Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 2, Page 239-264, August 2023.
This article seeks to analyse how the concept of masculinity is embedded in the cultural discourse of Ancient India. It is also our contention that since in the ancient Indic context, the sex-gender system was a reality, we cannot discount the existence of a ‘masculinist’ structure which had a role to play in shaping the perception/functioning of a masculine persona. The article is an attempt to unravel the mystique of Indic manhood across a broad temporal frame by focusing on different themes such as varn˙a status, male body, fatherhood and sexuality and its framing within the discourse on masculinity. Since masculinity was constructed in opposition to both femininity and the defective/deficient male, these two aspects have also been focused upon.
Category Archives: Accounting History
Book review: K. L. Tuteja, Religion, Community and Nation: Hindu Consciousness and Nationalism in Colonial Punjab
Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 2, Page 280-283, August 2023.
K. L. Tuteja, Religion, Community and Nation: Hindu Consciousness and Nationalism in Colonial Punjab, Indian Institute of Advanced Study and Primus Books, 2021, pp. 372+xi, ₹1,250.
K. L. Tuteja, Religion, Community and Nation: Hindu Consciousness and Nationalism in Colonial Punjab, Indian Institute of Advanced Study and Primus Books, 2021, pp. 372+xi, ₹1,250.
Nationalism, Revivalism and Pan-Islamism: Shifts in the Political and Cultural Imaginings of Allama Iqbal’s Poetry
Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 2, Page 199-238, August 2023.
This paper argues that contrary to some popular perceptions, the ideological shift in Iqbal dates not from 1930 (when he apparently moved towards the acceptance of the two-nation theory at the Allahabad Session of the Muslim League) but to his stay in Europe from 1905 to 1908 (after which he made a complete and abrupt shift from Indian nationalism to revivalism and Pan-Islamism). This shift is powerfully expressed in the political and cultural imaginings of both his Urdu and Persian poetry. His poetry becomes suffused with the ideas of revivalism and Pan-Islamism in counter-position to those of composite nationhood and territorial nationalism on which the Indian national movement was premised. The shift is embodied in poetic imagery and metaphor incompatible with the modern idea of nationalism, especially the dominant idea of Indian nationalism. Iqbal’s later thoughts concerning Islam’s relations with non-Muslims in India and elsewhere promote an adversarial historical and cultural narrative of Islam.Though triggered by a passionate rejection of the West and its modernity, the shift manifested not just in a critique of the West but also of all non-Islamic cultures and civilizations. Iqbal’s narrative of Islam is teleological and triumphalist. Far from being defensive about the charges of intolerance and aggression levelled against Islam by its critics, he proudly invokes imagery of the sword and the conquest in the history of Islam, while bemoaning the decline of its political power in the modern era. Iqbal’s quest is for a supposedly pure Islam of the past and its revival in the twentieth century in the form of a redefined, reconstituted and revitalized Umma which cuts across boundaries of nations, continents and ethnicities. Few poets in the history of the modern world have had such influence as Allama Iqbal, and fewer still have made such fundamental shifts.
This paper argues that contrary to some popular perceptions, the ideological shift in Iqbal dates not from 1930 (when he apparently moved towards the acceptance of the two-nation theory at the Allahabad Session of the Muslim League) but to his stay in Europe from 1905 to 1908 (after which he made a complete and abrupt shift from Indian nationalism to revivalism and Pan-Islamism). This shift is powerfully expressed in the political and cultural imaginings of both his Urdu and Persian poetry. His poetry becomes suffused with the ideas of revivalism and Pan-Islamism in counter-position to those of composite nationhood and territorial nationalism on which the Indian national movement was premised. The shift is embodied in poetic imagery and metaphor incompatible with the modern idea of nationalism, especially the dominant idea of Indian nationalism. Iqbal’s later thoughts concerning Islam’s relations with non-Muslims in India and elsewhere promote an adversarial historical and cultural narrative of Islam.Though triggered by a passionate rejection of the West and its modernity, the shift manifested not just in a critique of the West but also of all non-Islamic cultures and civilizations. Iqbal’s narrative of Islam is teleological and triumphalist. Far from being defensive about the charges of intolerance and aggression levelled against Islam by its critics, he proudly invokes imagery of the sword and the conquest in the history of Islam, while bemoaning the decline of its political power in the modern era. Iqbal’s quest is for a supposedly pure Islam of the past and its revival in the twentieth century in the form of a redefined, reconstituted and revitalized Umma which cuts across boundaries of nations, continents and ethnicities. Few poets in the history of the modern world have had such influence as Allama Iqbal, and fewer still have made such fundamental shifts.
‘Fractured’ Peasantry in Colonial Bihar in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Reflections and Responses
Indian Historical Review, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 304-321, December 2023.
This article is an attempt at scrutinising the rural and agrarian structure through a caste framework in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bihar, a period when Bihar was undergoing economic, environmental, social and political changes owing to colonial intervention. This article will highlight these everyday negotiations, forgotten struggles and exclusions that were carried on against the background of the importation of western science and technology, changing laws and encroachment on common lands. An intrinsic mechanism was used during the changing times to keep the hierarchical structure alive. Nevertheless, it led to springing up of various kisan sabhas, which aimed at voicing the opinions of the marginalised peasantry. New set of sources will capture different shades of peasant identities and a vast multitude of peasant politics that range from reformist to radical. When the oppression became unbearable, the peasants took agency and strived for collective action, mostly violent in nature. This work will bring to the fore case studies of rural ferment towards this order by low-caste and class peasants. This article will also elaborate on the reasons behind the survival of feudal relations of power juxtaposed over ‘modern’ structures.
