117235 results in Asian Studies
9 - Can a Festival of a Goddess Be ‘Secular’?
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 261-296
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Summary
What defines the secular in a cultural festival in Bengal that centres on the annual homecoming of Goddess Durga? How may we read the rhetoric of secularization of this event that has a long historical background and has become crucial to its contemporary identity? In keeping with the title of this volume, a question mark necessarily hovers around the nomenclature of the ‘secular’ and the extent to which it may lend itself to the profile of a festival that has well outstripped its religiosity and willed its transformation into Kolkata’s biggest public art event. Defying any easy placement within an institutionally secure realm of either religion or art, and never fully measuring up to the criterion of the secular, the Durga Pujas provide a powerful site for the interrogation of each of these conceptual categories. I will be arguing that the contemporary festival of Durga in Kolkata (and the ideas and forms it exports to Durga Puja celebrations across Bengal and other big cities of India) offers itself not just as a case study but as a constitutive ground in the dismantling of boundaries between artistic, religious, and secular practices, allowing each of these to freely trespass into each other’s domains. This sense of trespass is not one that comes from within the field of festival art and its creative protagonists. It erupts more within the fields of scholarship and disciplines such as art history and religious studies. It is in the spaces of these disciplines that the need to redefine the normative domains of art, religion, and secularity has gone hand-in-hand with the urgency of maintaining their separate jurisdictions and their different rights and prerogatives. It is important, in this context, to mark the coming of age of the field of South Asian visual studies and its tendentious criss-crossing of the disciplines of art history, visual anthropology, and the study of ritual, religion, and material cultures; and to situate my turn to the changed artistic contemporary proclivities of Kolkata’s Durga Pujas within this shifting disciplinary confluence in the initial decades of the twenty-first century.
As a mega urban spectacle that has been engaging with a spectacular array of art and craft productions, new visual technologies, and social media, the city festival holds out an invitation to the field of visual studies that is hard to resist.
Index
- Abir Bazaz, Ashoka University
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- Nund Rishi
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- 05 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 263-281
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List of Illustrations
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp vii-viii
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6 - Climate Action Plans and Justice 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 115-139
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Summary
Introduction
‘Climate change seems to be the last of the priorities of the state and central government. Despite various climate plans, we continue to privatize coal and divert forest land. How does one reconcile these decisions with the objectives of the climate action plan?’ asked a senior administrative officer in the Odisha Revenue and Disaster Management Department when questioned about the auctioning of new coal blocks and the state's climate action plan. His grim observation points to the political and economic barriers against implementing an effective climate policy that addresses climate justice in India.
In this chapter, we argue that India's climate policy fails to adequately address difficult political questions related to climate justice and rising inequality. As our analysis of state and national climate action plans show, India's engagement with questions of climate justice remains merely symbolic. This directly follows from the country's stance in international climate negotiations, during which it has shied away from undertaking rigorous domestic climate action citing high levels of poverty and a need to focus on economic growth (Kashwan and Mudaliar 2021).
Our analysis of India's national and state climate action plans offers insights into the often-unstated normative principles that guide decision-making on climate change within the country. In this study, we demonstrate how, if at all, these action plans incorporate questions of justice and equality. We argue that most of India's climate action plans demonstrate a superficial understanding of socio-economic inequalities and hence fail to adequately address the disproportionate impact of climate events on the poor and marginalized.
We begin by discussing the principles that guide climate policy internationally and domestically. We then provide a critical overview of national and state climate action plans. We then scrutinize these action plans in terms of substantive equality and climate justice criteria, namely caste, gender, poverty, and co-benefits for development. We then analyse the action plans with regard to their treatment of these substantive criteria, the limitations in their approach, and possible strategies to address these limitations.
Background
Internationally, India is known to have pioneered the approach of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR), which allows developing countries to prioritize poverty alleviation and economic growth over climate mitigation.
