117215 results in Asian Studies
1 - Introduction
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 21 February 2023
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- 30 April 2024, pp 1-30
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Summary
Luminescence: In Situ with Dissent
It was an extraordinary winter of protest in India, as the year 2019 rolled to its end. The background was set by a series of undemocratic bills that became acts in parliament without debate and consensus, culminating in the most explosive and divisive Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December that year, leading to a surge of civil demonstrations, rallies, and protests across the country on a scale that had not been seen before. Directly triggered by the state crackdown on a student protest within the Jamia Millia Islamia University in the heart of New Delhi, made worse by arrests and vandalization of the campus, a group of Muslim women of all ages—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and grand-daughters—came out to occupy the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighbourhood flanking the university. With that began a historic day and night, peaceful, immovable sit-in by the Muslim women of this locality against a conglomeration of laws that they feared threatened their citizenship, and the guarantees of secularism enshrined in the Indian Constitution (Image 1.1).
During the ensuing weeks of the defiant sit-in, artists, along with activists and students, transformed the by-lanes of the neighbourhood with murals, pavement paintings, and installations that guided visitors to the scene of protest. A month into the event, scaffoldings, ephemera, and improvisations became part of ‘the art of resistance’, transforming Shaheen Bagh into ‘an open-air art gallery’. As one student visiting the venue wrote, ‘Even before reaching Shaheen Bagh, where the women sat with their daughters and grand-daughters in silent, powerful defiance … one is introduced to Shaheen Bagh through the numerous murals. The street art guides you….’ Opening up a space for daily congregations of activists and citizens, for singing and poetry reading, for speeches and book discussions, for the setting up of a library, as well as for a profusion of murals, drawings, posters, and installations, Shaheen Bagh was both a site of contestation and experiments in democratic practice (Images 1.2 and 1.3). Particularly significant was the way art and artists became constitutive of the site of protest, alongside community elders and student activists, to together conjure visions that had to be created to be fought for.
4 - Extractive Regimes in the Coal Heartlands of India: Difficult Questions for a Just Energy Transition
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 April 2024, pp 74-97
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Introduction
It is now accepted that the future of coal will be decided in the developing world. Even as Western countries transition away from coal, increased production and consumption of coal in India and China have meant that the share of coal in global energy production has remained constant for the past 40 years, despite attempts at decarbonization (Edwards 2019). Nevertheless, the West continues to produce high per capita emissions compared to developing nations (Lazarus and van Asselt 2018). In response, India has asserted its rights to equitable energy access in the international arena (Jaitly 2021). At the same time, questions of intra-country equity complicate India's position, with many arguing that India must pursue low-carbon pathways to protect its poor and vulnerable groups (Bidwai 2012).
After Independence, coal became an enduring symbol of national development in India (Lahiri-Dutt 2014). The coal industry has deep political roots, engaging powerful stakeholders at different levels (Bhattacharjee 2017). In recent years, coal investments have lost their appeal due to unrest over their environmental impacts as well as a dynamic downward trend in the demand for thermal power (Rajshekhar 2021). Even so, production targets for the state-owned Coal India Limited (CIL) – responsible for over 80 per cent of India's coal production – were increased to 1 billion metric tonnes by 2024. The central government is actively looking to sell more coal blocks to raise money, despite the lukewarm response to recent coal block auctions. Coal imports have simultaneously increased, engendering a new coastal coal geography controlled by private actors (Oskarsson et al. 2021). That renewables cannot substitute for coal, despite policy support from the state, is accepted. Analysts expect coal-fired generation to continue to grow to meet electricity demand growth even if 350 gigawatt (GW) of renewable energy (RE) capacity is installed by 2030 (Tongia and Gross 2019). New energy forms, including renewables, are, historically speaking, energy ‘additions’ rather than ‘transitions’ (Oskarsson et al. 2021). Importantly, this perception is not typical of India alone, as the global energy system remains locked into high coal energy use in the midst of an RE boom (Oskarsson et al. 2021).
