Associated Products
A European Library in 19th Century India: The Enlightenment World of Serfoji II of Tanjore (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: A European Library in 19th Century India: The Enlightenment World of Serfoji II of Tanjore
Author: Indira Peterson
Abstract: presentation at the India International Centre with Romila Thapar of JNU chair
Date: 10/18/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.iicdelhi.nic.in/User_Panel/Programs.aspx?TypeID=1076Conference Name: India International Centre, New Delhi
Drama, The Court, and the Public in Maratha Thanjavur: The Multilingual Yakshaganas of Shaji II (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Drama, The Court, and the Public in Maratha Thanjavur: The Multilingual Yakshaganas of Shaji II
Author: Indira Peterson
Abstract: This paper illuminates the Thanjavur Maratha ruler Shahji II (r. 1684-1712) innovative deployment of the Yakshagana dance drama genre as a key instrument for the court's self-presentation, as well as representations of its relationship with wider publics in the Tamil cultural region
Date: 10/19/2016
Primary URL:
http://www.jnu.ac.in/Events/Conference Name: Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi India
Amy Allocco organizes conference "To Take Place: Culture, Religion, and Home-making in and beyond South Asia" at the University of Madras (Conference/Institute/Seminar)Title: Amy Allocco organizes conference "To Take Place: Culture, Religion, and Home-making in and beyond South Asia" at the University of Madras
Author: Amy Allocco
Abstract: The conference, held on July 28-29, 2016, was organized by Amy Allocco, associate professor of Religious Studies at Elon University and James Ponniah, assistant professor in the Department of Christian Studies at University of Madras. The conference attracted more than 50 attendees from the South Indian city and featured 16 presenters from throughout India and five additional countries. Speakers addressed the means and practices by which migrants, displaced persons and various other subcommunities in South Asia establish physical, conceptual and emotional spaces that put them at home or give rise to conflict with other groups.
Date Range: July 28-29, 2016
Location: Chennai, India
Primary URL:
https://www.elon.edu/e-net/Article/135203A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Book)Title: A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement
Author: John Stratton Hawley
Abstract: India celebrates itself as a nation of unity in diversity, but where does that sense of unity come from? One important source is a widely-accepted narrative called the “bhakti movement.” Bhakti is the religion of the heart, of song, of common participation, of inner peace, of anguished protest. The idea known as the bhakti movement asserts that between 600 and 1600 CE, poet-saints sang bhakti from India’s southernmost tip to its northern Himalayan heights, laying the religious bedrock upon which the modern state of India would be built.
Challenging this canonical narrative, John Stratton Hawley clarifies the historical and political contingencies that gave birth to the concept of the bhakti movement. Starting with the Mughals and their Kachvaha allies, North Indian groups looked to the Hindu South as a resource that would give religious and linguistic depth to their own collective history. Only in the early twentieth century did the idea of a bhakti “movement” crystallize—in the intellectual circle surrounding Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal. Interactions between Hindus and Muslims, between the sexes, between proud regional cultures, and between upper castes and Dalits are crucially embedded in the narrative, making it a powerful political resource.
A Storm of Songs ponders the destiny of the idea of the bhakti movement in a globalizing India. If bhakti is the beating heart of India, this is the story of how it was implanted there—and whether it can survive.
Year: 2015
Primary URL:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674187467Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780674187467
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Book)Title: The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India
Author: Christian Novetzke
Abstract: In thirteenth-century Maharashtra, a new vernacular literature emerged to challenge the hegemony of Sanskrit, a language largely restricted to men of high caste. In a vivid and accessible idiom, this new Marathi literature inaugurated a public debate over the ethics of social difference grounded in the idiom of everyday life. The arguments of vernacular intellectuals pushed the question of social inclusion into ever-wider social realms, spearheading the development of a nascent premodern public sphere that valorized the quotidian world in sociopolitical terms.
The Quotidian Revolution examines this pivotal moment of vernacularization in Indian literature, religion, and public life by investigating courtly donative Marathi inscriptions alongside the first extant texts of Marathi literature: the Lilacaritra (1278) and the Jñanesvari (1290). Novetzke revisits the influence of Chakradhar (c. 1194), the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, and Jnandev (c. 1271), who became a major figure of the Varkari religion, to observe how these avant-garde and worldly elites pursued a radical intervention into the social questions and ethics of the age. Drawing on political anthropology and contemporary theories of social justice, religion, and the public sphere, The Quotidian Revolution explores the specific circumstances of this new discourse oriented around everyday life and its lasting legacy: widening the space of public debate in a way that presages key aspects of Indian modernity and democracy.
Year: 2016
Primary URL:
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-quotidian-revolution/9780231175807Publisher: Columbia University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780231175807
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Slow Boil: Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai (Book)Title: The Slow Boil: Street Food, Rights and Public Space in Mumbai
Author: Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria
Abstract: Street food vendors are both a symbol and a scourge of Mumbai: cheap roadside snacks are enjoyed by all, but the people who make them dance on a razor's edge of legality. While neighborhood associations want the vendors off cluttered sidewalks, many Mumbaikers appreciate the convenient bargains they offer. In The Slow Boil, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria draws on his long-term fieldwork with these vendors to make sense of the paradoxes within the city and, thus, to create a better understanding of urban space in general.