This article is an attempt at scrutinising the rural and agrarian structure through a caste framework in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bihar, a period when Bihar was undergoing economic, environmental, social and political changes owing to colonial intervention. This article will highlight these everyday negotiations, forgotten struggles and exclusions that were carried on against the background of the importation of western science and technology, changing laws and encroachment on common lands. An intrinsic mechanism was used during the changing times to keep the hierarchical structure alive. Nevertheless, it led to springing up of various kisan sabhas, which aimed at voicing the opinions of the marginalised peasantry. New set of sources will capture different shades of peasant identities and a vast multitude of peasant politics that range from reformist to radical. When the oppression became unbearable, the peasants took agency and strived for collective action, mostly violent in nature. This work will bring to the fore case studies of rural ferment towards this order by low-caste and class peasants. This article will also elaborate on the reasons behind the survival of feudal relations of power juxtaposed over ‘modern’ structures.
‘The Lamp that Illumines the Past’: Sanskrit Kāvya and the Writing of History in Early India
Indian Historical Review, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 233-247, December 2023.
Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify ‘embedded’ rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya’s traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity.
Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify ‘embedded’ rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya’s traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity.
Book review: Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century
Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 2, Page 283-286, August 2023.
Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019, pp. xxxviii+272.
Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019, pp. xxxviii+272.
‘Fractured’ Peasantry in Colonial Bihar in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Reflections and Responses
Indian Historical Review, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 304-321, December 2023.
This article is an attempt at scrutinising the rural and agrarian structure through a caste framework in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bihar, a period when Bihar was undergoing economic, environmental, social and political changes owing to colonial intervention. This article will highlight these everyday negotiations, forgotten struggles and exclusions that were carried on against the background of the importation of western science and technology, changing laws and encroachment on common lands. An intrinsic mechanism was used during the changing times to keep the hierarchical structure alive. Nevertheless, it led to springing up of various kisan sabhas, which aimed at voicing the opinions of the marginalised peasantry. New set of sources will capture different shades of peasant identities and a vast multitude of peasant politics that range from reformist to radical. When the oppression became unbearable, the peasants took agency and strived for collective action, mostly violent in nature. This work will bring to the fore case studies of rural ferment towards this order by low-caste and class peasants. This article will also elaborate on the reasons behind the survival of feudal relations of power juxtaposed over ‘modern’ structures.
This article is an attempt at scrutinising the rural and agrarian structure through a caste framework in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Bihar, a period when Bihar was undergoing economic, environmental, social and political changes owing to colonial intervention. This article will highlight these everyday negotiations, forgotten struggles and exclusions that were carried on against the background of the importation of western science and technology, changing laws and encroachment on common lands. An intrinsic mechanism was used during the changing times to keep the hierarchical structure alive. Nevertheless, it led to springing up of various kisan sabhas, which aimed at voicing the opinions of the marginalised peasantry. New set of sources will capture different shades of peasant identities and a vast multitude of peasant politics that range from reformist to radical. When the oppression became unbearable, the peasants took agency and strived for collective action, mostly violent in nature. This work will bring to the fore case studies of rural ferment towards this order by low-caste and class peasants. This article will also elaborate on the reasons behind the survival of feudal relations of power juxtaposed over ‘modern’ structures.
‘The Lamp that Illumines the Past’: Sanskrit Kāvya and the Writing of History in Early India
Indian Historical Review, Volume 50, Issue 2, Page 233-247, December 2023.
Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify ‘embedded’ rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya’s traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity.
Kāvya is literature as art. Few modern scholars have suspected such aesthetic and affective literature to possess an impulse for capturing human history, and certainly not in any form consistent with modern notions of the discipline. Interrogating anew the remarkably long-lived misconception that early India did not/could not write history, and moving beyond interpretations that identify ‘embedded’ rather than overt forms of historicity in our antiquity, this essay pioneers the argument that Sanskrit poetics (alam˙kāras´āstra) and its theories of representation may have conceived of poetry as in fact an ideal vehicle for writing history. And, taking seriously Kāvya’s traditional narrative modes may yield an alternative, more cohesive notion of historicality in early India that invested in the epistemic authority of the poet (kavi) and, in a constructivist vein, in history itself as a poetic production (nirmān˙a) underwritten by a deeply ethico-political discursivity.
Book review: Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century
Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 2, Page 283-286, August 2023.
Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019, pp. xxxviii+272.
Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2019, pp. xxxviii+272.
Book review: Satinder Kumar Lambha, In Pursuit of Peace: India–Pakistan Relations Under Six Prime Ministers
India Quarterly, Volume 79, Issue 4, Page 620-622, December 2023.
Satinder Kumar Lambha, In Pursuit of Peace: India–Pakistan Relations Under Six Prime Ministers. Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 384, ₹799, ISBN: 9780670097944.
Satinder Kumar Lambha, In Pursuit of Peace: India–Pakistan Relations Under Six Prime Ministers. Penguin Random House, 2023, pp. 384, ₹799, ISBN: 9780670097944.