3 - Art and the Secular in Contemporary India: A Question of Method
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 30 April 2024, pp 63-90
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Summary
Secular behaviours, secular habits of mind, secular institutions, and so on, once described with that adjective, are understood to illustrate of a conceptual domain that is, at the very least, divorced from the realm of the sacred. When compared with its supposed opposite, the secular is a relatively imprecise conceptual domain, with a loose set of phenomena forming its boundaries. It is best understood as realm of practice, made up of forms of self-fashioning or of meaning-making that are common or shared across religious communities and/or relatively independent of religion. Secular practices not only have precise and detailed genealogies but also robust lives in the present. They are intelligible and significant: when one acts in a secular way, that action is understood as such.
Historically, art—both in and outside of India—was transformed into a secular practice, when and as ideas of creation became anthropocentric. A feature of colonial modernity, art emerged as a secular site that is thick (like culture) rather than thin, active (like discourse) rather than passive. The secularity of art’s practices is grounded in its peculiar understanding of subjectivity: an idea of artistic expression in which the interiority of the self is both reflected and produced within an art object that is then interpreted by viewers long after the moment it is made. At the same time, art’s meanings are never just individual, and they often strike allegiances with more general cultural forms, including religion and myth.
In his anthropology of secularism, Talal Asad explores how Adonis, the Arabic poet, at once claims secular habits of mind as crucial to his practice and contemplates within his poetry a category of myth that emerges as the ‘plural, even anarchic’, mark of ‘unconscious truth’. This balance of secular and sacred is common among modern visual artists as well, whose habits of mind and bodily art practices are determinedly worldly, valuing the act of making as the most important part of being an artist. With very few exceptions, when forms of the sacred enter into art, they do so as source material, free for the artist’s taking.
Dedication
- Sumit Chakrabarti, Presidency University, Kolkata
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- Local Selfhood, Global Turns
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- 30 June 2023
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Frontmatter
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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About the Contributors
- Edited by Harsh V. Pant, King's College London, Hasan T. Alhasan, King's College London
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- India and the Gulf
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- 01 August 2023
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- 30 April 2024, pp 184-185
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12 - Rebuilding Konarak in the Twentieth Century: Legacies of Colonial Archaeology and Discourses of Inclusivity in Gwalior’s Birla Temple
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- By Tamara Sears
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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Between 19 January 1984 and 23 January 1988, a remarkable new temple was established in Gwalior (Image 12.1). According to a placard positioned at its entrance, the monument was commissioned by Basant Kumar (B. K.) Birla at the request of his famous philanthropist-industrialist father, Ghanshyam Das (G. D.) Birla, who had passed away on 11 June 1983, just seven months before the laying of the temple’s first foundation stone. That G. D. Birla would have been an inspiration for the monument is not surprising as it was he who had initiated a longer tradition of building monumental complexes popularly known today as ‘Birla temples’. Frequently located in cities and towns associated with the family business interests, these temples represent revivalist efforts to bring together architectural traditions rooted in ancient and medieval India with new visions concerning the role of religion within modern industrial society. Whereas the monuments themselves represented abstracted appropriations of traditional Nagara temple forms, the vast landscaped grounds provided respite for the increasingly crowded conditions of urban life by creating inviting spaces for burgeoning middle-class leisure.
At first glance, the temple at Gwalior follows the typical Birla temple pattern. It was built to serve the community that had grown around the city’s long-standing textile mills, and its design hearkens back to India’s architectural past. However, whereas the revivalist impulse in earlier Birla temples had been realized by combining references to multiple histories and regional styles in order to project a totalizing new vision, the temple at Gwalior was intended to recreate a specific monument, the famed Sun Temple at Konarak, originally built in the thirteenth century along the coast of eastern India (Image 12.2). The choice to model the Gwalior temple on Konarak is curious. Not only are the two removed by over 1,400 kilometres (or nearly 900 miles), but the two places also share very little in terms of their local or regional history. Built on a grand scale by King Narasimha Deva of the Eastern Ganga dynasty, the original temple at Konarak had been largely destroyed over the centuries. Very little remains of the main sanctum, and all that exists is its preceding mandapa (pillared hall) and a large dancing hall.