Much urban studies literature paints street vendors either as oppressed and marginalized victims or as inventive premoderns. In contrast, Anjaria acknowledges that diverse political, economic, historic, and symbolic processes create contradictions in the vendors' everyday lives, like their illegality and proximity to the state, and their insecurity and permanence. Mumbai's disorderly sidewalks reflect the simmering tensions over livelihood, democracy, and rights that are central to the city but have long been overlooked. In The Slow Boil, these issues are not subsumed into a larger framework, but are explored on their own terms.
Year: 2016
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780804798228
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation (Book)Title: Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation
Editor: Chitralekha Zutshi 9781108402101
Abstract: On the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, Partition, and the creation of Pakistan, this ground breaking collection brings together fourteen cutting-edge scholarly essays on multiple aspects of both the region and the issue of Kashmir. While keeping the political dimensions of the dispute over the territory in focus, these innovative essays branch out from the high politics of the conflict to consider less well-known aspects and areas of Kashmir. They examine the continuities and ruptures between Kashmir's past and its present situation; reevaluate the contemporary political scenario from the perspective of gender, economic and political marginality, everyday experiences, and governance; and analyze the ways in which the region of Kashmir and its people are represented and (re)present themselves in films and literature through their regional and religious identities, and commodities. This volume aims to understand the limitations of postcolonial nationalism and citizenship as exemplified by the situation in contemporary Kashmir.
Year: 2017
Primary URL:
http://tm1-live.eu.aws.cambridge.org/ie/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/kashmir-history-politics-representation?format=PB&isbn=9781108402101#YhyjqhKzC76ABHOQ.97Primary URL Description: Cambridge University Press web site
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781108402101
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Preserving and Improving the Breeds: Colonial Cow Protection and the Prehistory of a Constitutional Directive (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Preserving and Improving the Breeds: Colonial Cow Protection and the Prehistory of a Constitutional Directive
Author: Catherine Adcock
Abstract: Recent events have underscored the danger that cow protection poses to religious and caste minorities in India, as Dalits and Muslims allegedly suspected of cattle-slaughter have been brutally assaulted or killed. These events have followed the strengthening of anti-slaughter laws.
Such laws originate with Article 48 of the Constitution of India, which directs the state to "endeavour to organize agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines" and to "take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter" of cattle. In 1958, the Supreme Court cited Article 48 when it ruled it constitutional for the states to prohibit the slaughter of female cows.
Article 48 has been described as the product of a secularist compromise, in which Ambedkar and Nehru succeeded in couching cow protectionists' religious demands for a ban on cow-slaughter in the more neutral language of science and agriculture. But as Chigateri (2011, p. 146) has observed, Article 48 "reiterates the Hindu basis" of opposition to cow slaughter. As the restriction of slaughter came to be justified on secular grounds, minority rights were submerged or erased.
There was also a "Hindu basis" to the ostensibly secular framing of Article 48. Cow protectionists had used agricultural reasoning since Dayanand Saraswati in 1881. This paper details how such reasoning acquired a scaffolding of official and expert support in the last decades before independence. The colonial state has been praised for its secular stance on cow protection: colonial officials refused cow protectionists' demands by invoking the principle of religious neutrality, citing Muslims' right to sacrifice cattle at Bakr Id. Nonetheless, by 1948, alliances between colonial officials and cow protectionists had blurred any distinction between a secular or scientific concern with breed improvement, and a Hindu religious concern with preserving cattle life.
Date: 01/04/2018
Primary URL:
https://aha.confex.com/aha/2018/webprogram/Paper23446.htmlConference Name: American Historical Association Annual Meeting 2018
Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion (Book)Title: Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion
Editor: Amy Allocco
Editor: Brian Pennington
Abstract: Religious rituals are often seen as unchanging and ahistorical bearers of long-standing traditions. But as this book demonstrates, ritual is a lively platform for social change and innovation in the religions of South Asia. Drawing from Hindu and Jain examples in India, Nepal, and North America,the essays in this volume, written by renowned scholars of religion, explore how the intentional, conscious, and public invention or alteration of ritual can effect dramatic social transformation, whether in dethroning a Nepali king or sanctioning same-sex marriage. Ritual Innovation shows how the very idea of ritual as a conservative force misreads the history of religion by overlooking ritual’s inherent creative potential and its adaptability to new contexts and circumstances.
