This book’s Introduction sets out the key intellectual and historical contexts for its argument. It shows that religious belief gained an important cultural emphasis after the Reformation and that it was considered to be distinct from other kinds of belief or assent. Engaging with scholarly discussions of belief, this introduction suggests that the period from around 1580 to the 1650s witnessed an attempt to investigate what was particular about a specifically religious kind of belief. Its certainty and spiritual origin were compared to, and contrasted with, other kinds of assent that were generated by probable forms of argument. An important and widespread way of effecting this comparison involved considering religious belief alongside the kinds of assent generated in legal settings – when witness evidence is evaluated for its credibility. The introduction roots this discursive method in contemporary legal culture, before surveying recent scholarship on literary culture, law and religion.

Chapter 2 SKILLS in ACTION argues that skills are keys to understanding crucial notions in action theory, such as intentional action. The idea that intentional actions are constitutively the employment of skills is an attractive thought, and yet, the view has fallen in disrepute. This chapter resuscitates it: I argue that no other capacity—from instincts to habits or talents, to innate general-purpose faculties—can figure as centrally in action theory.

Chapter 10 PRACTICAL CONCEPTS AND PRODUCTIVE REASONING reviews arguments for positing practical concepts and discusses a novel empirical argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively productive kind of reasoning.

Chapter 3 considers Francis Bacon’s use of legal evidentiary procedures and the important role they play in his discussions of religious belief. Its first half is given over to a wide-ranging account of Bacon’s philosophical prose. It sets out to establish that Bacon uses his knowledge of Romano-canon law and its evidentiary practices to shape his methodological reforms for natural philosophy. This chapter applies the findings of this survey to Bacon’s prose fiction narrative, New Atlantis. Requirements for credible legal testimony are, on the one hand, shown to shape the style of Bacon’s narration. On the other, though, Bacon’s discussion of evangelical conversion shows that, as a spiritually derived form of assent, religious belief transcends such legally derived criteria for credibility. New Atlantis thus develops Bacon’s philosophical distinctions between faith and knowledge. It also asks probing questions about religious belief and intercultural encounters in early modernity.

Background

Madhesh, a region rich in culture and history and the heartland of the ancient Mithila kingdom, is celebrated as the birthplace of revered figures such as Sita and Gargi, women who embody wisdom, power, and empowerment. As daughters of Mithila, their legacy should have been one of empowerment for all Madheshi women, fostering a sense of strength and agency among those residing in their homeland. Yet, contrary to this legacy, Madheshi women today find themselves marginalized in their own land, treated as outsiders both by their own patriarchal society and by the nationalist discourse of the Nepali state, which views Madhesh as a peripheral and contested space. This dual marginalization places Madheshi women in a complex state of “otherness,” where they are not only excluded from the mainstream narratives of Nepali identity but also subjected to restrictive patriarchal norms within their own community (Gautam 2008; Ghimire 2018). To understand this paradox, we must delve into the forces that have conspired to marginalize these women and examine why the legacy of empowerment has not been passed down to the women of Mithila, that is, “Madhesh.”

In the sociopolitical landscape of Nepal, Madheshi women endure a unique form of intersectional oppression that intertwines gender-based and ethnic discrimination. They face the multidimensional nature of marginalization that includes patriarchal constraints within their community and systemic exclusion from the broader nationalist discourse. As a result, Madheshi women find themselves “doubly othered,” experiencing dual layers of discrimination that render their struggles distinct within Nepal's feminist and social justice movements.

Risk and uncertainty were structural to the Roman world, as was the case for other preindustrial empires. But their impact was not distributed equally. Social, economic, political, legal, military, and other inequalities pervaded Roman society and generated conditions of precarity. Precarity was experienced as a new relation to the Roman object world; as an impetus for experimentation but a brake on innovation; as a state of constant anticipation; as a troubled relation to place; and as a negotiation of horizontal and vertical relations of care.