9 - Intersectional Water Justice in India: At the Confluence of Gender, Caste, and Climate Change
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 April 2024, pp 183-206
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Introduction
India's water crisis has been widely covered in the international and national press. In the summer of 2019, the New York Times published a series of reports and features on the prospects of Chennai and other large Indian cities running out of water (Subramanian 2019). Data on the absolute scarcity of water, sometimes illustrated using dramatic satellite imageries of water bodies, often dominate discussions on India's water crisis (Sengupta 2019). Recall, for example, the 2019 report about 21 Indian cities running out of groundwater by 2020 (ANI 2019a). We are now well past the dreaded summer of 2020 but there has been no follow-up reportage. The argument that India's water crisis lingers because its effects are experienced unequally along multiple dimensions – caste, class, and gender – is hardly a controversial one for scholars. However, there has been very little discussion in both the international and domestic press of the gross inequalities in access to water. The New York Times report mentions the poor, while another describes how women sacrificed daily showers so that office-going male members of the family could afford the luxury instead (Denton and Sengupta 2019). An overwhelming focus on water scarcity instead of water inequalities, we argue, is one of the major causes for the perpetuation of India's water crisis. In this chapter, we seek to examine how the intersection of social inequalities and climate change contributes to water injustice.
In India, access to water is determined by a complex entwining of caste, class, and gender identities that work to perpetuate structural inequalities. While geography and the quality of physical infrastructure greatly influence the extent of water insecurity, they are not entirely responsible for it. In some parts of the country, safe drinking water is inaccessible, causing widespread suffering, illness, and disease. In other regions, cheap and state-subsidized access to water is taken for granted and easily abused (Fatah 2013). The army cantonment and government districts in Delhi receive 375 litres of water per capita per day. On the other hand, South Delhi's Sangam Vihar, an area with a large number of ‘unauthorized colonies’ and home to many lower-income religious minorities, receives a meagre 40 litres of municipal water per person.
List of Abbreviations
- Edited by Harsh V. Pant, King's College London, Hasan T. Alhasan, King's College London
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- India and the Gulf
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Vernacular Apocalypse
- Abir Bazaz, Ashoka University
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- Nund Rishi
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- 05 August 2023
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- 30 April 2024, pp 214-245
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Summary
As apocalyptist I can imagine that the world will be destroyed. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.
—Jacob TaubesThe apocalyptic is at the core of the vernacular vision of Islam disclosed in the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi. There is nothing unusual about this as the apocalyptic genre is fundamental to all Abrahamic religions. Even more significantly, it is Nund Rishi's shruks on the apocalyptic that endure the most in Kashmiri cultural memory and have passed on into the Kashmiri language as proverb and prophecy. The apocalyptic mode in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry, it is useful to recall, emerges at a distinct historical moment in medieval Kashmir: a time of transitions from the rule of independent Hindu kings to the establishment of a Muslim sultanate and the beginning of religious conversions to Islam in the region. A close reading of the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic material reveals a translated, and vernacular, apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry that mediates relations between pre-Islamic and Islamic eschatology.
A traditional Muslim apocalyptic is deployed by Nund Rishi and hurled against the political structure of his time (the new Muslim sultanate ruled by the Shahmīrī dynasty). But the elements of a traditional Muslim apocalyptic are also displaced on to metaphors of a sudden inner transformation. The catastrophe of end times intimates hope of a new life. There is a tension in the shruks that deal with the apocalyptic between a traditional Muslim apocalypse and a Sufi apocalypse. This is true of much Islamic mystical poetry, but what is unique in Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is that the coming hour of reckoning (the Islamic qiyāmah, or qayāmat in Urdu and Kashmiri) is seen not as the end of history (individual or eschatological) but as the end to an unjust political order in history. Even though the currency of Nund Rishi's apocalyptic shruks in popular memory owes much to enduring cycles of violence in Kashmir's recent history, Nund Rishi's apocalypticism is best approached as the translation of classic Islamic eschatology (traditional Muslim apocalyptic) into the Kashmiri vernacular. The preponderance of the theme of the apocalyptic in Nund Rishi's mystical poetry is also conspicuous because other key Islamic eschatological themes such as the Prophet's mystical ascension to heaven, mi’rāj, do not appear so significantly in the Nund Rishi corpus.