Year: 2018
Publisher: SUNY Press
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-1-4384-690
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu (Book Section)Title: Flower Showers for the Goddess: Borrowing, Modification, and Ritual Innovation in Tamil Nadu
Author: Amy Allocco
Editor: Brian Pennington
Editor: Amy Allocco
Abstract: not available
Year: 2018
Publisher: SUNY Press
Book Title: Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion
Mangala Bansode and the Social Life of Tamasha: Caste, Sexuality, and Discrimination in Modern Maharashtra (Article)Title: Mangala Bansode and the Social Life of Tamasha: Caste, Sexuality, and Discrimination in Modern Maharashtra
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Caste and Life Narratives special issue of Biography 40, 1
West-Centric Divide, Global health, and Postcolonial Intervention (Article)Title: West-Centric Divide, Global health, and Postcolonial Intervention
Author: Amit Prasad
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Science and Technology Studies 30, 4
Contesting Urban Space: Shrine Culture and the Discourse on Kashmiri Muslim Identities, and Protest in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Book Section)Title: Contesting Urban Space: Shrine Culture and the Discourse on Kashmiri Muslim Identities, and Protest in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Editor: Chitralekha Zutshi
Abstract: not available
Year: 2017
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Title: Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation
Ten Years, Few Certainties: Interpretive Ambivalence and Gendered Tensions in Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Ten Years, Few Certainties: Interpretive Ambivalence and Gendered Tensions in Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives
Author: Amy Allocco
Abstract: paper delivered in panel: In panel: Maintaining Interpretive Ambivalence: Gender, Religion, and Scholarly Interpretation in South Asia
Date: 10/12/2018
Primary URL:
https://confsouthasia.wiscweb.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/48/2018/10/2018-Annual-Conference-on-South-Asia-Program-Book-FINAL.pdfPrimary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference
Exposure: Striving and cycling in India (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Exposure: Striving and cycling in India
Author: Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria
Abstract: In panel: Bangalore as Multiple City: Urban Responses through Cultures of the Body
Date: 10/13/2018
Primary URL:
https://confsouthasia.wiscweb.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/48/2018/10/2018-Annual-Conference-on-South-Asia-Program-Book-FINAL.pdfPrimary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference
“Set in Stone: Sponsor Figures in Orissa, ca. 8th–13th Centuries” (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: “Set in Stone: Sponsor Figures in Orissa, ca. 8th–13th Centuries”
Author: Robert Linrothe
Abstract: paper presented in panel “Portraiture and the Human Figure in Orissa (Odisha), 8th–13th Centuries” at the College Art Association 2019 annual conference
Date: 02/13/2019
Primary URL:
https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/conference/2019_CAA_Annual_Conference_Program.pdfPrimary URL Description: College Art Association annual conference program
Conference Name: College Art Association
“The Rise of New Dalit Women in Indian Historiography,” (Article)Title: “The Rise of New Dalit Women in Indian Historiography,”
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: Especially since the political turmoil of the 1990s, scholars have focused on the marginalized histories of Dalit (“Untouchable”) communities in India. Yet these investigations also concentrated exclusively on the male Dalit community. Only recently, however, scholars have focused their attention on Dalit women as “subjects” of study. Dalits are dominated and dominating at the same time. My article examines Dalit women's lifeworlds under double patriarchy in colonial and post-colonial India to highlight the contributions of scholars in understanding how different Dalit women are negotiating, challenging, politicizing, and transforming conditions of their discriminated Dalit status: as sexed women and caste Dalit. I theorize and focus on ways “new” Dalit women engaged with the incremental intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and community to carve out their subjectivity, agency, respectability, and honor in modern India. To this end, I dwell on a variety of themes—generative gender and “new” Dalit women, upper-caste prejudice, community, patriarchy, honor, and formal education to illuminate the changing sociality and complexities of Dalit women's worlds. My review article demonstrates that Dalit women's universal perspectives and historical and political practices are deeply democratic and as such have the potential of engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building solidarities, and actually reshaping the larger fields of South Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender Studies.
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12491Primary URL Description: Wiley web site
Access Model: online journal
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: History Compass
Publisher: Wiley Online Library
Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 (Book)Title: Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa's Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960
Author: David Atwill
Abstract: Islamic Shangri-La transports readers to the heart of the Himalayas as it traces the rise of the Tibetan Muslim community from the 17th century to the present. Radically altering popular interpretations that have portrayed Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist, David Atwill's vibrant account demonstrates how truly cosmopolitan Tibetan society was by highlighting the hybrid influences and internal diversity of Tibet. In its exploration of the Tibetan Muslim experience, this book presents an unparalleled perspective of Tibet's standing during the rise of post–World War II Asia
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299733/islamic-shangri-laPrimary URL Description: Publisher's website
Access Model: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520299733
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Noise along the Network: A Set of Chinese Ming Embroidered Thangkas in the Indian Himalayas (Book Section)Title: Noise along the Network: A Set of Chinese Ming Embroidered Thangkas in the Indian Himalayas
Author: Robert Linrothe
Editor: Christoph Anderl
Editor: Ann Heirman
Editor: Carmen Meinert
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2018
Publisher: Brill
Book Title: Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia
Cow Protection and Minority Rights in India: Reassessing Religious Freedom (Article)Title: Cow Protection and Minority Rights in India: Reassessing Religious Freedom
Author: Catherine Adcock
Abstract: Recent efforts to prevent cow-slaughter in India have prompted U.S. concern about violations of religious freedom. But although the politics of cow protection poses a significant threat to disadvantaged groups in India, efforts to ameliorate that threat through an international policy of religious freedom also carry serious risks. This paper reviews reports issued by the U.S. Department of State's Office of International Religious Freedom and by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. It argues that by unnecessarily portraying the politics of cow protection in terms of a stark conflict between Hindus and Muslims, they threaten to undermine the goal of reducing anti-minority discrimination and violence in India
