A Brief History of Poverty Alleviation in Neoliberal Times /
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This book is about implementation of poverty alleviation policy in recent times. It follows one poverty alleviation policy called Swaran Jayanti Shahari Rozgar Yojana initiated in 1997, through three large cities: Mumbai, Delhi and Kochi. There are specific reasons why this policy was chosen. It reflects the dominant paradigm in strategy in recent times. It is built on women, self-help group collectives, microfinance and enterprise. The book spans five years of fieldwork (2009-14). It reproduces the circumstances of poor urban women, their families and the effect of policy designed to help them. Most significantly it examines policy execution at the local level. There is substantial difference in the manner in which the same policy is implemented in each city. The organization for implementation is also different and outcome is noticeably different as well. Consequently, com parisons are useful. In a manner the fieldwork also points to nature of 'trickle-down' that has occurred. India by then had experienced over two decades (1990-1 and 2013-14) of higher than historic growth. Large cities are high growth centres, prime location of wealth accumulation as well as trickle down. Travels into the ever-increasing margins of urban centres were unsettling, particularly in the mega cities. Trickle down evidently does not take care of the problem of mass absolute poverty. Direct policy interventions of several kinds are needed but overall as this volume brings out the scale of the problem is completely unrelated to public resources, organization and energy applied to it.
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1 online resource (400 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753754
Minorities and Religious Freedom in a Democracy /
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This book has four parts. Part one explains the place of minorities in a democracy, examines the process of their formation at the global as well as national levels and looks at the response received by them at these forums. Parts two and three deal with basic rights of minorities enshrined in Articles 25 and 30 of the Indian Constitution, the detailed history of these articles, the debates in the Constituent Assembly and other related documents. This book also deals with Christians as a minority and controverts the myth that they are the most forward community. It details the general constitutional rights as well as special rights of the minorities in India and focuses attention on the relationship between human rights and minority rights and the role of National Commission for Minorities in protecting the human rights of minorities. The appendices contain important international and national documents relating to human and constitutional rights of the minorities. An essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, human rights activists and all others interested in the issues involved and the future of Indian polity.
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1 online resource (248 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753501
The Evolution and Growth of Radha Soami Satsang Beas /
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This volume presents a detailed study of the growth of Beas branch of Radha Soami Satsang which started from a wild grass strewn area of a few square yards and which has now been converted into a well planned self governed township under the leadership of its five spiritual masters - Baba Jaimal Singh, Baba Sawan Singh, Baba Jagat Singh, Baba Charan Singh and the present Master Baba Gurinder Singh. It also takes into account through extensive fieldwork the historical background, philosophy, national and international growth, administrative structure, social welfare activities and literary works undertaken by the Beas branch. It adds new dimensions to one's understanding of how a religious philosophy propagated by its masters could attract millions of followers from all over the world. The work is largely based on the information collected through the author's personal visits to Dera Beas and its other satsang centres, interviews of some Dera devotees besides Dera Library Archival records, Dera magazines, Government records and secondary sources. This volume also contains detailed maps, appendices and a glossary which adds immensely to the scholarly nature of the work.
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1 online resource (424 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753389
Light of devotion : oil lamps of Kerala /
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This in-depth study of the medieval oil lamps of Kerala and beyond considers these art objects as primary sources for a broader discussion on the ritual use of Hindu oil lamps, their related and unique cultural history, their motifs, style and subject matter. From an understudied region, many of the pieces presented are previously unpublished.
