Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia

Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia PDF Author: Brannon Ingram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317234294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian ‘public’ across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of ‘the public’ intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia

Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia PDF Author: Brannon Ingram
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317234294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian ‘public’ across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of ‘the public’ intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

The Neighborhood of Gods

The Neighborhood of Gods PDF Author: William Elison
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649490X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world’s collective imagination—as a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia. Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others? The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. A pioneering ethnography, this book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.

Imagining the Course of Life

Imagining the Course of Life PDF Author: Nancy Eberhardt
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824829193
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Imagining the Course of Life offers a rich portrait of rural life in contemporary Southeast Asia and an accessible introduction to the complexities of Theravada Buddhism as it is actually lived and experienced. It is both an ethnography of indigenous views of human development and a theoretical consideration of how any ethnopsychology is embedded in society and culture. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a Shan village in northern Thailand, Nancy Eberhardt illustrates how indigenous theories of the life course are connected to local constructions of self and personhood. In the process, she draws our attention to contrasting models in the Euro-American tradition and invites us to reconsider how we think about the trajectory of a human life. Moving beyond the entrenched categories that can hamper our understanding of other views, Imagining the Course of Life demonstrates the real-life connections between the "religious" and the "psychological." Eberhardt shows how such beliefs and practices are used, sometimes strategically, in people's constructions of themselves, in their interpretations of others' behavior, and in their attempts at social positioning. Individual chapters explore Shan ideas about the overall course of human development, from infancy to old age and beyond, and show how these ideas inform people's understanding of personhood and maturity, gender and social inequality, illness and well-being, emotions and mental health.

Modern South Asia

Modern South Asia PDF Author: Sugata Bose
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415307871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A wide-ranging survey of the Indian sub-continent, Modern South Asia gives an enthralling account of South Asian history. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of understanding of the social, economic and political realities of this region. This comprehensive study includes detailed discussions of: the structure and ideology of the British raj; the meaning of subaltern resistance; the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste class, community and gender; and the state and economy, society and politics of post-colonial South Asia The new edition includes a rewritten, accessible introduction and a chapter by chapter revision to take into account recent research. The second edition will also bring the book completely up to date with a chapter on the period from 1991 to 2002 and adiscussion of the last millennium in sub-continental history.

Print and the Urdu Public

Print and the Urdu Public PDF Author: Megan Eaton Robb
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190089377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India addresses Urdu print publics from the perspective of Madinah newspaper, published in Bijnor qasbah of the then-United Provinces, in order to demonstrate how an Urdu newspaper published from the margins became central to the Muslim public constituted in the first half of the twentieth century.

Disaffected

Disaffected PDF Author: Tanya Agathocleous
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753894
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

Paper, Performance, and the State : Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India

Paper, Performance, and the State : Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India PDF Author: Farhat Hasan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316516814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Looking at the political processes in early modern South Asia as shaped by state formation from below, this work argues that, outside the imperial and trans-regional contexts, the Mughal state subsisted on the mutually-empowering relations with the elites and common people.

Global Digital Cultures

Global Digital Cultures PDF Author: Aswin Punathambekar
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472131400
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.

India’s Spatial Imaginations of South Asia

India’s Spatial Imaginations of South Asia PDF Author: Shibashis Chatterjee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199095493
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India’s foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. As a part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, this volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime. This volume probes reasons behind the relevance of differentiated cartography of territorial nationalism in our shared understanding of space, politics, society, and the community.

The Politics of Imagining Asia

The Politics of Imagining Asia PDF Author: Hui Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061357
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
In this bold, provocative collection, Wang Hui confronts some of the major issues concerning modern China and the status quo of contemporary Chinese thought. The book’s overarching theme is the possibility of an alternative modernity that does not rely on imported conceptions of Chinese history and its legacy. Wang Hui argues that current models, based largely on Western notions of empire and the nation-state, fail to account for the richness and diversity of pre-modern Chinese historical practice. At the same time, he refrains from offering an exclusively Chinese perspective and placing China in an intellectual ghetto. Navigating terrain on regional language and politics, he draws on China’s unique past to expose the inadequacies of European-born standards for assessing modern China’s evolution. He takes issue particularly with the way in which nation-state logic has dominated politically charged concerns like Chinese language standardization and “The Tibetan Question.” His stance is critical—and often controversial—but he locates hope in the kinds of complex, multifaceted arrangements that defined China and much of Asia for centuries. The Politics of Imagining Asia challenges us not only to re-examine our theories of “Asia” but to reconsider what “Europe” means as well. As Theodore Huters writes in his introduction, “Wang Hui’s concerns extend beyond China and Asia to an ambition to rethink world history as a whole.”