Background

Bala Krishna Sama (1902–1981), the doyen of Nepali drama, wrote an epic entitled Chiso Chulho (1958), or “cold hearth.” This epic is woven around the theme of a silent but very strong love relationship between Gauri, a so-called high caste girl, and Sante, a Dalit young man. Sama has chosen to write an epic on the theme of inter-caste love, which was not accepted by the traditional Nepali society. In this epic Sama has dramatized the moments and conditions of alterity. Sama chooses the epic genre to write about othering in a caste-ridden society that he experienced and inherited because this genre gives him space to play at once with tradition and individuality. Sama has chosen to describe the agony of the characters by giving them poetic elevation, thereby deconstructing the canonical norm, which requires that the hero of the epic should be one who hails from the upper echelon or caste of society. By selecting a Dalit or the so-called low-caste male character named Sante, who tailors clothes as part of his traditional occupation, Sama has used all the accoutrements of the epic genre in this oeuvre.

Sante's love for the higher-caste woman Gauri has introduced an unsolved theme that reverberates even in today's Nepali society, which claims to have made achievements in terms of eliminating the excesses of casteism and improving the conditions of women. We can imagine what would have happened if Gauri and Sante had taken a rebellious stand nearly seven decades ago. As a reminder, we can take the widely reported and discussed tragic incident resulting in the death of several young men of Rukum Karnali that happened on May 20, 2020, perpetrated to foil the love between a high-caste girl and a Dalit boy.

Attracting “youths of good promise from every part of the [Bengal] Presidency, including the most remote provinces,” was the founding mandate of Presidency College that was supposed to distinguish it from “the very small circle of districts heretofore connected with the Hindoo College.” The district constituencies of the Presidency College stretched far and wide, and this vast hinterland—indiscriminately clubbed as “mofussil” in the official documents—presented a set of peculiar predicaments to the institution. On the one hand, the claim of serving the mofussil equally with the metropolis of Calcutta was the formal justification for many of the unusual institutional privileges that the college came to enjoy. On the other hand, the college authorities never tired of complaining that this very responsibility of serving the mofussil held the institution back from realizing its full potential. To the Presidency College's evolving metropolitan selfimage, the mofussil was both a supply house of talent and a rustic source of cultural embarrassment. It was a distant exterior that, in the form of migrant students, was also an intimate presence. For such students, again, the mofussil was an identity that had to be alternately performed and concealed in the urban theater of bhadralok modernity. In examining the evolving institutional, spatial, and experiential registers of this unresolved tension from 1855 to 1920, this chapter attempts to suggest one way of uncocooning the history of Presidency College.

Coalitional bargaining arises in many political and economic situations. This chapter presents three applications of the random proposer model for cooperative TU games and pure bargaining problems: bargaining in legislatures, labour markets, and international climate agreements. In Part III, we will provide further applications of coalitional bargaining to efficient renegotiations (Chapter 8), climate cooperation and free-riding (Chapter 9), and trading under uncertainty (Chapter 10).

The title of this volume, The Other Nepal, implies that there exists a more visible, globally recognizable, widely represented, and geopolitically marked entity called “Nepal” to which the other Nepal merely plays a shadowy, sketchy, and spectral sidekick that is routinely overlooked, forgotten, and silenced. The origin of this internal schism may be traced to an ideologically fraught and rancorous debate between two camps of Nepalese historians and philologists over the denotation of the letter “ने” (Ne) in the word “Nepal.” Hindu historians of Nepal see in it an ancient Hindu sage named “Ne” and claim that he is the protector (palak) of the land. Those opposed to this anthropomorphizing and Sanskritization assert that “Nepal” derives from the Tibeto-Burman words nhyet, meaning cattle, and pa, meaning man, and claim that this non-Hindu and zoomorphic signification has gradually been displaced and erased from Nepali history, languages, and cultures. This erasure in their eyes represents and embodies a larger and more sinister pattern of internal colonization of Indigenous and ethnic populations and cultures of Nepal.

This book carries tentative inscriptions of this eclipsed, erased, internally colonized, and othered Nepal. It intends to probe into the apparent dyad between the Nepal that arrogates to itself the role of defining and representing the entire nation and the Nepal that is effectively silenced by the hegemonic discourses and practices of nationalism and by the hierarchies premised on caste, ethnicity, and gender. The tenor of the analysis and research collected in this book, therefore, is at once investigative, critical, inclusive, and ethical. To inquire into and bring to light what has hitherto been largely invisible and to investigate the causes, conditions, and consequences of such invisibility are the primary goals of this volume.