When Sparrows Became Hawks

When Sparrows Became Hawks PDF Author: Purnima Dhavan
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199756554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Purnima Dhavan examines the creation of the Khalsa Sikh warrior tradition during the 18th century. By focusing on the experiences of long-overlooked peasant communities, she reveals how a dynamic process of debates, collaboration, and conflict transformed Sikh practices and shaped a new martial culture.

When Sparrows Became Hawks

When Sparrows Became Hawks PDF Author: Purnima Dhavan
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199756554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book Here

Book Description
Purnima Dhavan examines the creation of the Khalsa Sikh warrior tradition during the 18th century. By focusing on the experiences of long-overlooked peasant communities, she reveals how a dynamic process of debates, collaboration, and conflict transformed Sikh practices and shaped a new martial culture.

The Cherished Five in Sikh History

The Cherished Five in Sikh History PDF Author: Louis E. Fenech
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197532853
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
On the 30th of March, 1699, the Sikh Guru Gobind Singh called together a special assembly at the Keshgarh Fort at Anandpur. Following the morning devotions, the Guru asked for a volunteer, saying, "The entire sangat is very dear to me; but is there a devoted Sikh who will give his head to me here and now? A need has arisen at this moment which calls for a head." One man arose and followed the Guru out of the room. When the Guru returned to the assembly with a bloodied sword, he asked for another volunteer. Another man followed. This was repeated three more times, until at last the Guru emerged with a clean sword and all five men alive and well. Those five volunteers would become the first disciples of the Khalsa, the martial community within the Sikh religion, and would come to be known as the Panj Piare, or the Cherished Five. Despite the centrality of this group to modern Sikhism, scholarship on the Panj Piare has remained sparse. Louis Fenech's new book examines the Khalsa and the role that the the Panj Piare have had in the development of the Sikh faith over the past three centuries.

Persianate Selves

Persianate Selves PDF Author: Mana Kia
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503611965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
For centuries, Persian was the language of power and learning across Central, South, and West Asia, and Persians received a particular basic education through which they understood and engaged with the world. Not everyone who lived in the land of Iran was Persian, and Persians lived in many other lands as well. Thus to be Persian was to be embedded in a set of connections with people we today consider members of different groups. Persianate selfhood encompassed a broader range of possibilities than contemporary nationalist claims to place and origin allow. We cannot grasp these older connections without historicizing our conceptions of difference and affiliation. Mana Kia sketches the contours of a larger Persianate world, historicizing place, origin, and selfhood through its tradition of proper form: adab. In this shared culture, proximities and similarities constituted a logic that distinguished between people while simultaneously accommodating plurality. Adab was the basis of cohesion for self and community over the turbulent eighteenth century, as populations dispersed and centers of power shifted, disrupting the circulations that linked Persianate regions. Challenging the bases of protonationalist community, Persianate Selves seeks to make sense of an earlier transregional Persianate culture outside the anachronistic shadow of nationalisms.

Music in Colonial Punjab

Music in Colonial Punjab PDF Author: Radha Kapuria
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192692925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
This book offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from 'mirasis' (bards) and 'kalawants' (elite musicians), to 'kanjris' (subaltern female performers) and 'tawaifs' (courtesans). A central theme is the rise of new musical publics shaped by the anglicized Punjabi middle classes, and British colonialists' response to Punjab's performing communities. The book reveals a diverse connoisseurship for music with insights from history, ethnomusicology, and geography on an activity that still unites a region now divided between India and Pakistan.

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal

Belonging across the Bay of Bengal PDF Author: Michael Laffan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350022624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 407

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Book Description
Belonging across the Bay of Bengal discusses themes connecting the regions bordering the Bay of Bengal, mainly covering the period from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries – a crucial period of transition from colonialism to independence. Focusing on the notion of 'belonging', the chapters in this collection highlight themes of ethnicity, religion, culture and the emergence of nationalist politics and state policies as they relate to the movement of peoples in the region. While the Indian Ocean has been of interest to scholars for decades, there has been a notable tilt towards historicizing the Western half of that space, often prioritizing Islamic trade as the key connective glue prior to the rise of Western power and the later emergence of transnational Indian nationalism. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal enriches this story by drawing attention to Buddhist and migrant connectivities, introducing discussions of Lanka, Burma and the Straits Settlements to establish the historical context of the current refugee crises playing out in these regions. This is a timely and innovative volume that offers a fresh approach to Indian Ocean history, further enriching our understanding of the current debates over minority rights and refugee problems in the region. It will be of great significance to all students and scholars of Indian Ocean studies as well as historians of modern South and Southeast Asia.

