Modern South Asia

This article explores the surprising role of the ancient Buddhist past in the construction of Pakistani national histories in museum exhibits and archaeological guides from 1950 to 1969. Although Pakistan was created as a homeland for Indian Muslims during the 1947 Partition of British India, Pakistani historians struggled to forge a unifying history for the new Muslim nation-state through Islam. In response, Pakistani museum curators co-opted and reframed Buddhist sculptures from before the arrival of Islam to differentiate Pakistan from India and to make sense of Pakistan’s recently drawn borders. They creatively retold the history of ancient Gandhara (first century BCE to fifth century CE), a Buddhist kingdom in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan, to provide deep historical logic for Pakistan’s existence as a religious homeland in the mid twentieth century and to build global cultural connections to Southeast Asia and to Europe.

Historically, Sea has been an important tool for supremacy and dominance over nations. The Sea Ports remained important in modern world politics but are getting more multifaceted with an upsurge in world's commercial activities. Moreover, the ports in contemporary era are subjected to materialize two pronged objectives of strategic leverage and an economic gateway. Owing to greater strategic depth in several Asian countries, their access to sea routes through their own land routes is costly. It has obliged them to search for the shortest access to sea routes to gain a competitive edge over their trade competitors. In this context, the development of Gwadar port in Pakistan by China and Chabahar port in Iran by India is driven by competition for geographic control to secure resources and markets and also by fear of strategic encirclement. The two ports, Gwadar and Chabahar, have huge importance, both in monetary and geographic perspective, not only for Pakistan and India but also for China, Iran, and Central Asian Republics (CARs). The paper intends to delve into the importance of these ports in the region of Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia. Moreover, it also encapsulates its impacts of regional economic integration in comparison.

The focus of this article is firstly to examine some aspects of the Kukri (Khukuri) in relation to Col. Kirkpatrick´s mission to Nepal (Nepaul) in 1793. In doing this I´ll attempt to place it in a historical context and briefly discuss the Kukri`s meaning in Nepal.
given is taken from his work published in 1811.

The Kukri & Kora (Kohara) in Col. Kirkpatrick`s work is the very first illustration of a Kukri knife and the Kora sword,  we
have record of and  could for the first time in history
be seen in a book. It thus allowed the British public and of course the World at large to gain knowledge about some of the weapons of the hill mean that have since then been strongly associated to Nepal and thue Gurkha/Gorkha soldier (and regiment/brigade).

This paper analyzes the current situation in Pakistan through the prism of the country’s historical experience, proposing new approaches to the threats to Pakistan’s territorial integrity and the stability and security of South Asia as a whole.
Conventional political science labels, such as authoritarianism, democracy, Islamism and secularism, are of little use when applied to Pakistan. “Pakistan’s history shows that giving priority to Islam can be combined with a democratic system of government, as well as with an authoritarian regime,” Topychkanov writes. Islam’s supremacy in Pakistani society has manifested itself primarily through Muslim nationalism and Islamic socialism, as well as through various radical forms of Islamic ideology. Experiments with Islam, which is the foundation of the country’s national identity, are therefore not the solution to Pakistan’s problems. Resolving these problems requires comprehensive solutions that encompass the political, economic and social spheres.
Topychkanov also notes that the external environment, particularly problems in Afghanistan, has had a negative impact on Pakistan’s political development. Protracted or failed operations of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan would strengthen pro-Taliban forces in Pakistan, while stabilization in Afghanistan would help weaken these groups and stop the rise of support for religious extremism. The escalation of tensions between Pakistan and India also contributes to the spread of extremism in Pakistan.
Topychkanov proposes a number of policy approaches, suggesting that the planning and implementation of aid programs for Pakistan should meet three main criteria:
they must be oriented towards the long term
be strictly controlled at all stages
be targeted.