3 - Becoming Nothing
- Abir Bazaz, Ashoka University
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- Nund Rishi
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- 05 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 184-213
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Summary
The death of God is the final thought of philosophy, which proposes it as the end of religion: it is the thought towards which the Occident (which in this respect excludes neither Islam nor Buddhism) will not have ceased to tend.
—Jean-Luc NancyThe shruks of Nund Rishi bring us face-to-face with an existential encounter with death's imminence. But what work does the recognition of death's imminence do? We have already seen that Nund Rishi's insistence on death's imminence is a call to a dying before death. The call to a dying before death is often also in Nund Rishi a call to becoming Nothing. Let us turn to the first two lines of a shruk taken up by Rahman Rahi in his critical essay on the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi that we also discussed in the previous chapter:
Zū neri brōnṭh tu’lōbh nēri patu’
Gatshan dọn zu’ vaṭu’, shunya ākār
The first to depart is life and only then greed
The two go on separate paths: the form of the Nothing
Rahman Rahi turns to the modern theatre stage in an attempt to interpret this shruk. He sets up a play between zū, or zuv (life), and lōbh (greed), which meet their end in the nothingness of death. Zū nēri brōnṭh (the first to leave, or depart, is life) gives us a palpable sense of someone's departure (in this case, zū, or life) before that of someone else (lōbh, or greed). It is, in other words, impossible for human greed to end before the end of life. Lōbh, greed or avaricious desire, has such a tenacious hold over us that it only leaves the stage of existence after life has already departed. What life and desire leave behind is a space of emptiness (shunya), and this play has the form of nothingness (shunya ākār). The idea that everything is empty (śūnyatā, or emptiness) is central to Mahayana Buddhism, which held sway in Kashmir between the third century BCE to about the fifth century CE (the Sanskrit term śūnya also means zero). Such a stance was not seen in the Buddhist tradition as nihilist. Graham Priest identifies the core meaning of the idea of śūnyatā: “Nothing exists in and of itself. Everything that exists does so inasmuch as, and only inasmuch as, it relates to other things.
Dedication
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp v-vi
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3 - “I Am Going to Fight …”: Muslim Women’s Politics and Gender Activism
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 145-188
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Summary
I am a woman and I can sense and feel the sound of an impending danger sooner than anyone. Now writers have to pay more attention to this world than ever before. The new knowledge, the dangers of the new politics have flared up this world. The darkness of hostility, destruction, and disenchantment are everywhere and constantly increasing!
—Jeelani BanoIn Jeelani Bano's 1963 novel Aiwan-e-Ghazal (The palace of the ghazals), two ashraf Muslim women, Qaiser and her daughter Kranthi, join the radical squads of the Telangana armed rebellion led by the communists that fought valiantly between 1946 and 1951. Members of an extremely conservative family known for its absolute loyalty to the Nizam and its conservative Islamic practices, Qaiser and Kranthi take a path that unsettles the entire family and the local community. In fact, Qaiser's cousins Chaand and Ghazal had been predecessor rebels in the family; however, Qaiser's leftist politics—according to one of her elderly family members—“create nothing less than extreme chaos in the family.” The entire confrontation begins with what historian Mahua Sarkar terms an “invisible everyday agency.” However, in the case of these four Hyderabadi Muslim women characters whom I will introduce in this, this everyday agency gradually becomes strikingly visible in their interactions with the family, thanks to their explicit interventions in the political sphere of Hyderabad. Along with Qaiser and Kranthi, Chaand and Ghazal demonstrate two modes of gender activism with their participation in the Hyderabadi public sphere. In what follows, I discuss the magnitude of such gender activism and of the political dimension of Muslim women's selfhood as manifested in this novel. This chapter explains how amidst the intersections of the rise of new politics in the city, the system of modern education, the Telangana activism of the 1940s, and the progressivist ideology—all four of these women forcefully demonstrate their agency as resistance against traditionalism, and specifically against the normative definitions of Muslim womanhood and the hegemonic patriarchy. During my interviews and field research, I came to realize that the life story of the author also plays a crucial role in the making of this compelling political agency of Muslim women and their participation in the public sphere.