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Also issued in print: 2022. :
1 online resource (x, 144 pages) : illustrations (colour) :
Specialized. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9781803272559 (PDF ebook) :
Absent in Politics and Power : Political Exclusion of Indian Muslims /
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Muslims face acute political deprivation at all levels in spite of their immense contribution towards the survival of democracy in India. The volume attempts to gauge and analyze the political underrepresentation of Muslims in the Parliament and state assemblies as well as their nomination by the mainstream national and regional parties. The book analyzes the reasons responsible for their absence in politics and power, including their under-nomination in secular parties, denial of SC status to them, Muslim-majority seats being reserved for SCs, etc. The book also discusses the rise of the BJP and, its exclusionary attitude, communalization of political space and its fall out on the attitude of the secular parties, which thrive on Muslim votes. It also focuses on the internal factors within Muslims, such as presence of many Muslim candidates in Muslim-dominated seats, division of secular votes, lack of leadership, and their inability to forge a viable political alliance with other deprived groups. The volume also attempts to analyze the rise of upper caste Hindus in politics, political deprivation of Hindu OBCs, and necessity of due share of Pasmanda Muslims in politics for secularization of political space. The author delves closely into what strategies Muslims must adopt to have at least proportional share and introspection on how to create an effective political space. The volume advocates a forceful change of attitude, thinking and action on the part of various factors involved: government, political parties, media, academic circles, the community itself and other deprived sections. Finally, the book advocates for inclusive democracy and social democracy, as advocated by Dr. Ambedkar to eradicate inequality in politics and to have an all-representative government.
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1 online resource (360 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753297
Marriage and Divorce in India : Changing Concepts and Practices /
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This volume explores the nature of social change in the fundamental institution of marriage in Indian society. It documents the churning going on in the conjugal bond with reference to gender inequality, patriarchy, domestic violence, divorce, separation, and remarriage under the impact of urbanization, modernization and globalization. The work includes fourteen papers divided into three parts. Part I discusses changes in the choice of spouse in terms of age at marriage and the age differential between spouses; endogamy and hypergamy; inter-caste and interfaith marriage; and divorce and remarriage among Hindus, Muslims and Christians with particular attention to feminism. It raises new questions about the rising trends of separation, desertion, divorce, remarriage, and the option to live single. Part II takes a closer look at love, sex and marital relationships through the prism of films, state laws, and civil rights. It specifically deals with the live-in relationships, extra-marital relations, matrimonial litigation, and use and abuse of IPC 498A. Part III documents the changing character of spouse selection through the newer forms such as the print and electronic media and the shift from parental choice to individual choice. The volume will interest students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, family studies, and law, as well as counselors, various religious organizations, and electronic and print media.
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1 online resource (328 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753587
The Tale of the Tulsi Plant and Other Studies /
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This book focuses on Western India. The book begins with the story of Tulsi (Basil) plant, Shami (Ghaf) and Indian Bel (Bael) tree. It covers the history of the Maratha Empire, the arrival of Mughals in Deccan during the period of Aurangzeb, the emergence of the Maratha confederacy under the Peshwa rule, and the emergence and the subsequent rule of British East India Company. This book covers the interactions of Portuguese subjects with the Marathas, the bakhar literature of Dabhades and Gaikwads, and the court scenes. Also, this book contains sayings and philosophies from Kathiawar, Deccan, and compositions by Muslim and Parsee communities.
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1 online resource (192 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753686
Religion in Society : Social Dimensions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism in India /
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Through an analysis of archaeological and literary data, this book explores two interrelated themes: the socio-economic and cultic processes that resulted in the decline of Indian Buddhism in its last strongholds - Bihar and Bengal - towards the end of the early medieval period, and the patterns of revival of Buddhism in the neighbouring province of Uttar Pradesh, c. 2005-2011 ce. These themes have been explored by undertaking an analysis of the developments in the social histories of other competing religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Ājīvika-dharma. By placing emphasis on the religious praxis and behaviour of the non-elite segment of population, this book offers some significant 'from below' perspectives on the social histories of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism and Ājīvika-dharma in eastern and northern India.
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1 online resource (228 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753303
Ill Health among Tribal Communities in India : A Synthesis of Three Studies on Historical Exclusion, Conflict and Health Systems /
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This book brings together the findings from three studies across four sites: Assam, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Kerala. It aims to understand and explain the diverse nature of health inequities along with processes and historical contexts which create, configure, and sustain health inequities among tribal populations in India. The book reveals that beneath the oft-repeated storyline of the poor health of tribal communities lies a more nuanced reality of varied experiences across different tribal communities; and within-group differentials among the same community. The book also forcefully brings home the inadequacy of commonly used health indicators such as morbidity and mortality to describe the multiple dimensions of lack of well-being experienced by the tribal communities. With the help of thick qualitative descriptions, the book captures the everyday violence of loss of livelihoods, displacement, insecurity, poverty, and hunger, not to mention the overt violence of ethnic conflicts. It argues that these consequences to people's well-being can hardly be captured in terms of disease and death alone. The book delineates the pathways through which health inequities experienced by the tribal communities have come about and have persisted. It highlights, among other factors, the failure of the public health system to reach out to the tribal communities and, worse still, the public health system's systematic marginalisation of tribal communities owing to the 'equity-blindness' of its very design, structure, and organisation. The book ends with reflections on the implications of the studies for policies, programmes, and research.
