Reconsidering Islam in a South Asian Context

Reconsidering Islam in a South Asian Context
Author: M. Reza Pirbhai
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2009
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9004177582

Despite late reconsideration, a dominant paradigm rooted in Orientalist essentialisations of Islam as statically legalistic and Muslims as uniformly transgressive when local customs are engaged, continues to distort perspectives of South Asia's past and present. This has led to misrepresentations of pre-colonial Muslim norms and undue emphasis on colonial reforms alone when charting the course to post-coloniality. This book presents and challenges staple perspectives with a comprehensive reinterpretation of doctrinal sources, literary expressions and colonial records spanning the period from the reign of the 'Great Mughals' to end of the 'British Raj' (1526-1947). The result is an alternative vision of this transformative period in South Asian history, and an original paradigm of Islamic doctrine and Muslim practice applicable more broadly.

Everyday Life in South Asia

Everyday Life in South Asia
Author: Diane P. Mines
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 582
Release: 2010-07-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0253013577

Now updated: An “eminently readable, highly engaging” anthology about the lives of ordinary citizens in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (Margaret Mills, Ohio State University). For the second edition of this popular textbook, readings have been updated and new essays added. The result is a timely collection that explores key themes in understanding the region, including gender, caste, class, religion, globalization, economic liberalization, nationalism, and emerging modernities. New readings focus attention on the experiences of the middle classes, migrant workers, and IT professionals, and on media, consumerism, and youth culture. Clear and engaging writing makes this text particularly valuable for general and student readers, while the range of new and classic scholarship provides a useful resource for specialists.

Contours of South Asian Social Anthropology

Contours of South Asian Social Anthropology
Author: Swatahsiddha Sarkar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000581306

This book presents a conceptual and methodological framework to understand South Asia by engaging with the practices of sociology and social anthropology in India and Nepal. It provides a new imagination of South Asia by connecting historical, political, religious and cultural divides of the region. Drawing from the experiences of Indian and Nepali social anthropology, the book discusses the presence of Nepal studies in Indian social anthropology and vice versa. It highlights Nepal or South Asia as a subject for social anthropological research and stresses on pluriversal knowledge production through regional scholarship, dialogic social anthropology, South Asian episteme, post-Western social anthropology and the decolonisation of disciplines. In exploring the themes and problems of doing social anthropology in Nepal by Indian scholars, the book assesses the scope of developing the South Asian social anthropological worldview. It explains why social anthropological and sociological inquiry in India has failed to surpass its focus beyond the territorial limits of the nation state. The book examines the issues of methodological nationalism and social anthropological research tradition in South Asia. By using the Saidian framework of travelling theory and Bhambra’s idea of connected sociologies, it shows how social anthropology can develop disciplinary crossroads within South Asia. This book will be of interest to students, teachers and researchers of South Asian studies, anthropology, sociology, social anthropology, South Asian sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, area studies, cultural studies, Nepal studies and Global South studies.

South Asia's Weak States

South Asia's Weak States
Author: T. V. Paul
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2010-08-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0804778531

South Asia, which consists of eight states of different sizes and capabilities, is characterized by high levels of insecurity at the inter-state, intra-state, and human level: insecurity that is manifest in both traditional and non-traditional security problems—especially transnational terrorism fuelled by militant religious ideologies. To explain what has caused and contributed to the perpetual insecurity and human suffering in the region, this book engages scholars of international relations, comparative politics, historical sociology, and economic development, among others, to reveal and analyze the key underlying and proximate drivers. It argues that the problems are driven largely by two critical variables: the presence of weak states and weak cooperative interstate norms. Based on this analysis and the conclusions drawn, the book recommends specific policies for making the region secure and for developing the long lasting inter- and intra-state cooperative mechanisms necessary for the perpetuation of that security.

