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The Practice of History in India

Author: Anirudh Deshpande

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-10-14

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 1000483169

In the last few decades, professional historians have raised important questions regarding the theories, methods and practices of history extant since the earliest times. Oral and Visual History have assumed a new importance in our times. This book presents seven essays on history as it can be practised productively in India. It is pedagogically important to students and teachers of history in India. Meant primarily for undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students, it will also be appreciated by the lay public. Readers will certainly rethink their historical perspectives in response to the issues of theory raised critically in this book. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

An Introduction to the Study of Indian History

Author: Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi

Publisher: Popular Prakashan

Published: 2023-11-05

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9788171540389

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This book is the culmination of patient research and mature reflection of a profoundly original mind and has earned universal recognition and honour over the last few decades.

Approaches to History

Author: Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Publisher: Primus Books

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 9380607172

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History as a social science is arguably more self-reflective than associated disciplines in that family. Other social scientists seem to see little reason to look beyond the paradigm they are developing in the present times. Historians on the other hand, tend to depend on the cumulative process of the development of their craft and the fund of accumulated knowledge. Yet, while this is acknowledged in the practice of research, Historiography in itself as a subject of study has rarely found its place in the syllabi of Indian universities. Knowledge of Historiography is taken for granted when a scholar plunges into research. In an attempt to address this lacuna, the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has planned a series of volumes on Historiography comprising articles by subject specialists commissioned by the ICHR. The first volume in the series, Approaches to History: Essays in Indian Historiography brings to the readers the first fruits of that endeavour. While the essays encompass areas of research presently at the frontiers of new research, scholars will also find the bibliographies accompanying the essays of significant appeal.

History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000

Author: Sumit Guha

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0295746238

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In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization. Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.

Interrogating International Relations

Author: Jayashree Vivekanandan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1136703861

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The book interrogates the disciplinary biases and firewalls that inform mainstream international relations today, and problematises the several tropes that have come to typify the strategic histories of post-colonial societies such as India. Questioning a range of long-held cultural representations on India, the book challenges such portrayals and underscores the centrality of context and contingency in any cultural explanation of state behaviour. It argues for a historico-cultural understanding of power and critiques IR’s tendency to usher in a selective ‘return of history’. Taking two contrasting case studies from medieval Indian history, the book assesses the success and failure of the grand strategy pursued by the Mughal empire under Akbar. The study emphasises his grand strategy of accommodation, defined by the interplay of critical variables such as distance and the vast military labour market. The book also looks at his conscious attempt to indigenise power by projecting himself as the personification of the ideal Hindu king. This case study helps to contextualise the many critical transitions that occurred in international relations: from medieval empires to the modern state system, and from an indigenised, experiential understanding of power to its absolute, abstract manifestations in the colonial state.

History and the Present

Author: Partha Chatterjee

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1843312247

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The essays in this volume bring together historians and anthropologists to reflect on the place of history within present-day conditions. The central focus here is on aspects of the popular, on the ways in which the popular relates to the scientific, the professional, the aesthetic, the religious, the legal and the political. These essays represent a critique of the disciplinary practices of history. They examine the historian's practices and assumptions, being mainly concerned with finding a set of practices of history-writing that are both truthful and ethical. They are united by the desire to find a way out of the self-constructed cage of scientific history that has made historians wary of the popular. In his introduction, Partha Chatterjee spells out some of the requirements for this new analysis of the popular. He stresses the fact that in contemporary industrializing societies the popular should not be taken to be a homogeneous mass. On the contrary, he states, an awareness of the variety and innovativeness of the contemporary popular could rejuvenate academic historiography.

Religions of India in Practice

Author: Donald S. Lopez, Jr.

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 0691216266

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The inaugural volume of Princeton Readings in Religions brings together the work of thirty scholars of the religions of India in a new anthology designed to reshape the ways in which the religious traditions of India are understood. The book contains translations of forty-five works, most of which have never before been available in a Western language. Many of these highlight types of discourse (especially ritual manuals, folktales, and oral narratives) and voices (vernacular, esoteric, domestic, and female) that have not been sufficiently represented in previous anthologies and standard accounts of Indian religions. The selections are drawn from ancient texts, medieval manuscripts, modern pamphlets, and contemporary fieldwork in rural and urban India. They represent every region in South Asia and include Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, and Muslim materials. Some are written texts reflecting elite concerns, while others are transcriptions of oral narratives told by nonliterate peasants. Some texts are addressed to a public and pan-Indian audience, others to a limited coterie of initiates in an esoteric sect, and still others are intended for a few women gathered in the courtyard for a household ceremony. The editor has reinforced this diversity by arranging the selections within several overarching themes and categories of discourse (hymns, rituals, narratives, and religious interactions), and encourages us to make our own connections.

Producing India

Author: Manu Goswami

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-01-26

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0226305104

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When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and interstate dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment. Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.

Nation at Play

Author: Ronojoy Sen

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-10-27

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0231539932

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Reaching as far back as ancient times, Ronojoy Sen pairs a novel history of India's engagement with sport and a probing analysis of its cultural and political development under monarchy and colonialism, and as an independent nation. Some sports that originated in India have fallen out of favor, while others, such as cricket, have been adopted and made wholly India's own. Sen's innovative project casts sport less as a natural expression of human competition than as an instructive practice reflecting a unique play with power, morality, aesthetics, identity, and money. Sen follows the transformation of sport from an elite, kingly pastime to a national obsession tied to colonialism, nationalism, and free market liberalization. He pays special attention to two modern phenomena: the dominance of cricket in the Indian consciousness and the chronic failure of a billion-strong nation to compete successfully in international sporting competitions, such as the Olympics. Innovatively incorporating examples from popular media and other unconventional sources, Sen not only captures the political nature of sport in India but also reveals the patterns of patronage, clientage, and institutionalization that have bound this diverse nation together for centuries.