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1 online resource (204 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004752917
History in the Public Domain /
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History is a hot topic in popular politics of the public domain. Pressures from different kinds of ideological positions and politics of identities of various kinds put serious constraints on the practice and writing of history. Despite the challenges, scholarship has continued to grow. Current historiographical thrusts illustrate how a whole range of themes and issues are dealt with by professional historians from a variety of perspectives with reference to sources and evidence. For instance, issues relating to the complex interactions between religion and political culture are no longer being swept under the carpet. This collection of short essays and extended discussions on current research aims to intervene in public debates on what exactly happened in history. Given the situation, attempts of this kind can possibly help in somewhat bridging the wide gap between serious academic research and misplaced assumptions of popular histories. Much as historians are accused of merely speaking to themselves (and boring others), they need to be taken seriously when intervening in public debates using specialized historical methods and practices. Historical research conducted in universities can inform popular debates in newspapers, television channels, social media, and roadside dhabas for that matter, to lift the discussion to an informed intellectual plank and to bring about historical literacy and civility in the public domain.
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1 online resource (260 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004751538
History, Archaeology and Ideology : Essays on Intellectual and Social History of Early India /
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In a country as vast and varied as India and that too with an extraordinary long and continuous history spanning over several millennia, historical processes of its development just cannot be unilinear. Since such diversi-fied processes are being presented in this monograph in a broad material background, it becomes imperative that the simultaneous presence of varied production processes in different parts of the subcontinent is recognised and underlined. In fact, modes of production and productive forces as factors behind historical transformations through the centuries have been stressed in most of the contributions here. Be it the issue of social formations and their dynamism, or of the analysis of the so-called 'feminist' writings; comprehending the ground realities of the lowest orders of the social fabric, or of providing fresh insights for delineating the developmental stages of Indian arts; construction of the apparatus of knowledge systems in early India, or of establishing the true identity of common Indian human being; the central focus has always been on the ordinary toiling people of the country. Even archaeologists have been exhorted to make them the real subjects of enquiry and data retrieval in their diggings and excavation reports. Long tradition of questioning going back to the Ṛgveda, social bases of knowledge systems, construction of 'heritage' and its sustenance in the face of challenges of 'development', ideological confrontations with neo-colonialist strains and incessant concern about communalisation of writings on Indian history and archaeology are other themes that have been highlighted here. Sixteen essays of this anthology cover almost the whole gamut of five millennia of Indian history.
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1 online resource (564 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753037
Treasure Trade and Tradition : Post-Kidarite Coins of the Gangetic Plains and Punjab Foothills, 590-820 CE /
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This book has much to offer the numismatic enthusiast drawn to bold coinages shrouded in mystery. But it will also appeal to the general reader interested in a key formative period for the emergence of pre-modern India. It examines our turbulent social, religious, political and economic transition during the sixth through ninth centuries. The author focuses intensely on a single, tell-tale form of evidence, namely the enigmatic base gold dinara coins of the descendants of the Kidarite Huns. By thoroughly investigating the coins in their temporal, geographic and physical contexts, he teases out a fascinating story with three facets: treasure (gold and silver mineral wealth, as well as the spiritual wealth of pilgrimage centres sacred to Buddhism and Hinduism); trade (bearing horses, precious metals and pilgrims alike over the great caravan roads between Central Asia and north India); and tradition (the minting traditions of banking communities, the rulership traditions of royal lineages, and the spiritual traditions of religious art). Through its detailed analysis, the book clears up a great deal of confusion about the monetary systems of ancient Kashmir, the Punjab foothills and the Gangetic plains, from c. 590 to 820. With a large body of new metallurgical tests, the book defines, classifies and attributes this challenging series of trimetallic coins, revealing for the first time the money of Punjab's hill kingdoms nestled in the Siwalik valleys. Along the way, it prepares the groundwork for a new perspective on the role of hard money in early medieval economies, revealing preliminary evidence that the empire of the great Harshavardhana may have had a broadly-used coinage, contrary to expectations of the feudal model.