Year: 2018
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03068374.2018.1470750Primary URL Description: journal web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Asian Affairs
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Making Maha(n)pashtra [a Great Nation]: Marathi Morality and Sexual Modernity, 1945-65 (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Making Maha(n)pashtra [a Great Nation]: Marathi Morality and Sexual Modernity, 1945-65
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: Along with uniting for and engaging in the overt politics of Samyukta Maharashtra Movement (United Maharashtra Movement in Western India of the 1950-60s), many women and men equally engaged in and pursued the interlocking discourse of constructing their own regional identity, sexual modernity, morality, civility, and legitimacy. What was the language and paradigms that Marathi elites used in their articulation of what it meant to be Marathi, scientific, progressive, scientific, rational, and modern? Why was it so significant? In order to prove that they were now fit to govern themselves in independent India and Maharashtra, Maharashtrians articulated the vernacular political discourse of shuddha (pure, sanitized), naitik (moral), samajik (social), laingik (sexual), and sanskrutik (cultural) contours of what it meant to be a new brand of shilvan (genuine, of good disposition) Marathi manusa. In so doing, they once again attacked ashlilta (vulgarity) and critically carved out their moral modernity in order to be legitimate Marathi. Drawing upon hitherto unexplored Marathi sources, including film magazines my paper examines middle-class Maharashtrian’s wide range of attitudes, practices, social, and sexual anxieties regarding the appropriate boundaries of decency, vulgarity, sexuality, and conjugality, as they sought to carve out their Maha-rashtra (great nation)
Date: 01/05/2020
Primary URL:
https://aha.confex.com/aha/2020/webprogram/Paper27456.htmlPrimary URL Description: American Historical Association annual conference program site
Conference Name: American Historical Association
Refashioning Futures: Dalit Women’s Education and Empowerment in Maharashtra (Book Section)Title: Refashioning Futures: Dalit Women’s Education and Empowerment in Maharashtra
Author: Shailaja Paik
Editor: Helen Ullrich
Abstract: Since the End of the Nineteenth Century Dalits struggled for the right to public spaces, including temples, streets, water tanks and schools. Like other battles, Dalits' quest for education was filled with contradictions, triumphs and reversals. What did education mean to Dalit men and especially women? Why was it so important to them? How did women deal with double patriarchy, private and public, inside and outside their homes, and double discrimination---of caste and gender oppression? This essay focuses on the life history of three Dalit middle-class women from Pune, Maharashtra.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319966069Primary URL Description: Palgrave Macmillan site
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Book Title: The Impact of Education in South Asia: Perspectives from Sri Lanka to Nepal
ISBN: 978-3-319-9660
Ritual Relationships with the Dead in South Indian Hinduism (Public Lecture or Presentation)Title: Ritual Relationships with the Dead in South Indian Hinduism
Abstract: The talk focused on the broad range of ways that Hindus in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu interact with their dead relatives. Within this ritual repertoire, Allocco’s lecture highlighted ceremonies designed to invite the dead back into the world and install them in their family’s home shrine as protective household or family deities. The goals of these invitation rituals, which have attracted little notice from anthropologists and other researchers, run counter to the dominant scholarly understanding of Hindu relationships with the departed, which draw on high-caste perspectives presented in Sanskrit texts that emphasize separation from the living
Author: Amy Allocco
Date: 05/13/2019
Location: University of Helsinki, Finland
Primary URL:
https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2019/05/13/amy-allocco-presents-invited-lecture-at-the-university-of-helsinki/Primary URL Description: web site of Elon University
Performing Tamil Saiva Selfhood: The Otuvar Singer of Hymns in Modern Tamil Nadu (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Performing Tamil Saiva Selfhood: The Otuvar Singer of Hymns in Modern Tamil Nadu
Author: Indira Peterson
Abstract: This paper draws upon the figure of Dharmapuram Swaminathan (1923-2009), a singer of Tamil Saiva hymns (otuvar) who develops a massively popular style of singing that carves a new and deeply charismatic sonic and social space for the Tamil Saiva poetic canon in the twentieth century. She juxtaposes Swaminathan’s rise to fame with the development of institutions such as the Tami? Icai Ca?kam and the popularity and circulation of devotional music through new forms of mass media, both of which were economically and politically enabling for figures like him.
Date: 10/19/2019
Primary URL:
https://register.southasiaconference.wisc.edu/schedulePrimary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference 2019
Siddi Chronicles: A Historical Ethnography of a ‘Racial’ Category in Hyderabad, India (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Siddi Chronicles: A Historical Ethnography of a ‘Racial’ Category in Hyderabad, India
Author: Gayatri Reddy
Abstract: This paper explores shifting signifiers of ‘Africanness’ and ‘Arabness’ in claims of belonging on the part of habshis/siddis in Hyderabad from the 19th century up to the present, arguing, ultimately, both for the long afterlives of these 19th c. events, as well as the fact that these shifting globally-inflected meanings need to be located in local and regional histories if we are to better understand their impacts on individuals and communities.
Date: 10/18/19
Primary URL:
https://register.southasiaconference.wisc.edu/schedulePrimary URL Description: conference program
Conference Name: Madison South Asia Conference 2019
Pilgrims and Paintings: Images of the Triloknath Cult Image in Zangskar (Conference Paper/Presentation)Title: Pilgrims and Paintings: Images of the Triloknath Cult Image in Zangskar
Author: Rob Linrothe
Abstract: The white marble image at Triloknath Temple in Himachal Pradesh is considered to represent Shiva by Hindu visitors, and a special six-armed version of Lokeshvara Bodhisattva by Buddhists. Pilgrims from both faiths considered it a "self-arising" image, and so particularly powerful.Until relatively recently Triloknath was situated along one of the main routes connecting Zangskar, a predominantly Buddhist region of southern Ladakh, with Himachal and other regions of India. Over the past few years, Professor Linrothe has identified paintings, sculptures and photographs of the white marble image in its setting at Triloknath in Buddhist monasteries, a nunnery and in private shrines. Professor Linrothe will present evidence that there was a cult of this specific version of the deity at Zangskar, as well as a familiarity among Zangskaris with the particular iconographic form from much earlier (eighth to twelfth century) metal sculptures from neighboring Kashmir.