4 - Reconstructing Bengali Selfhood: The Conception of Dharma in Akshay and Bankim
- Sumit Chakrabarti, Presidency University, Kolkata
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- Local Selfhood, Global Turns
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- 30 June 2023
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Summary
History and Bengali Selfhood
The writing of history will always seek out narratives. If one were to look around the cultural, social, religious, or economic tropes scattered across the nineteenth-century Bengali society, it would not be difficult to discover the many reconstructivist narratives that define what may be described as ‘threshold moments’2 in the history of the Bengali people. So many of these narratives employ, implicitly or explicitly, tropes of representation that may be read through lenses of globality, global intellectual history, the world historical, or the universalist, and put into critical categories that bring out differential moments of enunciation which may be interpreted variously. Similarly, while some historians and commentators will tend to read nineteenth-century Bengal as one whole block divided into separate but connected narratives, others would discover a more well-defined disjunction between the first and second parts of the century. Likewise, both the principles of reconstruction and the way the ethos of the Bengali people were interpreted may be seen as different ways of reading history. Or, in other words, different ways of framing a narrative. As I have tried to understand in the last chapter, Akshay Dutta's intervention as both an object and an agent of history involved a rather complicated cultural politics due to his interstitial location within bhadralok Calcutta society, the contingent and unfinished nature of his academic training, and what one might call a certain ideological evasiveness that refused nomenclatures, boundaries, or categories. With time, the debates on representation became more fraught and by the middle of the century, the principles of reconstruction or avenues of representation were complicated by too many interconnections, cross-currents, and hermeneutic challenges that were not easy to grapple with: the modern and non-modern debate; the good and evil of imperialism; the principles of education; nationalism and its manifestations, and the corresponding idea of swadesh; religion, religious practice, and debates on conversion – to name a few. Out of these debates and discussions emerged the question of selfhood, of fashioning the self as a representative body of Bengali (or sometimes national) identity and defined within a moral or cultural register that had a commensurate relationship with modernity.
5 - Climate Justice Implications of the Relationship between Economic Inequality and Carbon Emissions in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 April 2024, pp 98-114
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Introduction
The carbon emissions of the world's richest 1 per cent are more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 per cent, despite the fact that climate change is expected to disproportionately affect the poor, especially in the warmer parts of the world (Oxfam 2020; Goswami 2020). This suggests that climate and socio-economic justice are intertwined, and understanding the nature of the relationship between carbon emissions and economic inequality can help us arrive at potential pathways to address both.
Climate and socio-economic justice are crucial in the case of India. India is a significant player in the global economy, as its gross domestic product (GDP) is the fifth largest in the world (World Bank 2021). However, the country also experiences staggering levels of economic inequality. It has the third highest number of billionaires, but it also has the largest poor population in the world (Ankel 2020; Roser and Ortiz-Ospina 2019). The wealth of the richest 1 per cent of the Indian population is more than four times the total wealth of the bottom 70 per cent (Economic Times 2020). These indicators of economic inequality demonstrate a dire need to enhance socio-economic justice in India.
Three different indicators of carbon emissions are widely used for analytical purposes. The present climate crisis resulted from historically accumulated greenhouse gas emissions, measured in carbon dioxide equivalents. The United States (US) is the largest contributor, accounting for about 25 per cent of the global cumulative carbon emissions between 1751 and 2019, while India contributed about 3 per cent (Ritchie 2019). Hence, India's historical cumulative carbon emission is rather low. The second indicator measures annual carbon emissions, or a country's current emission levels. Based on this indicator, India has the third highest carbon emission levels globally; it trails China and the US by a huge margin. The third indicator is per capita annual emissions, which accounts for differences in the population size of countries. When countries are ranked in descending order of their per capita carbon emissions, India ranked 128 out of 210 countries in 2019 (Crippa et al. 2020). Even though India's per capita carbon emissions and its share in cumulative global emissions is low, its current scale of emissions is a matter of concern (Matthews 2016).