3 - Stories of Girmitiyas: Folklore and The Sociocultural World of Indentured Indians in The Sugar Colonies
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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- 20 April 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 69-82
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Summary
The presence of Indian labour across the globe during the nineteenth century not only helped transform the capitalist global economy but also affected the cultural expression, including folklore, of migrant workers. More than 1.3 million Indians signed contracts of indentureship between 1834 and 1916 and shipped out to sugar plantations across the globe under the aegis of European empires. The first colony to bring in Indian indentured work was Mauritius in 1834. British Guyana imported indentured labour next in 1838, Trinidad and Jamaica in 1845, the smaller West Indian colonies of St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada in the 1850s, Natal in 1860, Suriname in 1873 and Fiji in 1879. Most indentured Indian labourers chose to stay in their new homes after the termination of their contracts and formed a distinct Indian diaspora in their respective host countries. Indentured Indians brought many sociocultural norms and expressions to the host countries which evolved over the succeeding generations. Folklore is one of these traditions.
Folklore is the traditional expression of a society or a particular group of people in which folk tales, songs, ballads, proverbs or jokes are transmitted from one generation to another. In the course of transmission, the folklore changes, depending on the place and cultural context. This is one of the reasons that different versions of the same folk tales exist. The origin and authors of folklore usually remain hidden as the stories and traditions are carried on and spread orally among often illiterate people.
INDENTURED FOLK TALES
When indentured migrants reached plantation colonies, they not only brought Indian religio-cultural norms but also folklore. Most of the folklore of the indentured Indians is in the Bhojpuri language as the majority of migrants were from the Bhojpuri-speaking areas of north India. However, over time, exposure to the languages, places and space of the host countries meant that indentured folklore in Mauritius can be found in both Creole and Bhojpuri. Other folklore in Mauritius is recorded in south Indian languages, such as Tamil, as a significant portion of the indentured there were from south India.
There are broadly five kinds of folk tales prevalent among Indian indentured societies across the globe. These are didactic tales, social stories, religious tales, love stories and entertainment stories. Moralistic tales endeavoured to encourage certain behaviours in children (and adults). A moral education was attempted through such accounts.
6 - Sanctions for Citizenship: Indians Overseas and Imperial Reciprocity
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- By Heena Mistry
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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- 20 April 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 139-156
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Summary
On 4 November 1944, the home department of the Government of India ordered a notice to be placed in the Gazette of India announcing the enforcement of the Indian Reciprocity Act against South Africa. Because persons of Indian origin in the Union of South Africa faced restrictions in entering, residing in, and trading, the central government directed that similar restrictions be imposed on South Africans of non-Indian origin in British India. In addition, the home department distributed an office memorandum explaining that the Government of India had decided to enforce the Indian Reciprocity Act and take retaliatory measures against the union government. The memorandum declared that the decision to finally implement the Indian Reciprocity Act against the Union of South Africa was a reaction to proposed legislation, such as proposed legislation that was colloquially known as the Pegging Bill. The proposed bill, which would later be passed as the Trading and Occupation of Land (Transvaal and Natal) Restriction Act in 1943, was referred to as the ‘Pegging Act’ because it ‘pegged’ a racial pattern of land ownership in the Durban municipal area. Sir Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, the agent of the Government of India in South Africa at the time, had also recommended that the Government of India consider more drastic retaliatory measures towards the union government, advising that the bill be made immediately applicable. The floor of the legislature, Indian public opinion and the press were all insistent in demands for retaliatory measures against South Africa.