Date: 12/07/2019
Primary URL:
https://www.saichicago.org/event/art-and-architecture-of-south-asiaPrimary URL Description: web site of South Asia Institute
Conference Name: South Asia Institute symposium “Art and Architecture of South Asia"
Art Historical Evidence for a Cult of the Triloknath Lokesvara in Zangskar (Article)Title: Art Historical Evidence for a Cult of the Triloknath Lokesvara in Zangskar
Author: Robert Linrothe
Abstract: The Triloknāth Mandir (temple) has been of enduring interest to historians of religion, anthropology, art history and architecture since the nineteenth century. It is located in Tunde (Tib. Ras phag) Village along the Chandrabhaga River valley in Himachal Pradesh, on the periphery of the Western Himalayan Buddhist horizon. The Drukpa Kagyu monk Taktsang Repa (Stag tshang ras pa,1574-1651)visited it in the seventeenth century, and the account of his pilgrimage to what he seems to have assumed was Uḍḍīyana, attracted the attention of Giuseppe Tucci. Part of Triloknāth's fascination is the fact that contemporary villagers in the region identify and revere the white marble image of SugatiśaṃdārśanaLokeśvara as Śiva, while Buddhist visitors from Lahul, Zangskar, and other areas recognize it as Buddhist. In recent years, a Buddhist monk and a Hindu
pujārī are deputed to assist both types of visitors. Another alluring issue is that a temple with a śikhara in the Nāgara style usually associated with north Indian Brahmanical architecture houses a Buddhist sculpture, and that too carved in white marble, a highly unusual material in Himalayan Buddhism. No overwhelming consensus has been arrived at about either the date of the temple, or the sculpture installed within it, or whether the architecture was "originally" Brahmanical and then adapted to house a Buddhist image, or was Buddhist from start. Rather than taking up those well-rehearsed if unresolved matters, here I focus on the iconography of the image in question, Sugatiśaṃdārśana Lokeśvara, its association with Kashmir, and the appearance in neighboring Zangskar of images that appear to be copies of the particular white marble sculpture now in Triloknāth.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.academia.edu/43037933/Art_Historical_Evidence_for_a_Cult_of_the_Trilokn%C4%81th_Lokesvara_in_ZangskarPrimary URL Description: academia.edu site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Tibetology
Deeply Rooted Ritual: The Plurality of Sponsor Couples in Eastern Indian Sculpture, Ca. Eighth to Thirteenth Century, and an Explanatory Hypothesis (Article)Title: Deeply Rooted Ritual: The Plurality of Sponsor Couples in Eastern Indian Sculpture, Ca. Eighth to Thirteenth Century, and an Explanatory Hypothesis
Author: Robert Linrothe
Abstract: n/a
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
http://http://bengalart.org/front_end/journal_details/62Primary URL Description: Journal of Bengal Art web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Bengal Art
Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives (Article)Title: Vernacular Practice, Gendered Tensions, and Interpretive Ambivalence in Hindu Death, Deification, and Domestication Narratives
Author: Amy Allocco
Abstract: This article focuses on a Tamil Hindu woman named Aaru, who embodied the Goddess in possession performances from age thirteen, resisted marriage through her twenties, and committed suicide at twenty--nine. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Aaru and her family conducted between 2006 and 2019, it analyses narratives concerning her untimely death, subsequent deification, and eventual domestication as a pūvāṭaikkāri. It highlights the hermeneutical challenges associated with three intersecting spheres: the dominant categories that shape the scholarly understanding of Hinduism; vernacular Hinduism as revealed in Aaru’s complex story; and the ethnographic research and writing process. I resist an arbitrary resolution of the gaps and seeming inconsistencies that abound in these accounts, arguing instead that we can enlarge and nuance our understandings of matters as diverse as ritual relationships with the dead, the nature of Tamil family deities, and the gendered tensions of the contemporary moment if we hold space for multiple interpretive possibilities. Indeed, Aaru’s case offers us significant resources for a fuller, more inclusive appreciation of the textures of vernacular Hinduism – Hinduism as it is experienced, lived, and practiced in particular places and contexts – and compels us to consider the limitations of prevailing interpretive paradigms and the fragmental and shifting nature of ethnographic knowledge.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/jhs/article/13/2/144/5923484Primary URL Description: journal web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Journal of Hindu Studies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Surface Pleasures: Bicycling and the Limits of Infrastructural Thinking (Article)Title: Surface Pleasures: Bicycling and the Limits of Infrastructural Thinking
Author: Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria
Abstract: There has been a resurgence of recreational cycling in Mumbai, as elsewhere in India, since the early 2010s. A significant reason for the new popularity of cycling has to do with the immersion in the urban landscape that it offers; people are attracted by the pleasures of the embodied experiences of cycling as well as interactions with the varied communities of cyclists with whom they share the road. This paper shows how surfaces matter both materially and metaphorically in opening new possibilities for understanding fun, recreation and pleasure. Whereas in critical urban studies and related fields, surface often connotes superficiality or a cover over the real, I argue that attention to surfaces and its pleasures is what enables people to emphasize the productive possibilities of ‘convivial alliances’ across differences and to promote an agenda for sustainable transportation politics that goes beyond infrastructure building.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2020.1703324Primary URL Description: journal web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Preserving and Improving the Breeds: Cow Protection’s Animal Husbandry Connection (Article)Title: Preserving and Improving the Breeds: Cow Protection’s Animal Husbandry Connection
Author: Catherine Adcock