Select Bibliography
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 30 April 2024, pp 282-299
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1 - Introduction: Climate Justice in India
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 30 April 2024, pp 1-24
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Summary
Arundhati Roy famously described the COVID-19 pandemic as a
portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (Roy 2020)
As inspiring and insightful as these words are, such juxtaposition of utopia and dystopia barely scratches the surface of what and who we are as a nation. The soulcrushing images of burning pyres in parking lots turned into makeshift graveyards, which international and national media have immortalized, offer a clue, as does the sombre poetry of Parul Khakhar (Tripathi 2021). India is a land pockmarked with a million fires.
The COVID-19 crisis has come as a shock to many middle-class Indians. Yet, to India's Dalits, Adivasis, women, and other marginalized groups, haunted by centuries of oppression, this crisis is yet another in a long list of historical and ongoing crises. For example, the coalfields of Jharia in Jharkhand have been burning for over a century now. As a result, at least 130,000 families have, quite literally, lived through a century-long trial by fire (Rahi 2019). Since 1995, the state-owned Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL) has claimed to have a ‘master plan’, which is possibly gathering dust in some almirah of the coal ministry (S. Kumar 2021). One would imagine that a pandemic like COVID-19 might scare the minister whose job includes ensuring the welfare of the 3.6 million people who work in mines with a less than adequate supply of fresh air. Yet, in 2020, India's coal minister valorized coal workers as ‘our coal warriors who are toiling day and night to keep the lights on even during the corona pandemic’ (Press Information Bureau 2020). They toiled very hard indeed.
A year later, as India struggled to confront the monstrous second wave of the pandemic, Central Coalfields Limited (CCL), a subsidiary of Coal India Limited (CIL), recorded the highest-ever single-day coal dispatch of 80 railway rakes (PNS 2021).
Introduction
- Sumit Chakrabarti, Presidency University, Kolkata
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- Local Selfhood, Global Turns
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Summary
One would often, but not consistently, come across mentions of Akshay Kumar Dutta in discussions on the cultural and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Bengal. He would, on most occasions, be a cursory reference, a footnote, a character on the fringes of the larger rubric of the discussion. There was a great churning of intellectual frameworks throughout the nineteenth century in Bengal – religious and educational reforms, epistemic shifts, cultural upheavals, and much of all these have been documented with care by historians and social scientists alike. Akshay Kumar Dutta, however, has rarely featured as a crucial presence in these discussions and debates. This book asks the ‘why’ question by attempting to closely read some of his works and examine if such erasure has foreclosed possible complications to certain categories of critique.
Born on 15 July 1820 in the quiet hamlet of Chupi in Burdwan district, Akshay was the youngest and the only surviving child of Pitambar Dutta and Dayamayi Debi. His father worked as a cashier in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), and Akshay's initial years were spent in Chupi, being educated in the local pathsala run by Gurucharan Sarkar. He also started learning Farsi with Munshi Aminuddin and Sanskrit with Gopinath Tarkalankar as a young boy while still at Chupi. His father, subsequently, took him to Calcutta, where, after a brief stint at a free school run by missionaries at Kidderpore, he was admitted to Gourmohan Auddy's Oriental Seminary. His father's untimely demise in 1839 did not allow him to finish his formal education, but as his biographers have documented, his love of learning led Akshay to train himself in both the sciences and the humanities and provoked him, at an early age, to contemplate on the epistemic disconnect between Puranic and European forms of learning. As Akshay grew up in Calcutta, the city caught in the middle of multiple reforms, he was introduced, through his visits to the Bangla Bhasanushilani Sabha (a forum for the spread and practice of the Bangla language), to the poet Iswarchandra Gupta, who was also incidentally the editor of the periodical Sangbad Prabhakar.