The Government of India decided to give effect to all measures of the Reciprocity Act. One of these measures was to refrain from employing any more South African nationals of non-Indian origin in the various services in India, as Indians in South Africa were not employed in any but the ‘most subordinate and menial posts’. Only approximately 200 white South Africans were employed in India. Specifically, the Home Department requested that South Africans of non-Indian origin not, in future, be appointed to posts in the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police and other services at the provincial or federal levels. Despite putting these measures in place, the memorandum admitted that they were ‘not likely to be of any considerable magnitude’ because so far, no South African had been employed in the Secretary of States or Provincial Services and the number of those who held technical posts was negligible.
3 - India’s Strategic Partnerships in the Gulf: Context, Objective, and Components
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 74-102
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Summary
Introduction
India and the Gulf relations have evolved over a period of time, from India being a benign power with transactional interaction with the region to being a pragmatic actor and strategic partner to major Gulf economies. The inclusion of strategic components in the relations started over a decade after the end of the Cold War when India signed a strategic partnership agreement with Iran in 2003. Before that, since 1991, both India and the region had already started to embrace each other by shedding off their ideological differences and protectionist economy and by being lenient on non-alignment Third World concern. This was also the time when India ceased viewing the region through the Pakistani prism. Hence, the elevation of Indo-Gulf relations to strategic partnership level is the outcome of changing geopolitical and geostrategic dynamics, internationally, regionally, and nationally. Strategic relations with the region are crucial for India's economic development, social progress, and political ascendance. With growing defence cooperation and the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative, the Gulf's role in building India's defence industry is worth examining. The Gulf's importance in India's strategic calculus far outweighs even the immediate neighbourhood, given the volume and percentage of trade, its contribution to India's energy requirements, and gross domestic product (GDP) through remittances sent by 8.5–10 million Indian expatriates in the region.
Thus, it is undeniable that the Gulf is key to India's growth story. The economic and energy component in the Indo-Gulf relations is dominant since the discovery of oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908 and subsequently in the Arab states. Therefore, what tempted the countries to enter into strategic partnerships and what are the objectives of such partnership warrant a detailed examination. Furthermore, it becomes necessary to inspect what corresponds to a strategic partnership in the Indo-Gulf context. Thus, both a conceptual and contextual understanding of Indo-Gulf relationstransformed to strategic partnerships is unique and is a relevant contribution to the existing literature on the subject.
Strategic partnerships as a concept emerged in the 1990s as an important feature in the evolving international relations systems and discourse. Generally, it is multifaceted and multidimensional in character; however, it does not necessarily mean a unique relationship.
2 - Unravelling the Texts: Memory, Reforms, and Literary Sulh-i-Kul
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 21-54
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Summary
This study has two related ambitions: one is to recover women's poetic compositions, and the other is to see how their participation in the literary sphere was remembered and represented by connoisseurs, critics, and the common folk in the early modern period. In order to do so, it focuses, as discussed earlier, on two biographical compendia (tazkiras) of female poets, both written in the nineteenth century, and this poses several problems before us. For one, we need to understand the implications of recovering women's lyrics from the tazkiras since our access is mediated by the selection, observations, and biographical notes that their authors provide before citing their poetic compositions. In line with the standard format of literary tazkiras followed across the Persianate world, in almost all entries there is a selection of verses, but these are preceded by biographical clips of varying lengths. The question then is: how are these life stories to be read and interpreted, particularly when they purportedly intend to highlight and preserve the contribution of women to the shaping of the literate tradition? Related to this, we need to be attentive to the disciplining thrust in the life stories and the inbuilt exclusions and silences that were integral to the discursive incorporation of women's poems within the early modern literary culture.
Raising the issue of ‘authenticity’ in texts of memorialization only fetches diminishing returns, and it is important to realize that our tazkiras not only carry verses that were ‘authentic’ but also the ones whose genuineness was suspect, but they were still in circulation in commemorative spaces. Not an inconsiderable number of women poets had poetic compilations or diwāns of their own, and when their work is mentioned in the tazkiras, one could be fairly certain about their genuineness. It also happened not infrequently that married men provided to the authors poems composed by their wives; or the tutors, impressed by some of their female students, shared their couplets with them. Even so, our authors also picked up a large amount of their material from gossip and discussions in the markets (bāzār), coffee houses (qahwa-khāne), courtesan's quarters (kotha), and poetic assemblies (mushā ‘ira).