Abstract: Many of the controversial actions of the central and state governments in India in recent months—from strengthened anti-slaughter laws to the issuing of ‘identification cards’ to cattle—have been made in the name of animal husbandry or breed improvement. Such gestures are generally understood to be superficial, and recent. They have been attributed to post-colonial influences: the pressure of India’s Constitution on cow protectionist legal strategy, or the pressure of national planning and ‘modernisation’ on cow protectionist institutions. This essay argues that breed improvement has been integral to the politics of cow protection since the early decades of the twentieth century. Breed improvement has long been a central component of cow protectionist arguments and activity. It has been the basis for an alliance with the state that began in the colonial period and continues to the present. Far from superficial, breed improvement is integral to the cow protectionist discourse that supports vigilante violence today.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2019.1681680Primary URL Description: journal web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Shifting Technologies of Reflection: Intergenerational Relationships and the Entanglements of Field and Home (Article)Title: Shifting Technologies of Reflection: Intergenerational Relationships and the Entanglements of Field and Home
Author: Amy Allocco
Abstract: This article focuses on the intergenerational gifts and relationships that have structured my experience of the flows between home and the field in order to highlight the deeply intersubjective and relational aspects of fieldwork. It considers the shifting technologies of reflection—the diverse forms of field-writing that I produced at different stages as intertextual mediations of my fieldworlds—present in an archive chronicling twenty-five years of study and fieldwork in South India. Excavating this archive—which includes traditional fieldnotes, handwritten letters, creative essays, emails, voice memos and visual fieldnotes—has sharpened my awareness of the value of analyzing fieldwork experiences longitudinally and offers rich glimpses of everyday religion and gendered social relations. These materials underscore the interpenetrations of home and field, life and death, and self and other and prompt me to reaffirm my commitment to centering the crucial relationships that develop in these contexts in my scholarship, teaching and mentoring.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/FIR/article/view/18358/20630Primary URL Description: journal web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Fieldwork in Religion
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India (Article)Title: Bringing the Dead Home: Hindu Invitation Rituals in Tamil South India
Author: Amy Allocco
Abstract: Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Tamil-speaking South India, this article presents one Hindu invitation ritual to return dead relatives known as pūvāṭaikkāri to the world of the living and install them as household deities. This two-day ceremony demonstrates that prevailing scholarly perceptions of death and what follows it in Hindu traditions have constrained our ability to appreciate other models for ritual relationships between the living and the dead. These vernacular rituals call the dead back into the world, convince them to possess a human host, and persuade them to be permanently installed in the family’s domestic shrine so they may protect and sustain living kin. Rather than aiming to irrevocably separate the dead from the living, these rites are instead oriented toward eventual conjunction with the dead and therefore reveal a fundamentally different picture than that articulated in the majority of Hinduism’s sacred texts and scholarly accounts
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article/89/1/103/6248160Primary URL Description: Journal of the American Academy of Religion web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Kashmir: Oxford India Short Introductions (Book)Title: Kashmir: Oxford India Short Introductions
Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Abstract: Since 1947-48, when India and Pakistan fought their first war over Kashmir, it has been reduced to an endlessly disputed territory. As a result, the people of this region and its rich history are often forgotten. This short introduction untangles the complex issue of Kashmir to help readers understand not just its past, present, and future, but also the sources of the existing misconceptions about it. In lucidly written prose, the author presents a range of ways in which Kashmir has been imagined by its inhabitants and outsiders over the centuries-a sacred space, homeland, nation, secular symbol, and a zone of conflict. Kashmir thus emerges in this account as a geographic entity as well as a composite of multiple ideas and shifting boundaries that were produced in specific historical and political contexts.
Year: 2019
Primary URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/kashmir-oisi-9780190121419?cc=us&lang=en#Primary URL Description: Oxford University Press site
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780190121419
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Reenchantment: masterworks of sculpture in village temples of Bihar and Orissa (Book)Title: Reenchantment: masterworks of sculpture in village temples of Bihar and Orissa
Author: Rob Linrothe
Abstract: The book includes more than 250 photographs of sculptures and shrines within 57 chapters, each accompanied by explanatory texts (300 to 2000 words each) introducing village temple sites with 8th-13th century sculptures. The villages included are in south Bihar around Gaya, Bodh Gaya, Nalanda and Rajgir, as well as a selection of rarely documented village shrines of north Bihar (Mithila), in Begusarai, Darbhanga and Madhuvani districts. In Orissa, village sites visited were in Puri, Cuttack, Jaipur, Baleswar, Mayurbhanj, and Khorda districts.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://www.bibliaimpex.com/index.php?p=sr&format=fullpage&Field=bookcode&String=9788193367209&Book=Reenchantment:%20masterworks%20of%20sculpture%20in%20village%20temples%20of%20Bihar%20and%20Orissa;%20text%20and%20photographs%20by%20Rob%20LinrothePrimary URL Description: bookseller web site
Publisher: Studio Orientalia
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9788193367209
Copy sent to NEH?: No