This essay offers critical reflection on the work of Sheldon Pollock and Sudipto Kaviraj in connection with the project, ‘Sanskrit Knowledge-Systems on the Eve of Colonialism.’ While both Pollock and Kaviraj have written of the ‘death’ of Sanskrit, this essay advises against metaphors of historical rupture. If we wish to make sense of the fate of Sanskrit intellectuals under colonial modernity, we should attend to processes of cultural convergence and the concrete choices made by Sanskrit scholars. A selection from the reformist writings of Ishwaracandra Vidyasagara is examined to demonstrate one pandit’s on-going engagement with the Sanskrit intellectual tradition.

Scholars have long debated the impact of the British ‘rule of property’ on India. In our own day it has become common for historians to hold that the Raj's would-be regime of free capitalist property was frustrated by a pervasive divide between rhetoric and reality which derived from a fundamental lack of fit between English ideas and Indian land control practices. While seemingly novel, the contemporary emphasis on the theory-practice divide is rooted in an earlier ‘revisionist’ perspective among late-nineteenth-century colonial thinkers who argued that land control in the subcontinent derived from a uniquely Indian species of ‘proprietary’ (rather than genuinely propertied) right-holding. In this article, I critically examine the revisionist discourse of ‘proprietary right’ by situating it in a broader comparative perspective, both relative to earlier ideas about rendering property ‘absolute’ during the East India Company's rule and relative to the changing conception of the property right among legal thinkers in the central domains of the Anglo-common law world. In so doing, the article significantly revises our understanding of the relationship between property, law, and political economy in the subcontinent from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century.

Responding to recent critical reflection on the concept of anuvāda within the fields of translation studies and South Asian literary cultures, this article explores the complex colonial mediations shaping modern Bengali understandings of the term. The goal is to situate the production of new meanings of anuvāda within the zone of the Dubash, a phrase used here to conjure the highly mediated space of vernacular translation as practiced by Bengali intellectuals under colonial rule. This article argues that if we wish to employ anuvāda as a tool for rethinking the meaning and practice of translation, we must first attend to the processes that transformed the norms and goals of textual transmission in the colonial era. In the end we can hope not only to enrich our understanding of South Asian translational practices but also to appreciate the role played by translation in the story of literary modernity in Bengal.

Two years after Doklam, the controversy over the 17th Karmapa's visa is another reminder of India’s cartographic anxiety that fuels its compulsion for ascertaining ideological loyalty. It is also a symptom of competitive nation-building in the Himalayan region between the world’s two most populous states.

The Dolma Ling Nunnery and Institute hosted 46 nuns taking their 'Geshema' exams from August 15-26. The four-year 'geshe' degree is considered the highest academic degree in Tibetan Buddhism, the equivalent of a PhD. Far from being a monochromatic experience of dislocation and loss, the six-decade long exile in India has paradoxically proven to be an opportunity for Tibetan nuns to reconfigure their position in Tibetan society.

In comparison to other linguistic movements in India, Orissa is the single instance of a pan-regional linguistic identity that made a successful negotiation with the colonial state by using constitutional means. Subsequently, like many other linguistic movements that culminated in statehood in postcolonial India, its appeal waxed and waned. It gradually declined in the second half of the twentieth century, as language came to be displaced by issues of development as the prime movers of identity politics. At the Margins addresses these broader questions of poverty, marginality, ethnicity, and identity in Orissa in the twentieth century.
The work challenges the idea of 1947 as a watershed and seeks to grapple with the themes of regionalism, language-based ethnicity, centre-state relations, and the interrelationships between development and democracy across this divide. It will be a significant addition to studies in the politics of cultural identity and of democracy and development in the global South.

Charlton-Stevens's dissertation is a thorough investigation of the position and politics of Anglo-Indians in late colonial India. The category of Anglo-Indian was a construction of the Census of India of 1911, referring to a community of racially mixed descent previously designated as Eurasians, East Indians, Indo-Britons, and half-castes. It was " one of the several socially constructed categories by which transient (i.e. non-domiciled) Britons sought to demarcate racial difference within the Raj's socio-racial hierarchy ."