Frontmatter
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp i-iv
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5 - Indian Foreign Policy Towards the Gulf States: Strategic Narratives and Domestic Political Projects
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp 135-162
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Summary
The* Gulf region has been a key employment destination for Indian workers, a major source of remittances and vital trading partner for India. Through an examination of speeches and policies and using constructivist discourse analysis, this chapter seeks to assess the nature and drivers of the strategic narratives of the previous Congress Party–led government of Manmohan Singh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government of Narendra Modi to engage the Gulf states and the Indian diaspora in the Gulf region. It is argued that India's engagement with the Gulf states since the 1990s has been shaped by varying domestic political projects that place emphasis on India's advancement as a market-driven state and society with a secular-social democratic identity, under the Singh government, and an identity of ‘marketised Hindutva’, under the Modi government. The chapter aims to compare the nature of engagement produced by these similar but distinct political projects. It also seeks to highlight the foreign policy impact of the external projection of domestic politics and the impact of foreign policy engagement in shaping domestic political projects.
Introduction
India's current policy towards the Gulf States has been advertised as a reinvention and a distinct move beyond just an economic engagement based on the supply of oil to one that encompasses the security and strategic spheres. There is, however, a certain continuity with previous Indian engagements with Gulf nations. India's foreign policy was first transformed significantly following the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s, with economic security taking centre stage to assist a growing economy. Referring to the Gulf nations as India's ‘natural economic hinterland’, the goal of the Manmohan Singh government was to consolidate sustainable economic partnerships that would pave the way for strategic and political alliances, a direction that the current government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pursued actively. Broadly, India's priorities in the Gulf as identified by several governments have been geared towards energy security, trade, investment, strategic ties, and securing the interests of the large Indian diaspora. Another recurring aspect of India's engagement with the region has been to negotiate a tricky path between the Arab Gulf states, the relationship with Iran and to harbour increasingly closer ties with the Jewish state of Israel.
10 - Rooting History: Indian Indenture in South Africa and The Sultan of Many Journeys
- Edited by Ashutosh Kumar, Banaras Hindu University, India, Crispin Bates, University of Edinburgh
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- <i>Girmitiyas</i> and the Global Indian Diaspora
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- 20 April 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp 225-253
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Summary
The death of Hajee M. L. Sultan removes from the Indian scene one of its most colourful personalities. His story is in the best American tradition of the poor American boy ‘who made good’. Farm hand, waiter, farmer, porter, small businessman, big businessman, he passed through all the phases of poverty and wealth, at one time losing all he had in a tobacco business, at another time risking more than he had in a commercial venture. Written up, the story would appeal to thousands as on a par with stories of the merchant princes of the Western world; rich in interest and a spur to everyone.… The story is touched too with the same human magnanimity that has brought a final lustre to the great names of the capitalist world.… Who knows but that in time to come another small boy provided with the advantages existing only as a result of Hajee M. L. Sultan's beneficence will not rise from poverty to wealth; and what is more important, from ignorance to knowledge; and become in the field of political leadership or literature or science or industry a great statesman leading the whole Indian community to new levels of attainment. For who can tell where the influence [of] a benefaction begins or of magnanimity ends. There is something more. A curious inspiration invests the memory of such a man as the late Hajee M. L. Sultan. It is the inspiration to emulate his example of munificence.
—The Graphic, 19 September 1953The contribution of the Indian indentured of South Africa to the colonial economy was massive. Despite undertaking back-breaking work, from labouring on sugar plantations to building railways, most of the just over 150,000 migrants chose to stay in South Africa rather than return to India. Their impact was incredible, yet their histories were largely invisible in the public domain and continue to be marginalized. The promise of a memorial for the indentured made by the government in 2010, as Indians commemorated the 150th year of the arrival of the first indentured Indians in South Africa, failed to materialize even a decade later as the 160th anniversary was being marked. There is one indentured migrant, however, Sultan Pillai Kannu, whose name was emblazoned on a technical training college, and in postapartheid South Africa, a street bears his name.