The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Book)Title: The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: This book offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public, secular, traveling theater—and places Dalit Tamasha women at the heart of modernization in India. Deploying the vernacular as method and drawing on untapped Marathi archival materials, ethnographies, popular writings, and films, Shailaja Paik argues that Dalit artists, activists, and leaders negotiated the violence, brutality, exploitation, and stigma in Tamasha as they struggled to claim manuski (human dignity) and transform themselves from ashlil (vulgar) to assli (authentic) and manus (human beings). In doing so, Paik illuminates how Dalit Tamasha women bent patriarchal pressures both inside and outside the Dalit community and became foundational actors in conflicts over caste, class, culture, gender, and sexuality.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=34163Primary URL Description: Stanford University Press site
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781503632387
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Prizes
John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History
Date: 1/4/2024
Organization: American Historical Association
Abstract: Shailaja Paik's Vulgarity of Caste is a powerful work inspired by a moral imagination. Centering the life stories of Tamasha women, Pail reveals their willful agency and pursuit of legitimacy and mamuski (dignity). Paik combines sophisticated theoretical discussions of caste, labor, sexuality and gender, of "surplus women and caste slavery" with comprehensive research methodology including oral history, ethnography, and the recovery of a sparse documentary archives, to present this subaltern and marginalized community
Dr Ambedkar and the ‘Prostitute’: Caste, sexuality and humanity in modern India (Article)Title: Dr Ambedkar and the ‘Prostitute’: Caste, sexuality and humanity in modern India
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: Dalits’ (Untouchables) most democratic and productive politics relentlessly returns to questions of caste violence, sociality, sexuality and ‘inclusion/exclusion’ in the larger Indian body politic, thus producing a new matrix and mode of power within the category of the human itself. This article analyses the intellectual and anti‐caste leader Dr B. R. Ambedkar's (1891–1956) multi‐pronged – social, cultural and political – strategies of creating manuski (human dignity), dharmantar (religious conversion) and respectable samaj (community) in a doubly colonial – British and brahmanical – context. It offers the first analysis of Ambedkar's hitherto under‐examined speech of 16 June 1936 and other fragmentary evidence in Marathi by focusing on the changing contexts, complex conjunctures of socio‐sexual and material forces and political transformations that Dalit women engaged with to carve out their womanhood and humanity.
Year: 2022
Primary URL:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1468-0424.12557Primary URL Description: journal web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Gender & History
Questioning the Sacred Cow: Science, Religion, and Race in the United States and India (Book Section)Title: Questioning the Sacred Cow: Science, Religion, and Race in the United States and India
Author: Catherine Adcock
Editor: Myrna Perez
Editor: Ahmed Ragab
Editor: Terence Keel
Abstract: this chapter responds to the question how does a critical approach to science and religion reframe an attempt to define or distinguish these categories. The piece examines the material production of bovine animals, held to be sacred by Hindus.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/critical-approaches-to-science-and-religion/9780231206570Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Book Title: Critical Approaches to Science and Religion
ISBN: 9780231206570
The Heads or Tails of Cow Protection in India: Religious Freedom and Secular Agriculture (Book Section)Title: The Heads or Tails of Cow Protection in India: Religious Freedom and Secular Agriculture
Author: Catherine Adcock
Editor: Jeffrey Edward Green
Editor: Heather J. Sharkey
Abstract: The piece draws attention to the postcolonial history of India. It assesses how popular attitudes, customs and state policies inhibiting the slaughter of cows and the sale and consumption of beef are or have been a religious question associated with Hindu majoritarian dominance and the accommodation or exclusion of non-Hindus. It also shows how cow protection debates often have arisen in scientific and public policy forums relating to animal husbandry and agriculture. Debates over cow husbandry have had profound consequences for Indian politics by reifying sectarianism while feeding into a culture of Hindu nationalism and chauvinism that has often targeted Muslims. The chapter shows how Hindu majoritarian dominance has built momentum even as the religious and religious freedom dimension of cow and beef controversies remain ambiguous and contestable.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812253375/the-changing-terrain-of-religious-freedom/#:~:text=Authors-,Description,never%20been%20easy%20and%20smooth.Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Book Title: The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom
ISBN: 9780812253375
’To Kiss or Not to Kiss’? Cinema, Vulgarity and Marathi Manus in 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra (Article)Title: ’To Kiss or Not to Kiss’? Cinema, Vulgarity and Marathi Manus in 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra
Author: Shailaja Paik
Abstract: Critiques of vulgarity, sexuality and class featured prominently in the social, cultural and intellectual life of post-Independence India. This article focuses on the discourse of chumban bandi (banning kissing) in the 1950s and 1960s Maharashtra and analyses how it became a particularly unique index of heightened transgressive pleasure. I situate this discourse within a larger public debate, where dominant caste middle-class elites took upon the responsibility to shepherd supposedly recalcitrant dominated castes and low-class masses towards decency, civilized action and citizenship. Many elites energetically worked on their ideology, which was rooted in high-caste, middle-class and patriarchal values to create Marathi manus and nation. Drawing upon hitherto neglected Marathi language texts, I show how elites policed the kiss to both ban on-screen kissing and paradoxically harness its energy to engage in the politics of Marathikaran (creating Marathi regional identity) and create a new Marathi identity as modern, moral and decent.
