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Nayanjot Lahiri wins a major international prize for her biography of Ashoka  (also included below is the IESHR review of May 2017) October 3, 2016 Washington, DC — Nayanjot Lahiri of Ashoka University has been selected as the winner of the 2016 John F. Richards Prize for her book Ashoka in Ancient India (Permanent Black and Harvard University Press, 2015). The Richards Prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association (AHA) to honour the best book in South Asian history. The prize will be awarded during a ceremony at the Association’s 131st Annual Meeting in Denver, CO, in January 2017. Professor Lahiri’s biography was edited and typeset at Permanent Black, India’s leading academic publisher, and will be available in paperback later this month. (The American edition was offset from the Indian edition and published by Harvard University Press.) The series in which the South Asia edition appears, called “Hedgehog and Fox”, conceived and manage...

"… written in lucid prose, Kumar’s rich cultural history is an important addition not only to Kerala Studies but to South Asian Studies at large"  The Book Review WRITING THE FIRST PERSON Literature, History, and Autobiography in Modern Kerala Out now in paperback Why did autobiographical writings emerge in Kerala more than a century ago? What were the social, material, and cultural features that motivated individuals to write  personal histories and memoirs? This book shows the complex ways in which private recollections, and the use of memory for loosely literary ends, also entailed the production of history by another name. Udaya Kumar analyses this period of social transformation to show the emergence of new resources for the self-relective writer, as well as of new idioms of expression. Among the many genres and forms he studies are anti-caste writings, works advocating spiritual and social reorientation, monologic poetry, and early n...

It was in 1964 that Nehru, the chief remaining embodiment of Indian political hope, died, leaving in his wake a vacuum that his successors soon distilled into a political cynicism and larger moral decline that marked the real break from the nationalist idealism that had begun fifty years earlier, with Jallianwalabagh and Gandhi’s arrival. And it was in 1968 that the ‘three language formula’, presaged by the foundation of linguistic states, was promulgated, making Hindi merely one of three languages taught in schools, putting paid to what had over the nationalist period been cast as a major objective of unification—Hindi as the sole national language of the country. There were furious anti-Hindi riots in 1966 across both North and South India, many of them bloody and destructive, the end result being the tacit acceptance and codification into a policy of the general preference for English in the upper echelons of society. It is for these reasons, then, that this book looks at t...

"Her book is a lucid entry point for those unfamiliar with the Hindi novel in the past 150 odd years and offers a sharp analysis of tradition, nationalism, and modernity. " Shantam Goyal, The Print This book provides a panoramic view of the intellectual and cultural life of North India over a century – from the aftermath of the 1857 uprising to the end of the Nehruvian era. The North’s historical cities, rooted in an Indo-Persianate culture, began changing more slowly than the Presidency towns founded by the British. Focusing on six major cities – Agra, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow – Dalmia takes up eight canonical Hindi novels set in them to trace a literary history of domestic and political cataclysms. Her exploration of emerging Hindu middle classes, changing personal and professional ambitions, and new notions of married life provides a vivid sense of urban modernity. She looks at the radical social transformations associated ...

In classical times, India’s diverse groups – whether defined by family or caste, professional or religious association – settled on a concept of law. How did they reach consensus? Was it based in religion or transcendent knowledge? Did it depend on time and place? What apparatus existed to ensure justice and fair verdicts? Addressing these questions and more, A Dharma Reader traces the definition and process of Indian law from the third century BCE to the middle ages. Its breadth captures the centuries-long struggle by Indian thinkers to theorize law in a complex society. The volume includes new and accessible translations of key texts, notes that explain the significance and chronology of selections, and a comprehensive introduction that summarizes the development of various disciplines in intellectual and historical terms. With exceptional detail and historical precision, this Reader provides unique insights into the legal interactions among India...

  Udaya Kumar on his new book, Writing the First Person. With V. Sanil, Mohinder Singh, Prathama Banerjee   Monday 20 March, 5 pm, CSDS seminar room 29 , Rajpur Road, Delhi.    

The Writer of Modern Life Three scholars on the making of Indian literature By VINEET GILL  |  1 February 2017   "M odern writers and artists in India—and in other postcolonial countries—have always had to contend with the politics of cultural exchange between the colonised and the coloniser. When the Bengali critic Dineshchandra Sen, in a letter to the British historian EP Thompson, referred to Rabindranath Tagore as “a European writer of Bengali,” he was articulating a grievance against all cultural renegades. Yet far from being a failing on the part of the postcolonial writer or artist, the urge to cross over is essential to modernity. The scholar Rosinka Chaudhuri, in her 2014 book The Literary Thing —a fascinating study of the beginnings of modern poetry in Bengal—employs an interesting phrase to describe the phenomenon: “creative cross-contamination.” Let there be no doubt: the spirit of modernity is confused, many-hued, contaminated. How t...

In his first speech after taking office, Pakistan's new army chief, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, urged officers to read ARMY AND  NATION by STEVE WILKINSON, reports Salman Masood in The Nation . ISLAMABAD - The gathering of senior army officers of Rawalpindi Garrison sat alert in the General Headquarters auditorium and listened to their chief intently. It was the last week of December and Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa, the army chief, had been into the top job just weeks earlier. The general delivered his first speech – an articulation of his vision – as the new army chief in a poised manner and communicated it to his officers in unequivocal terms. The army has no business trying to run the government, the general said. The army must remain within its constitutionally defined role, he stressed. Gen Bajwa also alluded that an impression of a competition between the civilians and the military is counter-productive for the country. And, apart from other professional advice, he urg...

CHRISTIAN LEE NOVETZKE The Quotidian Revolution Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India In thirteenth-century western India, venture spiritualists—entrepreneurial religious figures—challenged the linguistic and cultural hegemony of Sanskrit, a language restricted to high-caste men. They did this by formulating new texts and social orders oriented around the use of the regional languages that reduced the barriers to access that Sanskrit had imposed. In so doing, these venture spiritualists created an early form of the public sphere in which the social ethics of caste and gender inequity were debated. This debate drew from, and reconfigured, the sense and scope of “everyday life” permeated by social distinction. The configuration of a new public sphere in medieval India that engaged with questions of social equality in the context of expanding the scope of everyday life is the process called “vernacularization.” The Quotidian Rev...

IQTIDAR ALAM KHAN The Mughal Nobility : Two Political Biographies Mirza Kamran (blinded and deported to Mecca in 1553) and Mun‘im Khan (d. 1575), whose political biographies this volume carries, are known for their prominent roles in the early Mughal state, over the time it was struggling to consolidate itself over North India. This was the crucial period which saw a process of gradual change in the structure and cultural ethos of the ruling establishment that Babur had brought with him. It came to be popularly known in India as Sultanat-i Mughlia (the Mughal Empire). One of its distinguishing features was the plurality of persuasions from which it drew its military personnel: Turkish-speaking Sunni Turanis, Irani or Khurasani Shias , Indian Muslims (the so-called Shaikhzadas), and Hindu Rajputs. The political lives of Mirza Kamran and Mun‘im Khan provide vital insights into the changing formation and character of early Mughal rule. Most modern ...