Wanderers, Kings, Merchants

Wanderers, Kings, Merchants PDF Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 9780670093687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
One of India's most incredible and enviable cultural aspects is that every Indian is bilingual, if not multilingual. Delving into the fascinating early history of South Asia, this original book reveals how migration, both external and internal, has shaped all Indians from ancient times. Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians are of mixed origins.It explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India's native languages.

Wanderers, Kings, Merchants

Wanderers, Kings, Merchants PDF Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Viking
ISBN: 9780670093687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
One of India's most incredible and enviable cultural aspects is that every Indian is bilingual, if not multilingual. Delving into the fascinating early history of South Asia, this original book reveals how migration, both external and internal, has shaped all Indians from ancient times. Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians are of mixed origins.It explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India's native languages.

Jahajin

Jahajin PDF Author: Peggy Mohan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9351360504
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
From Calcutta to Trinidad they went, the girmitiyas, crossing two oceans to reach their new homes on the other side of the world. jahajin illuminates for us the extraordinary experience of that jouney, the train ride from faizabad to calcutta, the passage down the hooghly. the three-month voyage around the stormy cape and up the Atlantic to Trinnidad, where the weary migrants settled into life as indentured labourers on the sugar estates. The novel opens with the narrator, a young linguist, talking to 110-year-old Deeda, who came to the caribbean on the same ship as her great great grandmother. Deeda speaks of leaving her village in basti with her son and sailing across the seas to "Chini-dad", the land of sugar, and about the life and friendships she built on her estate.Nested within this larger story is the dreamlike myth of Saranga, torn between her monkey-lover and her prince. Deeda's stories of a lost world captivate the younger woman, encouraging her to make the journey back across the kala pani. Alive with compelling characters and the lilt of Trinidad Bhojpuri, Jahajin gathers up the various narratives of relocation and transformation across a century in a tale that is part history and part fairy tale.

The Language of History

The Language of History PDF Author: Audrey Truschke
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
For over five hundred years, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of northern and central India, starting with the Ghurids in the 1190s through the fracturing of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Scholars have long drawn upon works written in Persian and Arabic about this epoch, yet they have neglected the many histories that India’s learned elite wrote about Indo-Muslim rule in Sanskrit. These works span the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and discuss Muslim-led kingdoms in the Deccan and even as far south as Tamil Nadu. They constitute a major archive for understanding significant cultural and political changes that shaped early modern India and the views of those who lived through this crucial period. Audrey Truschke offers a groundbreaking analysis of these Sanskrit texts that sheds light on both historical Muslim political leaders on the subcontinent and how premodern Sanskrit intellectuals perceived the “Muslim Other.” She analyzes and theorizes how Sanskrit historians used the tools of their literary tradition to document Muslim governance and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule. Truschke demonstrates how this new archive lends insight into formulations and expressions of premodern political, social, cultural, and religious identities. By elaborating the languages and identities at play in premodern Sanskrit historical works, this book expands our historical and conceptual resources for understanding premodern South Asia, Indian intellectual history, and the impact of Muslim peoples on non-Muslim societies. At a time when exclusionary Hindu nationalism, which often grounds its claims on fabricated visions of India’s premodernity, dominates the Indian public sphere, The Language of History shows the complexity and diversity of the subcontinent’s past.

EARLY INDIANS

EARLY INDIANS PDF Author: TONY. JOSEPH
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789391165956
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Transition to a Colonial Economy

The Transition to a Colonial Economy PDF Author: Prasannan Parthasarathi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521570428
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
According to widespread belief, poverty and low standards of living have been characteristic of India for centuries. Challenging this view, Prasannan Parthasarathi demonstrates that, until the late eighteenth century, labouring groups in South India, those at the bottom of the social order, were in a powerful position, receiving incomes well above subsistence. The decline in their economic fortunes, the author asserts, was a process initiated towards the end of that century, with the rise of colonial rule. Building on revisionist interpretations, he examines the transformation of Indian society and its economy under British rule through the prism of the labouring classes, arguing that their treatment by the early colonial state had no precedent in the pre-colonial past and that poverty and low wages were a product of colonial rule. The book promises to make an important contribution to the economic history of the region, and to the study of colonialism.

Three Ways to be Alien

Three Ways to be Alien PDF Author: Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611680190
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A study of individual trajectories in an early modern global context

The Wonder That Was India

The Wonder That Was India PDF Author: A. L. Basham
Publisher: Scholarly Pub Office Univ of
ISBN: 9781597400084
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692

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Book Description


Indians

Indians PDF Author: Namit Arora
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9353052874
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
What do we really know about the Aryan migration theory and why is that debate so hot? Why did the people of Khajuraho carve erotic scenes on their temple walls? What did the monks at Nalanda eat for dinner? Did our ideals of beauty ever prefer dark skin? Indian civilization is an idea, a reality, an enigma. In this riveting book, Namit Arora takes us on an unforgettable journey through 5000 years of history, reimagining in rich detail the social and cultural moorings of Indians through the ages. Drawing on credible sources, he discovers what inspired and shaped them: their political upheavals and rivalries, customs and vocations, and a variety of unusual festivals. Arora makes a stop at six iconic places -- the Harappan city of Dholavira, the Ikshvaku capital at Nagarjunakonda, the Buddhist centre of learning at Nalanda, enigmatic Khajuraho, Vijayanagar at Hampi, and historic Varanasi -- enlivening the narrative with vivid descriptions, local stories and evocative photographs. Punctuating this are chronicles of famous travellers who visited India -- including Megasthenes, Xuanzang, Alberuni and Marco Polo -- whose dramatic and idiosyncratic tales conceal surprising insights about our land. In lucid, elegant prose, Arora explores the exciting churn of ideas, beliefs and values of our ancestors through millennia -- some continue to shape modern India, while others have been lost forever. An original, deeply engaging and extensively researched work, Indians illuminates a range of histories coursing through our veins.

An English Made in India

An English Made in India PDF Author: Kalpana Mohan
Publisher: Rupa Publications
ISBN: 9789388292870
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
The book is an entertaining narrative about the myriad Indianisms to be found in the English used by a large percentage of Indians; the growing importance of Indian English in a world of many Englishes; the ongoing tussle between the elite who speak the King's English and those who speak in their mother tongue or mother-tongue-accented English; the effect of the IT boom on global English; and the changing attitudes of young Indians towards a language introduced by the Raj hundreds of years ago.

India Moving

India Moving PDF Author: Chinmay Tumbe
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
ISBN: 9353051630
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A little bit of India too moves with every migrant. From adventure to indenture, martyrs to merchants, Partition to plantation, from Kashmir to Kerala, Japan to Jamaica and beyond, India Moving is the first book to map out the great migrations that have made the country and the world a more diverse place to live in. To understand how millions of people have moved-from and to India-the book embarks on a journey laced with evidence, argument and wit, providing insights into topics like the slave trade and the migrations of workers, travelling business communities such as the Marwaris, Gujaratis and Chettiars, refugee crises like the Partition, and the roots of contemporary mass migration from Bihar and Kerala, covering a terrain that often includes seemingly unrelated topics like mangoes, dosas and pressure cookers. India Moving shows the scale and variety of Indian migrations and argues that greater mobility is a prerequisite for maintaining the country's pluralistic traditions.