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00856401.2023.2195250Primary URL Description: journal web site
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility (Book)Title: Mumbai on Two Wheels: Cycling, Urban Space, and Sustainable Mobility
Author: Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria
Abstract: Mumbai is not commonly seen as a bike-friendly city because of its dense traffic and the absence of bicycle lanes. Yet the city supports rapidly expanding and eclectic bicycle communities. Exploring how people bike and what biking means in the city, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria challenges assumptions that underlie sustainable transportation planning. Arguing that planning professionals and advocates need to pay closer attention to ordinary people who cycle for transportation or for work, or who choose to cycle for recreation, Mumbai on Two Wheels offers an alternative to the thinking that dominates mainstream sustainable transportation discussions. The book’s insights come from bicycle activists, commuters, food delivery workers, event organizers, planners, technicians, shop owners, and architects. Through ethnographic vignettes and descriptions of diverse biking experiences, it shows how pedaling through the city produces a way of seeing and understanding infrastructure. Readers will come away with a new perspective on what makes a city bicycle friendly and an awareness that lessons for a more equitable and sustainable urban future can be found in surprising places.
Year: 2024
Primary URL:
https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295752693/mumbai-on-two-wheels/Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780295752693
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Wonder in the Cremation Ground: The Affective and Transformative Dimensions of an Urban Tamil Festival (Book Section)Title: Wonder in the Cremation Ground: The Affective and Transformative Dimensions of an Urban Tamil Festival
Author: Amy Allocco
Editor: Tulasi Srinivas
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the spectacular urban festival of Mayana Kollai (looting of the cremation ground). It analyzes the potential for wonder in the festival as it is performed by the community of priests, trustees, and devotees of the Angalaparameshwari (Angalamman) temple in Chennai. The process of wonder is assessed in light of the broader repertoire of Tamil vernacular affective categories that are identified by festival participants as essential to the festival
Year: 2023
Primary URL:
https://sunypress.edu/Books/W/Wonder-in-South-AsiaPrimary URL Description: publisher website
Secondary URL:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438495293-010/htmlPublisher: SUNY Press
Book Title: Wonder in South Asia: Histories, Aesthetics, Ethics
ISBN: 9781438495286
Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir (Book)Title: Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir
Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Abstract: Written by the leading historian of modern Kashmir, this is a comprehensive portrayal of one of the most enigmatic politicians in modern South Asia, Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, known as the Lion of Kashmir. Abdullah (1905–1982) devoted much of his life to mobilizing Kashmiris to assert their rights, to trying to achieve a fair resolution for their politically contested state, to shaping its turbulent relationship with India, and to bridging the divide between India and Pakistan. Although he forged ties with the Indian National Congress, Abdullah’s support for Kashmir’s accession to India and his advocacy for a more autonomous position for the state within the Indian Union complicated his relationship with India and led to his fall from grace, arrest, and imprisonment. In 1975 he reached a compromise with India that alienated generations of Kashmiris for whose self-determination he had long fought. The people of Kashmir, India, and Pakistan continue to grapple with and contest his legacy. Zutshi’s rigorously researched and elegantly crafted biography brings this complex figure to life and offers a window onto the political fissures of twentieth-century South Asia more broadly.
Year: 2024
Primary URL:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300270778/sheikh-abdullah/Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Publisher: Yale University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780300270778
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Refashioning Paradise on Earth: Mughal Governance in Kashmir (Book Section)Title: Refashioning Paradise on Earth: Mughal Governance in Kashmir
Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Editor: Ramya Sreenivasan
Editor: Richard M. Eaton
Abstract: This article unravels the complex political, economic, and narrative relationship between the Mughal Empire and its Kashmir province. Contrary to scholarly and popular opinion regarding the devastating and exploitative nature of Mughal rule on Kashmir, in which Kashmiris had little say, the article illustrates that Kashmiris at various levels of society worked with the Mughals to bring the empire and Kashmir closer together through matrimonial, administrative, trade, and literary links. At the same time, Kashmiris resisted the Mughal incorporation of Kashmir into the imperial imagination—through the celebration of its natural beauty, complemented by the building activities of the Mughal rulers on its landscape—as paradise on earth. By drawing on local and more universal historical and literary ideas, Kashmir’s narrative tradition went beyond the confines of the Mughal imagination to reclaim Kashmir’s individuality and autonomy within the empire.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/34708/chapter/296421581Primary URL Description: publisher web site
Access Model: open access
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Book Title: The Oxford Handbook of the Mughal World
ISBN: 9780190222642
’Our Blood is Becoming White’: Race, Religion and Siddi Becoming in Hyderabad, India,” (Article)Title: ’Our Blood is Becoming White’: Race, Religion and Siddi Becoming in Hyderabad, India,”
Author: Gayatri Reddy
Abstract: “Our blood is becoming white.” This was a constant lament I heard from siddis in contemporary Hyderabad, India—third- and fourth-generation descendants of East African slaves and soldiers recruited by the local ruler or Nizam in the 1860s to form the African Cavalry Guard in his army. The article explores this siddi lament and the multivalent symbols—of color, blood, affect, belonging—latent in it. It draws on fieldwork conducted over the course of the last decade among siddis in Hyderabad, ambivalently situated as Indian citizens who are racialized as “Black” in an Indian and global order that denigrates Blackness and marked by their religious identification as Muslim in a virulently Hindu nation. The article unpacks these contexts, exploring the forces of empire and region and constructions of race, gender, and religion that have prodded and inflected siddi processes of becoming. In so doing, it unearths the ways in which Blackness, Muslimness, and masculinity are constituted as (intersecting) social and political categories, caught in the dialectics of alienation and intimacy, belonging and otherness, with enduring effects on the lives and cosmologies of siddis in Hyderabad and on the contemporary politics of race, gender, and religion in India.
Year: 2024
Primary URL:
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/15481433/currentPrimary URL Description: journal web site
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: American Anthropologist
Publisher: American Anthropological Association