At its peak, the East Indian Railway strike of 1922 affected more than 1500 kilometres of rail and involved tens of thousands of workers. The strike was an exemplary moment in Indian worker politics. It advanced an idiom of citizenship, distinct from Gandhian non-cooperation and Congress nationalism, in order to make claims for redress on their employer and the state, and simultaneously, to exhibit profound social power against the colonial state and wouldbe nationalist representatives. Though this strike began in response to allegations of a brutal assault, the demands of the workers, I will argue, expose the limits of both political nationalism and colonialism. To establish this point, the EIR strike is placed in a trans-colonial context with Kenya, which allows for the appreciation of the interwar period as a transformative moment in worker politics. Not only did the Indian strike actively resist Gandhi's proscriptions on striking and maintaining financial ties to the railway company, the workers also moved against the authority of the colonial state by appropriating discourses of governance that were conventionally used against them. Thus, while the strike relied on the breakdown of colonial authority resulting from nationalist agitation, the strike exceeded the purview of elite politics.

A Forest History of India is a collection of ten essays on the history of forest management in the Himalayas under British imperialism. The book contributes to three distinct historiographies: environmental history, the history of British imperialism and nationalist struggles in the colonies, and postcolonial developmental history.

The goal of this article is to provide conceptual and historical orientation useful for thinking about the emergence of philanthropy in modern South Asia. Conceptually, the article suggests the need to approach the expression of philanthropy in early colonial Bengal in terms of processes of imitation. To do so, we must overcome the stigma attached to the idea of imitation within both nationalist and post-colonial thought. In the particular context of early colonial Calcutta, local actors entered into intimate relationships with Europeans and these relationships provided occasions to borrow, translate, and retool a range of ideas and practices relevant to new modes of public charity. The importance of attending to historical context is suggested by reading such early colonial developments against the grain of late nineteenth-century perspectives—a time when Bengalis grew anxious about cultural imitation. Rather than deferring to these late-colonial anxieties over imitation, we need to situate them within a critically informed historical framework. To do this, the present article draws on the writings of the Brāhmo intellectual Rajnarain Bose, who pondered the relationship between an earlier colonial moment (‘then’) and his own late-colonial ‘now’. Close reading of Bose allows us to plumb the nature of late-colonial anxiety about cultural borrowing while opening up a new perspective on imitation and intimacy in early colonial Bengal that is not predicated on the teleology of the late-colonial modern.

No one narrator can gauge the true shape of an entity as elep­h­antine as the metropolis of Bombay. Sheetal Chhabria and Debashree Mukherjee, however, in their respective accounts of colonial Bombay, masterfully identify the beating heart of this elep­hant–capital. Their works, though occu­pied with two distinct narrative arcs of the city’s history, can be discussed alo­ngside each other. They both showcase the power wielded by the capital in ­urban life and the consequences of such domination on the people who inhabit the city, on their bodies, their livelihoods, their modes of dwelling, and their creative energies. The common grounds for a discussion of these two books also arise from the fact that both are homa­ges to the working-class “humans of Bombay” without whom capital would remain an inert proposition. In so doing, both books engage afresh with the idea of capital and its constitutive role in the economy, society, and culture of the met­ro­politan life.

Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi’s religious need to establish finite boundaries for everyday actions; finitude in turn defines Gandhi’s conservative and exclusionary conception of religion. Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book begins with an exploration of Gandhi’s religiosity of relinquishment and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade’s creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the near-simultaneous but heterogeneous, conservative Gandhian ideals of pursuing self-sacrifice and rendering the pursuit of self-sacrifice legible as the practice of an exclusionary varnashramadharma. At a considerable remove from Gandhi’s religious conservatism, successive
generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude and also the need to emancipate Gandhian finitude from Gandhi’s own exclusions. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies, religious studies, and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.

How do commodities and objects of desire acquire value and identity—indeed “qualities”—that render them worthy of exchange? Do these qualities rest only in consumer preference and market economics, or do other material and nonmaterial infrastructures produce and co-sustain them? What are the processes that inhere in products that we do not see, touch, or feel but are nonetheless crucial in making them desirable?