Royals and Rebels

Royals and Rebels PDF Author: Priya Atwal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197566944
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire's spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed.

The Sikh Zafar-namah of Guru Gobind Singh

The Sikh Zafar-namah of Guru Gobind Singh PDF Author: Louis E. Fenech
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199931453
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Louis E. Fenech offers a compelling new examination of one of the only Persian compositions attributed to the tenth Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708): the Zafar-namah or 'Epistle of Victory.' Written as a masnavi, a Persian poem, this letter was originally sent to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (d. 1707) rebuking his most unbecoming conduct. Incredibly, Guru Gobind Singh's letter is included today within the Sikh canon, one of only a very small handful of Persian-language texts granted the status of Sikh scripture. As such, its contents are sung on special Sikh occasions. Perhaps equally surprising is the fact that the letter appears in the tenth Guru's book or the Dasam Granth in the standard Gurmukhi script (in which Punjabi is written) but retains its original Persian language, a vernacular few Sikhs know. Drawing out the letter's direct and subtle references to the Iranian national epic, the Shah-namah, and to Shaikh Sa'di's thirteenth-century Bustan, Fenech demonstrates how this letter served as a form of Indo-Islamic verbal warfare, ensuring the tenth Guru's moral and symbolic victory over the legendary and powerful Mughal empire. Through analysis of the Zafar-namah, Fenech resurrects an essential and intiguing component of the Sikh tradition: its Islamicate aspect.

Religious Authority in South Asia

Religious Authority in South Asia PDF Author: István Keul
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000654923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
This book focuses on genealogies of religious authority in South Asia, examining the figure of the guru in narrative texts, polemical tracts, hagiographies, histories, in contemporary devotional communities, New Age spiritual movements and global guru organizations. Experts in the field present reflections on historically specific contexts in which a guru comes into being, becomes part of a community, is venerated, challenged or repudiated, generates a new canon, remains unique with no clear succession or establishes a succession in which charisma is routinized. The guru emerges and is sustained and routinized from the nexus of guruship, narratives, performances and community. The contributors to the book examine this nexus at specific historical moments with all their elements of change and contingency. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of South Asian studies, the study of religions and cultural studies.

India and the Early Modern World

India and the Early Modern World PDF Author: Jagjeet Lally
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003816819
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
India and the Early Modern World provides an authoritative and wide-ranging survey of the Indian subcontinent over the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, set within a global context. This book explores questions critical to our understanding of early modern India. How, for instance, were Indians’ religious beliefs, their ways of life, and the horizons of their learning changing over this period? What was happening in the countryside and towns, to culture and the arts, and to the state and its power? Were such experiences comparable or linked to those in other parts of the world? Can we speak of a global early modernity, therefore, within which India played an important role? Organised thematically, each chapter engages with such key issues, debates, and concepts, covering wide ground as it connects, compares, and contrasts developments witnessed across early modern South Asia to those around the globe. Drawing on the fruits of research in numerous fields over the past fifty years and rich in detail, India and the Early Modern World is a pathbreaking volume written engagingly and accessibly with scholars, students, and non-specialists in mind.

Between Household and State

Between Household and State PDF Author: Subah Dayal
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520402375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Between Household and State departs from dynastic narrations of the Mughal past to highlight the role of elite households and familial networks in peninsular India, the only region of the subcontinent never fully incorporated into the imperial realm. Drawing on rare documentary and literary materials in Persian and Urdu alongside the Dutch East India Company’s archives, this book takes readers on a journey from military forts and regional courts in the Deccan to the ports and weaving villages of the Coromandel Coast. It examines how regional elite alliances, feuds, and material exchanges intersected with imperial institutions to create new forms of affinity, belonging, and social exclusion. Subah Dayal brings attention to the importance of ghar—or home—in the creation of forms of mobility that anchored the Mughal frontier across the variable geography of peninsular India in the seventeenth century.