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge

Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge
Author: Bernard S. Cohn
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400844320

Bernard Cohn's interest in the construction of Empire as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon has set the agenda for the academic study of modern Indian culture for over two decades. His earlier publications have shown how dramatic British innovations in India, including revenue and legal systems, led to fundamental structural changes in Indian social relations. This collection of his writings in the last fifteen years discusses areas in which the colonial impact has generally been overlooked. The essays form a multifaceted exploration of the ways in which the British discovery, collection, and codification of information about Indian society contributed to colonial cultural hegemony and political control. Cohn argues that the British Orientalists' study of Indian languages was important to the colonial project of control and command. He also asserts that an arena of colonial power that seemed most benign and most susceptible to indigenous influences--mostly law--in fact became responsible for the institutional reactivation of peculiarly British notions about how to regulate a colonial society made up of "others." He shows how the very Orientalist imagination that led to brilliant antiquarian collections, archaeological finds, and photographic forays were in fact forms of constructing an India that could be better packaged, inferiorized, and ruled. A final essay on cloth suggests how clothes have been part of the history of both colonialism and anticolonialism.

Borders and conflict in South Asia

Borders and conflict in South Asia
Author: Lucy Chester
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2017-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526117630

Borders and conflict in South Asia is the first full-length study of the 1947 drawing of the Indo-Pakistani boundary in Punjab. Using the Radcliffe commission as a window onto the decolonization and independence of India and Pakistan, and examining the competing interests, both internal and international, that influenced the actions of the various major players, it highlights British efforts to maintain a grip on India even as the decolonization process spun out of control. Drawing on extensive archival research in India, Pakistan, and Britain, combined with innovative use of cartographic sources, the book paints a vivid picture of both the partition process and the Radcliffe line’s impact on Punjab. This book will be vital reading for scholars and students of colonialism, decolonization, partition, and borderlands studies, while providing anyone interested in South Asia’s independence with a highly readable account of one of its most controversial episodes.

Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia

Imagining the Public in Modern South Asia
Author: Brannon Ingram
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317234294

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the category of ‘the public’ has come under increased scholarly and popular scrutiny in recent years. To better understand this current conjuncture, we need a fuller understanding of the specifically South Asian history of the term. To that end, this book surveys the modern Indian ‘public’ across multiple historical contexts and sites, with contributions from leading scholars of South Asia in anthropology, history, literary studies and religious studies. As a whole, this volume highlights the complex genealogies of the public in the Indian subcontinent during the colonial and postcolonial eras, showing in particular how British notions of ‘the public’ intersected with South Asian forms of publicity. Two principal methods or approaches—the genealogical and the typological—have characterised this scholarship. This book suggests, more in the mode of genealogy, that the category of the public has been closely linked to the sub-continental history of political liberalism. Also discussed is how the studies collected in this volume challenge some of liberalism’s key presuppositions about the public and its relationship to law and religion.

Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South

Social Ontology, Sociocultures, and Inequality in the Global South
Author: Benjamin Baumann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2020-05-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000064387

Challenging the assumption that the capitalist transformation includes a radical break with the past, this edited volume traces how historically older forms of social inequality are transformed but persist in the present to shape the social structure of contemporary societies in the global South. Each social collective comprises an interpretation of itself – including the meaning of life, the concept of a human person, and the notion of a collective. This volume studies the interpretation that various social collectives have of themselves. This interpretation is referred to as social ontology. All chapters of the edited volume focus on the relation between social ontology and structures of inequality. They argue that each society comprises several historical layers of social ontology that correspond to layers of inequality, which are referred to as sociocultures. Thereby, the volume explains why and how structures of inequality differ between contemporary collectives in the global South, even though all of them seem to have similar structures, institutions, and economies. The volume is aimed at academics, students and the interested public looking for a novel theorization of social inequality pertaining to social collectives in the global South.

An Endangered History

An Endangered History
Author: Angma Dey Jhala
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2019-04-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199096910

An Endangered History examines the transcultural, colonial history of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, c. 1798–1947. This little-studied borderland region lies on the crossroads of Bangladesh, India, and Burma and is inhabited by several indigenous peoples. They observe a diversity of religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, and Christianity; speak Tibeto-Burmese dialects intermixed with Persian and Bengali idioms; and practise jhum or slash-and-burn agriculture. This book investigates how British administrators from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries used European systems of knowledge, such as botany, natural history, gender, enumerative statistics, and anthropology, to construct these indigenous communities and their landscapes. In the process, they connected the region to a dynamic, global map, and classified its peoples through the reifying language of religion, linguistics, race, and nation.