and Bengal. It does this through an examination of the confrontation between local and colonial notions of space, power and authority that was initiated by the construction of the region into a politically and economically unified territory. In the mid-nineteenth century Goalpara was a ‘frontier’ on the subcontinental mainstream in terms of social norms, settled production, forests and fields, long-distance trade and communication, centralized political power, law and taxation, as well as already being liminal in regional terms between ‘proto-Bengal’ and ‘proto-Assam’. What makes its transition from a divergent and peripheral economic and political space, which had mobility as a defining feature, to a unit of a modern state with permanent boundaries and an undivided sovereignty, more significantly, was its fairly rapid (and documented...
11 citations
TL;DR: The Agency of the Colonial Subject (AOC) in Forestlands in Early Nineteenth-Century Nilgiris as discussed by the authors was one of the earliest works dealing with claims and rights in forestlands.
Abstract: The Agency of the Colonial Subject : Claims and Rights in Forestlands in Early Nineteenth-Century Nilgiris
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors studied a corpus of genealogical materials from Bengal called kulajis or kulagranthas, which had served important political and cultural functions for several centuries.
Abstract: This article studies a corpus of genealogical materials from Bengal called kulajis or kulagranthas, which had served important political and cultural functions for several centuries. The main focus...
9 citations
TL;DR: The politics of modernity within Telugu culture by focusing on Kandukuri Viresalingam, the most prominent Westernizing social reformer from the Telugu-speaking region of British India in the nineteenth century, was examined in this paper.
Abstract: This article looks at the politics of modernity within Telugu culture by focusing on Kandukuri Viresalingam, the most prominent Westernizing social reformer from the Telugu-speaking region of British India in the nineteenth century. It analyses two of his major literary productions—an autobiography and a novel—and his wider interventions within the public sphere. This study reflects on the ambivalences and contradictions within the reformist project, and the nature of its association with nationalism. It is suggested that in the battle between social reformers and political nationalists, the former managed to assert their social leadership. This allowed Viresalingam's legacy to be successfully appropriated by the nationalist ideology of the region. By showing that political nationalism could indeed accommodate critiques of Indian society from Western or colonial perspectives, the article puts forward an argument different from some of the current understandings of Indian nationalism.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the potential of the Krsiparāśara, a Sanskrit agricultural work, for understanding the rural society of early medieval eastern India through dense readings by refixing it into its social context.
Abstract: This article aims at exploring the potential of the Krsiparāśara, a Sanskrit agricultural work, for understanding the rural society of early medieval eastern India through dense readings by refixing it into its social context. The structure shows the character of the text as an agricultural manual. The composer and intended audience of the text may have been local brāhmanas or similar local literate groups with a rural social background and involvement in agriculture, placed at the confluence of both local and supra-local knowledge. The image of a homogeneous agrarian society in the text is a constructed one. Though it is difficult to reconstruct the rural social structure directly from such an image, it is possible to access some aspects of social reality by detecting breaches within the text in which social diversity is recognizable. On the other hand, considering the logic of the construction of such an image, the intention of the composer to gloss over social diversity becomes discernible. It indicate...
4 citations
TL;DR: In this article, three very different types of data must be considered in any attempt at constructing a history of the ancient Jewish community of Kochi in Kerala: scant historical data, a third-century patristic letter, a ninth-century Muslim travelogue, an eleventh-century royal charter engraved on copperplates, a twelfth-century Hebrew tombstone.
Abstract: Three very different types of data must be considered in any attempt at constructing a history of the ancient Jewish community of Kochi in Kerala. There are scant historical data—a third-century patristic letter, a ninth-century Muslim travelogue, an eleventh-century royal charter engraved on copperplates, a twelfth-century Hebrew tombstone. There are numerous motifs from Kochini folklore, especially the intriguing Malayalam songs of Jewish women. Finally, there are indigenous narrations by which the community presents itself to the outside world. Even taken together, these three types of data do not yield a comprehensive history. But what they do reveal is perhaps more significant; they chart the community's crafting for themselves a niche within the social framework of Kerala. In sum, in their narrations they create an identity that resonates exceptionally well with both Indian and Jewish values, themes and motifs.
3 citations
TL;DR: Ernst and Lawrence as mentioned in this paper pointed out that "the spell of hagiography, with its powerful evocation of the virtuous and ideal life, was so strong that few writers have been able to escape its influence altogether".
Abstract: In continuation of a long-standing tradition, the Chishti Sufi order (silsila) attracts a large number of devotees to its shrines (dargahs) spread all over the Indian subcontinent. Cutting across the boundaries of institutionalized religions, the followers have converted the tombs of some of the early Chishti saints into major centres of pilgrimage. The seat (gaddi/sajjada) and the dwelling place (khanqah/ jamaatkhana) of the living master (pir/shaykh/khawaja) also continue to draw the faithful, despite vigorous campaigns by reformists of different hues. Generations of Muslim writers have played an important role in creating and sustaining these sacred spaces by highlighting the careers of Chishti exemplars, mainly the first five great Sufis of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There is an abundance of devotional and scholarly writings on the tombs and full-length biographies of the saints in several languages, including Persian, Urdu and English. Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, two leading American scholars of Sufism in South Asia, have contributed to this biographical process even as they show some degree of detachment from the subject. They have consciously avoided the trap of the hagiographers and thereby the Sufi tradition itself by advocating the need to pay equal respect and attention to later Sufi masters, rather than blindly adhering to the notion of decline. As the authors put it, the golden age syndrome so favoured by the Orientalists accords a handful of the great ones, mostly from one early period, a kind of hagiographical reverence denied to all others (Ernst and Lawrence 2002: 13). It is suggested by the authors that the spell of hagiography, with its powerful evocation of the virtuous and ideal life, was so strong that few writers have been able to escape its influence altogether. In other words, most of the supposedly scholarly literature on eminent Sufis ends up adopting the same rhetorical style of presentation employed by devotees (Ibid.: 48).1
3 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the relationship between a Śaiva cult and processes of legitimation in the context of early medieval Rajasthan, and explored the complex ways in which the history of the lineage and the cult centre was interwoven.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between a Śaiva cult—that of Eklingji—and processes of legitimation in the context of early medieval Rajasthan. It focuses on the multiple strategies of legitimation associated with the Guhilas of Mewar, and explores the complex ways in which the history of the lineage and the cult centre was interwoven. The study shows how the cult and the sacred site acquired different meanings over the early medieval period, and how the heterodox ascetics—the Śaiva Pāśupatas—were displaced by Brahmans after the thirteenth century. These changes are located within the broader cultural, social and political contexts of the seventh to the fifteenth centuries.