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| 1 |
ID:
134259
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| Summary/Abstract |
India recently witnessed a prominent movement against state corruption led by the ‘India Against Corruption’ (IAC) group, which came under criticism for utilising the Gandhian hunger strike as a protest tactic. This essay examines the Gandhi and the Gandhianism conjured up by the movement's critics, who dismissed the IAC as either sacrilegiously un-Gandhian or anachronistically Gandhian. I argue that these critics reinstated Gandhi and Gandhianism as unidimensional, ossified and largely inimitable texts. In so doing, they glossed over the contradictions, experimentation and ambivalences that marked Gandhi's life and attributed to him a closure that he disavowed. This desire to reproduce or preserve the ‘real’ Gandhi needs to give way to more creative mimicry, so that his praxis can be reinvented and enlivened by social movements today.
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| 2 |
ID:
134266
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper studies photographs of Bombay's built environment, especially Dalit and working-class houses, taken by two social scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. The photographs are situated at the intersection of four discursive temporalities: (a) social reforms initiated by Indian nationalists of the late nineteenth to twentieth centuries; (b) sanitary reforms and urban restructuring undertaken by city administrators and the colonial state, which reappeared vigorously after the plague epidemic of 1896; (c) colonial knowledge production, including census, labour and housing reports that informed academic social–scientific knowledge; and (d) Dalit and working-class social movements that aspired to transgressing the limits of reform in order to re-define self and the collective, and demand the redistribution of material resources.
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| 3 |
ID:
134262
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| Summary/Abstract |
While Jaipur is commonly envisioned as a bastion for Hindus, this paper argues that the city, founded in 1727 by the Kachhwaha ruler, Sawai Jai Singh II, was intended to serve multiple populations. In many ways, ideologies behind Jaipur's development continue the Mughal emperor Akbar's policy of sulh-i kul, which loosely can be translated as universal toleration. Through an examination of Jaipur's architecture, built between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and paintings held in the court's royal collections, the city's growth and its diverse population can be seen as a map of state policy, which promoted tolerance to ensure good governance and prosperity.
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| 4 |
ID:
134264
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| Summary/Abstract |
This essay explores the rich verbal- and visual-narrative repertoires constitutive of a ‘sense of place’ within the Urdu-language Khushtar Ramayan, highlighting some of the significant ways in which they converge with and diverge from other prominent textual and visual representations of the Ramayan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The material history of Khushtar's work as a book is also traced in order to illuminate a number of important linkages and shifts from a ‘local’ courtly economy and ‘sense of place’ to an emergent, proto-national, print-commercial one.
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| 5 |
ID:
134260
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| Summary/Abstract |
The early decades of the twentieth century saw the development of a popular, albeit hitherto little explored, branch of ‘scientific’ knowledge in the Hindi public sphere. Known as ‘santati-śāstra’ (lit. ‘the science of progeny’ or ‘progeniology’), this branch of knowledge instructed newly-married middle-class couples on how to produce mentally and physically perfect children. This essay begins with a comparison between santati-śāstra and eugenics as it was promoted in India and elsewhere. Analysing two specific issues treated in santati-śāstra literature, it shows that this form of knowledge based its principles not on ‘classical eugenics’ as promulgated by Francis Galton and re-adapted by Indian eugenicists, but on an entirely different set of sources, which included Ayurveda, ratiśāstra, and theories on heredity stemming from a mid-nineteenth-century American phrenologist. Santati-śāstra's singular frame of ‘scientific’ reference, and especially its use of Western ‘fringe science’, provide new insights into the multiple, and sometimes unexpected, ways in which ‘Western science’ functioned as a legitimising source in vernacular texts.
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| 6 |
ID:
134263
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| Summary/Abstract |
In part, this essay suggests one aspect of the new ‘visual turn’ in history, treating as evidence the production and reception of visual-culture artefacts. In part, it is concerned with the way that the objects and practices linked to visual culture established a sense of place for urban locales, and how that changed over time. Visual entry points for that sense of place are many: the built environments (and how their use and imputed meanings altered); the two-dimensional representations (such as photographs and posters) of these monuments and significant buildings that called out the storied meanings associated with them; the photographic documentations of everyday life; and the organisations and activities/events staged around and through built environments in each place.
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| 7 |
ID:
134265
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Hindi-language journal, Sarasvati (1900–82), belonged to a new breed of periodical, the illustrated monthly, emerging in India at the turn of the century. It pursued and established an integral connection between art and literature. In this essay, I examine visually-oriented strategies implemented by the journal's editor, M.P. Dwivedi, to establish literary authority amidst resistance to his poetic agenda. In particular, I focus on two of Dwivedi's earliest attempts at establishing literary authority through combined literary–visual narrative forms: literary criticism conveyed through editorial cartoons, and poetry inspired by, and accompanying, the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma. A closer look at the deliberate cultivation of such literary interactions with the visual provides the basis for a more nuanced history of the modernisation of Hindi poetry and indicates the interactive significance of literature and art across multiple regions in the early twentieth century.
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| 8 |
ID:
134261
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| Summary/Abstract |
This introductory essay raises a range of issues that have emerged as studies of South Asia culture, society and history have taken a ‘visual turn’. This special of South Asia deliberately juxtaposes articles that would not ordinarily be read together, as they treat art history, history, anthropology and literary studies to underscore their shared interest in visual evidence produced at moments of crucial change. In the process, we hope to expand both the larger scholarly community's understanding of ‘visual culture’ and the potential for analysts of South Asia to trace interconnections and influences on the changing subcontinent through its very specific, if widely deployed, visual culture.
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| 9 |
ID:
134267
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| Summary/Abstract |
Attention to the visual within the political anthropology of India has focused almost exclusively on spectacle and the excessively visible. This paper examines the question of visibility by interrogating the conditions that enable collective agendas to be seen as political, and advocates closer attention to the role of the state in these processes of recognition. In doing so, it emphasises shifts in the visual aspects of communicative networks and uses specific examples of mass protest and blockage agitation to trace longer histories of practice, expanding the domains of both the visual and the political available as objects of scholarly attention.
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