In comparison to other social groups, India’s rural poor – and particularly Adivasis and Dalits - have seen little benefit from the country’s economic growth over the last three decades. Though economists and statisticians are able to model the form and extent of this inequality, their work is rarely concerned with identifying possible causes. Employment, Poverty and Rights in India analy…
"Writing Self, Writing Empire examines the life, career, and writings of the Mughal state secretary, or munshi, Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1670), one of the great Indo-Persian poets and prose stylists of early modern South Asia. Chandar Bhan’s life spanned the reigns of four emperors: Akbar (1556–1605), Jahangir (1605–1627), Shah Jahan (1628–1658), and Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir (1658–170…
The ethnographic approach to Indian history and genealogy; the making of dynastic history in the kingdom of Jhalavad; the history of Gujarat. ‘Genealogy, Archive, Image’ addresses the ways in which history and tradition are ‘reinvented’ through text, memory and painting. It examines the making of dynastic history in the kingdom of Jhalavad, situated in Gujarat, western India, over th…
This Report is one of the first comprehensive studies on young children in India. It focuses on children under 6 years of age and presents key aspects of their well-being and development. It introduces two young child indices aggregating selected indicators to separately track child outcomes and child circumstances and provides an account of the current situation of the young child in terms of …
This open access book examines India’s economic development, agricultural production, and nutrition through the lens of a “Food Systems Approach (FSA).” Despite economic progress, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition persist. Simultaneously, recent trends in obesity and micro-nutrient deficiency indicate a future public health crisis. This book explores the challenges a…
Popularly Hinduism is believed to be the world’s oldest living religion. This claim is based on a continuous reverence to the oldest strata of religious authority within the Hindu traditions, the Vedic corpus, which began to be composed more than three thousand years ago, around 1750–1200 BCE. The Vedas have been considered by many as the philosophical cornerstone of the Brahmanical traditi…
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. During the height of Muslim power in Mughal South Asia, Hindu and Muslim scholars worked collaboratively to translate a large body of Hindu Sanskrit texts into the Persian language. Translating Wisdom reconstructs the intellectual processes and exchanges that underlay these translations. Using as a case …
Jenny Huberman provides an ethnographic study of encounters between western tourists and the children who work as unlicensed peddlers and guides along the riverfront city of Banaras, India. She examines how and why these children elicit such powerful reactions from western tourists and locals in their community as well as how the children themselves experience their work and render it meaningfu…
In the historical study of the Indian grammarian tradition, a line of demarcation can often be drawn between the conformity of a system with the well-known grammar of Pa?ini and the explanatory effectiveness of that system. One element of Pa?ini’s grammar that scholars have sometimes struggled to bring across this line of demarcation is the theory of homogeneity, or savar?ya, which concerns t…
A ground-breaking collection of essays that explores the place of the Dutch and English East India Companies in Asia and the nature of their interactions with Asian rulers, officials, merchants, soldiers and brokers. The Dutch and English East India Companies were formidable organizations that were gifted with expansive powers that allowed them to conduct diplomacy, raise armies and seize terri…
Many societies are experiencing growing longevity and population ageing simultaneously with increasing urbanization and mobilities. Such fundamental demographic and structural shifts have been reflected in a multitude of narratives and strategies how to “age well” in view of rapidly transforming environments, mobilities of people and changing social relations. This volume explores the trans…
This open access book provides an evidence-based roadmap for revitalising Indian agriculture while ensuring that the growth process is efficient, inclusive, and sustainable, and results in sustained growth of farmers’ incomes. The book, instead of looking for global best practices and evaluating them to assess the possibility of replicating these domestically, looks inward at the best practic…
Through the study of archaeological, ethnographic, linguistic, and historical evidence from northern Peru to northern Chile, Bolivia, and northwest Argentina, the authors in this volume show the significance of ritual from pre-contact to present day in the Andes. These volume essays deal with theoretical and methodological concerns in anthropology and archaeology including non-human and human a…
The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan—the Ambikā Temple in Jagat and the Śri Ékliṅgjī Temple Complex in Kailāshpurī—the author looks beyond their divergent sec…
In this exploration of the meaning of home, Annie Zaidi reflects on the places in India from which she derives her sense of identity. She looks back on the now renamed city of her birth and the impossibility of belonging in the industrial township where she grew up. From her ancestral village, in a region notorious for its gangsters, to the mega-city where she now lives, Zaidi provides a nuance…
Paternalism to Partnership examines the administration of Indian affairs from 1786, when the first federal administrator was appointed, through 2021. David H. DeJong examines each administrator through a biographical sketch and excerpts of policy statements defining the administrator’s political philosophy, drawn from official reports or the administrator’s own writings. The Indian Offic…
Indigenous artists frequently voice concerns over the commodification of their cultures, a process acutely felt by those living with the consequences of colonialism. This timely book, which features colour illustrations throughout, examines the ways in which contemporary indigenous peoples in different parts of the Americas have harnessed performance practices to resist imposed stereotypes and …
People’s transnational mobilities, their activities to build homes in their countries of residence and their connectivities have resulted in multiplicities of belonging to encountered, imagined and represented communities operating within various political contexts. Migrants and their descendants labor to form and transform relations with their country of origin and of residence. People who s…
This book analyzes the possibilities for effective global governance of science in Europe, India and China. Authors from the three regions join forces to explore how ethical concerns over new technologies can be incorporated into global science and technology policies. The first chapter introduces the topic, offering a global perspective on embedding ethics in science and technology policy. Cha…
This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on t…
Rozman shows how East Asia’s international relations over three decades can be best understood through the lens of triangles, analyzing relations between the key nations through a series of trilateral relationships. He argues that triangles present a convincing answer to the question of whether we had entered a new era of bipolarity like the Cold War or an age of multipolarity. Triangulation …
Through an examination of the creation of the first linguistically organized province in India, Odisha, Pritipuspa Mishra explores the ways regional languages came to serve as the most acceptable registers of difference in post-colonial India. She argues that rather than disrupting the rise and spread of All-India nationalism, regional linguistic nationalism enabled and deepened the reach of na…
Oral Democracy studies citizens' voices in civic and political deliberations in India's gram sabhas (village assemblies), the largest deliberative institution in human history. It analyses nearly three hundred transcripts of gram sabhas, sampled within the framework of a natural experiment, allowing the authors to study how state policy affects the quality of discourse, citizens' discursive per…
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 va…
This open access book provides a clear holistic conceptual framework of CISS-F (competitiveness, inclusiveness, sustainability, scalability and access to finance) to analyse the efficiency of value chains of high value agricultural commodities in India. It is based on the understanding that agriculture is an integrated system that connects farming with logistics, processing and marketing. Farme…
Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were designated "coolies". Qualifying this framework of transition and introduction, this study makes a case for the "production" of coolie labour in the histo…
Coolie labour was often proclaimed as a deliberate compromise straddling the regimes of the past (slave labour) and the future (free labour). In the late 1850s, the locals were replaced by labourers imported from outside the province who were designated "coolies". Qualifying this framework of transition and introduction, this study makes a case for the "production" of coolie labour in the histo…
Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, families, and frontline workers who experience and treat traumatic injury from traffic .