Contents
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Book:
- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp vii-viii
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Preface
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp ix-x
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Summary
This pioneering volume provides a systematic treatment of India's Gulf policy from multiple thematic and theoretical angles. It seeks to address the mismatch between the Gulf region's economic and security importance to India and the dearth of academic attention paid to India's Gulf policy. Although several books and articles have been published on India's relations with individual Gulf states, few if any offer systematic treatments of India's Gulf policy as a whole. This volume also seeks to reconcile the study of India's Gulf policy with the disciplinary debates and questions that underpin the fields of international relations and foreign policy analysis. While much of the study of India's foreign policy remains atheoretical and isolated from broader theoretical and disciplinary conversations, this volume makes a conscious effort at bridging the divide. The editors have therefore conceived this volume as a collection of theoretically informed treatments of India's Gulf policy. The contributors were asked to consider and discuss the theoretical frames and methods that they employed in analysing the various aspects of India's Gulf policy. The volume, therefore, also serves as a practical guide for students of foreign policy analysis to applying theoretical and methodological tools to foreign policy.
The project was conceived in the course of Hasan T. Alhasan's doctoral work under the supervision of Harsh V. Pant at the India Institute at King's College London. The editors would like to thank the India Institute, the editors at Cambridge University Press, the three anonymous reviewers for their comments, and various colleagues including Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad, Dr N. Janardhan, P. R. Kumaraswamy, Dr Melissa Levaillant, and A. K. Pasha for their support and encouragement. Hasan is particularly indebted to HRH Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa and the Crown Prince's International Scholarship Programme for the generous financial support of his doctoral studies without which his work on this volume would not have been possible.
List of Poems and Artworks
- 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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- 31 May 2024, pp vii-viii
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Dedication
- Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi
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- Voices in Verses
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- 06 March 2024
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- 31 May 2024, pp vii-viii
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Index
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 300-306
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1 - No Longer a Nawab: The Making of a New Hyderabadi Muslim
- Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
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- Remaking History
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- 01 August 2023
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- 31 May 2024, pp 49-96
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Summary
Mother, please do forgive me. I’ve done two things that would be unacceptable to you. First, I’ve come far away from the contrived atmosphere of our nawabi families that are steadily in decline. I’ve come here for good, far removed from loathsome customs and demeaning attitudes. Please don't look for me. I shall not return.
Writing this letter was a defining moment in the life of Sultan, the protagonist in Nelluri Kesava Swamy's short story, “Vimukti” (Liberation). Against the long history of the nawabi and ashraf practices of his family, this act of writing a letter itself was a groundbreaking move—and signifies his desire to embrace a version of modern Islam and reformism. Whereas this specific period of the 1940s represents several strands of modern and reformist debates in the larger Islamic world, I suggest that the case of Hyderabadi Muslim identity offers us a quite different example—one of an entirely modern Islamicate milieu. The short stories published during and around this period seem to function as a site of tension between the normative expressions of Islam and the shifting paradigms in the everyday life of Muslims in Hyderabad. Basing my discussion on Swamy's stories, I will examine how these two mutually connected concepts deal with gender equality, social justice, and pluralism—the key ingredients that shaped an alternative Muslim identity in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad. The production and circulation of such an intriguing discourse led to the creation of what we can call a version of the “New Muslim” (nayē musalmān) in the history of the Hyderabad state during the turbulent 1940s. I take this term “New Muslim” from my interlocutors such as the post–Police Action writers and activists, who were specifically mentioning the rise of a new Muslim consciousness in the wake of the Police Action.
For the entire community of Hyderabad state that had suffered either directly or indirectly during and after the Police Action, the Muslim identity was a daily recurring challenge for at least two decades after the event.