Locality, Province and Nation

Locality, Province and Nation
Author: John Gallagher
Publisher: CUP Archive
Total Pages: 346
Release: 1973-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521098113

With the steady growth of interest in the history of India under the British, interpretations have emerged, and they may sharply alter much of our thinking about Indian nationalism and British Imperialism. Some of these historical revisions, and the conclusions which may flow from them, are illustrated by the essays in this book. All of them grapple with questions of Indian political organization in different parts of the British Raj. They enquire how these organizations worked at different level; in the towns and in the countryside, in the provinces and in the subcontinent itself. They examine how these kinds of politics came to be bonded together into what were called 'nationalist' movements. They suggest that the interplay between these movements and British Imperialism was very much more ambiguous than has been commonly supposed. All these essays are preliminary announcements of findings which will later appear in longer versions.

Literature and Nationalist Ideology

Literature and Nationalist Ideology
Author: Hans Harder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 545
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 135138435X

Writing histories of literature means making selections, passing value judgments, and incorporating or rejecting foregoing traditions. The book argues that in many parts of India, literary histories play an important role in creating a cultural ethos. They are closely linked with nationalism in general and various regional ‘sub-nationalisms’ in particular. The contributors to this volume look at a great variety of aspects of the historiography of modern regional languages of India. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Books Without Borders, Volume 2

Books Without Borders, Volume 2
Author: R. Fraser
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2008-07-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230289134

This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation - a material artifact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (amongst a range of other approaches) to contextualize the publisher's series in terms of its cultural and economic work.

India in the Persian World of Letters

India in the Persian World of Letters
Author: Arthur Dudney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 019285741X

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book traces the development of philology (the study of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth-century was Sirāj al-Dīn 'Alī Khān, (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose Intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-go'ī [literally, fresh-speaking] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native-speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative fresh-speaking poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reokhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire.

The Scattered Court

The Scattered Court
Author: Richard David Williams
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0226825442

Presents a new history of how Hindustani court music responded to the political transitions of the nineteenth century. How far did colonialism transform north Indian music? In the period between the Mughal empire and the British Raj, how did the political landscape bleed into aesthetics, music, dance, and poetry? Examining musical culture through a diverse and multilingual archive, primarily using sources in Urdu, Bengali, and Hindi that have not been translated or critically examined before, The Scattered Court challenges our assumptions about the period. Richard David Williams presents a long history of interactions between northern India and Bengal, with a core focus on the two courts of Wajid Ali Shah (1822–1887), the last ruler of the kingdom of Awadh. He charts the movement of musicians and dancers between the two courts in Lucknow and Matiyaburj, as well as the transregional circulation of intellectual traditions and musical genres, and demonstrates the importance of the exile period for the rise of Calcutta as a celebrated center of Hindustani classical music. Since Lucknow is associated with late Mughal or Nawabi society and Calcutta with colonial modernity, examining the relationship between the two cities sheds light on forms of continuity and transition over the nineteenth century, as artists and their patrons navigated political ruptures and social transformations. The Scattered Court challenges the existing historiography of Hindustani music and Indian culture under colonialism by arguing that our focus on Anglophone sources and modernizing impulses has directed us away from the aesthetic subtleties, historical continuities, and emotional dimensions of nineteenth-century music.

Literary Cultures in History

Literary Cultures in History
Author: Sheldon Pollock
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 1103
Release: 2003-05-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0520228219

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