1 - The Sahaja Islam of Nund Rishi
- Abir Bazaz, Ashoka University
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- Nund Rishi
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My son, may God hide from you the apparent meaning of the Law and reveal to you the truth of impiety! Because the apparent meaning of the Law is hidden impiety and the truth of impiety is manifest knowledge. Now therefore: praise to God, who manifests Himself upon the point of a needle to whomsoever He will and who hides Himself in the heavens and on the earth from whomsoever He will, with the result that one attests that “He is not” and the other attests that “There is only Him.” Neither is he who professes the negation of God rejected, nor is he who confesses his existence praised. The intent of this letter is that you explain nothing by God, that you extract not a single argumentation from him, that you desire neither to love him nor to not love him, that you do not confess his existence and that you are not inclined to deny it. And above all, refrain from proclaiming his Unity!: Maná¹£ūr al-Ḥallaj, cited by Michel de Certeau.
The contemporary discourses on Kashmir turn often to the idea of Kashmiri Islam as being unique and distinctive in South Asia. Such notions have appealed to Kashmiris themselves and inform articulations of Islam and Muslim nationalism in contemporary Kashmir. Even Kashmiri historians such as Mohammad Ishaq Khan who are critical of an understanding of Kashmir's pasts as “syncretic,” and not unqualifyingly Islamic, have found it difficult to reject the idea of an exclusive, even exceptional, Islam in Kashmir. The Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufism is fundamental to these debates about a distinctive history of Islam in Kashmir. The shruks of Nund Rishi in the Kashmiri vernacular not only turn to metaphors, symbols, and events from the Qur’ān but also rely on pre-Islamic Kashmiri cultural memory at a time (the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) when Islam was still a minority religion in Kashmir after the establishment of a Muslim ruling dynasty in the fourteenth century. The Rishi Order is recognized by most scholars of religion, history, and literature in Kashmir to have played a significant role in Kashmir's transition to Islam. The Rishi Order is also considered central to the claims of a distinctive Kashmiri Islam because of its retention of such pre-Islamic ascetic practices as vegetarianism and celibacy.
List of Figures
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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8 - Reimagining Climate Justice as Caste Justice
- Edited by Prakash Kashwan, Brandeis University, Massachusetts
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- Climate Justice in India
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- 03 November 2022
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- 30 April 2024, pp 162-182
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The contribution of colonialism and imperial expropriation to the unfolding climate crisis has been well documented on a global scale. This chapter seeks to interrogate the role of caste as a structural element in shaping environmental inequities within India and beyond. Scientists across disciplines agree that the current system of production is unsustainable at the planetary level, even if a consensus on how to address this issue remains elusive. I argue that in the case of India, accounting for historical and contemporary caste-based extraction is crucial for any meaningful realization of climate justice.
Globally, academic scholarship and policy have come to acknowledge the uneven and unjust ways in which the burden and responsibility for the current crisis are distributed across nations, ethnicities, races, and genders. There is an emerging consensus that the historical pathways of colonialism and capitalist development are directly responsible for this uneven distribution. This pattern is seen across the histories of energy production, plantation economies, and commercial agriculture, as demonstrated in the detailed work of political ecologists (for example, Li 2017). Consequently, the idea that mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building strategies must account for this historical unevenness is no longer controversial.
We see this acknowledgement in the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ formally adopted by the United Nations in 1992. Under this principle, world governments recognize the lesser contribution of formerly colonized countries such as India towards planetary environmental degradation. This can be read as an acknowledgement of the unequal distribution of political power and economic prosperity across world nations because of colonialism. Acknowledging this historicity of the climate crisis is important, but our understanding of it would remain incomplete without a serious stock-taking of those dimensions of inequality and unevenness that significantly pre-date the rise of colonial capitalism and are yet implicated in its development trajectory. These dimensions of inequality often operate at the national or sub-national levels and therefore escape scrutiny on the global stage. In the case of India, one such important and all-pervasive dimension of inequality is caste.
For decades, anthropological and historical scholarship on caste focused only on ritual, scriptural, and mythical dimensions, thus constructing the issue as a matter of religion alone. Anti-caste scholars and activists such as Ambedkar, Phule, and Periyar have resisted such ‘orientalist’ representations of caste.
Contents
- Abir Bazaz, Ashoka University
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- Nund Rishi
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Part 4 - Architectures of Devotion
- Edited by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, Vazira Zamindar, Brown University, Rhode Island
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- How Secular Is Art?
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- 30 April 2024, pp 331-332
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