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1 online resource (228 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004752504
My Life Struggle : A Translation of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati's Mera Jivan Sangharsh /
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India's twentieth-century struggle for political freedom was and remains an epic achievement in the human experience. Quite apart from its global influence, this is perhaps as familiar a story as it is remarkable, given the legacy of Gandhi, among others of that small generation of founders, whose unique leadership roles are rightly considered to have been transformational in the achievement of freedom in 1947 and in the promulgation of the Constitution of January 1950. But it must then also be said that the roles of the founding leadership were balanced and in many ways defined by the people of India themselves, primarily its peasants, whether the generic masses of Gandhi's definition and direction, or the independent and self- aware peasants of the field. It is this broader peasant story, and particularly that of the deeply engaged peasants of the kisan andolan, the peasant movement of the late 1920s and the 1930s, that appears here in the words of Swami Sahajanand Saraswati. It was their shared experience, or as Sahajanand put it more pointedly and more accurately, their common struggle. In fact, Sahajanand and the peasants had lived this history, and the Swami recorded it for posterity in his 1952 Hindi memoir Mera Jivan Sangharsh (My Life Struggle), translated here by Walter Hauser and Kailash Jha. Given Sahajanand's direct involvement in this history, his representation of the peasant story from the perspective of the peasants amounts to a paradigm shift in how the lives of the peas¬ants of India have been understood and represented overtime, either in politics or in scholarship. The intimacy, detail, and ethnographic richness of peasant activism as conveyed by Sahajanand is simply unique. This is true for many reasons, not least because the peasants understood fully what their struggles and movement meant, not only in social, cultural, and economic terms, but equally so in political, conceptual, and ultimately in human terms. It was their voice, loud and clear, and hence their history.
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1 online resource (464 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004753914
Food Cultures of India /
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In recent times, Food Studies has emerged as an important interdisciplinary field of enquiry, situated at the convergence point of many disciplines. Food Studies is not just about the study of food itself. One could argue that the trajectory of development of Food Studies has been along the similar lines as Cultural Studies (which also, is not only about the study of culture per se). Food Studies deals with more than the mere production, consumption, aesthetic appreciation, and cataloguing of food-related practices. It provides the vantage point to look at the relationship between food and people from the variety of perspectives offered by disciplines, such as arts, science, management, technology, sociology, cultural studies, economics, health, social justice, literature, anthropology, and history. In the context of these exciting developments, the present volume brings together a collection of essays written by academics and scholars belonging to a wide range of disciplines, and who have brought in their subject-expertise towards analysing various dimensions of Food Studies, covering its interface with folklore, social practices, fictional representation, famines, memory, and media studies.
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1 online resource (344 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004752245
Bengal Water Craft : Boat-Building and Fishing Communities /
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This is a unique work on the boat building traditions of Bengal. The boats of West Bengal have been influenced on the one hand by the boats of Bihar and on the other by the traditions of Bangladesh. North Bengal follows the ecology of the sub-Himalayan region and the boats of the region illustrate this well. Thirteen chapters describe the typology of different boats found in West Bengal. From raft and dugout, the survey moves to the rich centre of boat building at Balagarh. From here it moves to cargo carriers such as the bhedi. Boats are linked to ecological regions but massive programmes such as the Damodar Valley Corporation changed the pattern of the waters. The remarkable ingenuity of the boat builders is shown in the new boat types such as the Cho_t Šālti, which were developed in conformity with the changes in river flow. Chapter fourteen outlines fishing activities in the Sundarbans area, linking this to boat typology. From the methodological angle the work follows closely the model evolved by George Hornell. All available historical records have been examined. The author has conducted a meticulous survey of existing ethnological sources which are used to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. A map showing the centres where various types of boats are made in West Bengal has also been included. This book therefore ventures into new ground, linking ecology with historical methodology, and is, above all, a singular tribute to the all round artistry of the Bengal boat builder.
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1 online resource (320 pages) : illustrations. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004752788