Books published by Primus Books

While Bollywood continues to be part of the psyche of Indians and South Asians the world over, the cinematic representation of identities, particularly of the Muslim as a cultural category, also contains within ideas about visualities and their impact. The contribution of cinema to ideological milieus is immense. Hindi cinema-through its romantic narratives and culture of myth-making-has tended to be one of the most powerful tools of political communication and propaganda.This book aims to bring cinematic narratives under the analytical lens and contextualize the representation of the Muslim in popular Hindi cinema. It also argues in favour of a noticeable transformation in the representation of Muslims in films through the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the emergence of a secularized portrayal which is far from unproblematic. Can one discern an attempt to construct a visual binary where the Muslims can be categorized as 'good' and 'bad'?

Contemporary anxieties about global warming and climate change impacts have unsettled the ways in which we think about environmental politics and human history. Intense discussions have already begun over whether we need to reconsider what we understand by the term 'environmental change' and if humans have truly become a 'geo-physical' force. Put differently, how should we recast our understanding of the planet's varied environmental pasts in order to make sense of the Anthropocene present? This collection of 19 essays on forestry and environmental change in the erstwhile colonies of the British Empire builds on Richard Grove's quest for achieving a 'global synthesis' as efforts towards writing environmental histories on a planetary scale. The Commonwealth of Nations as a single environmental bloc for study, enquiry and historical scrutiny, explores connected environmental histories, compares dissimilar ecological regions and debates ideologies for environmental management.

This book shows how gender is central to our imagination and understanding of modernity. The essays in this volume unravel the complexities of modernity's relationship to femininity and the cultures of gender construction amidst the diverse manifestations of colonialism and nationalism.The essays cover varied aspects of gender identities, including the private spheres of elite women who expressed their freedom through their subversive, restricted sexuality, thus shaking off the shackles of domination; the debates regarding dress codes for women; the deplorable condition of girls after marriage; legislative battles to achieve the right to divorce; challenges to notions of sports as a masculine activity; the different meanings of modernity for women writers; the implications of print cultures and cinema on women; gendered meanings of peace and partition; women's preferences, perceptions and practices; the politics of resistance; and questions of agency and autonomy.

India's Historic Battles: From Alexander the Great to Kargil focuses on the decisive battles that have shaped the course of Indian history. Taking into account recent research, especially in the fields of technology, military theory and demography, this book is an attempt to analyse the twelve great battles that have had a crucial impact on the fate of the subcontinent. Moving freely across time and space, and focusing on cross-continental analysis to bring out the uniqueness of the big battles fought in India as well as their commonality, each chapter dwells on the nature of the weapons used, type of leadership displayed, and the experience of the soldiers in each battle. An attempt has also been made in this book to construct counterfactual scenarios for most of the battles to show how often luck and chance decide the course of history. Parallel imageries are constructed on 'ifs' and 'buts'.

The 22 essays in this volume, written between 1974 and 2010, deal with the religious history and culture of Gujarat. The first part of this book focuses on Gujarati devotional literature: Vaiṣṇava pad-bhajan, Vallabhite dhoḷ, Sant-vāṇī Ismā'īlī Ginān, Ciśtī Gujarati bhajan, all with textual and thematic convergences. The second part analyses stories of saints and sacred places. Their constructions are in no way authentic historical accounts, but they provide a vivid picture of the time and society that produced them.The focus of these essays is more on an explortation of popular religions (lok-dharma) mainly in Saurashtra and Kutch, both in their oral and written transmission. Gujarat has a rich variety of religious currents (all of which are not treated here; some are merely evoked). They are reflected in literary sources and local observation and they demonstrate Gujarat's capacity to promote a regional culture nourished by a multiplicity of religions.

The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years studies the changing dynamics of politics brought about by the eclipse of Congress hegemony, caused principally by the 1967 election results and the split in the Congress party in 1969. It examines the proposition, widely accepted, that Indira Gandhi systematically subverted constitutional democracy by undermining institutions like the parliament and the cabinet, and established authoritarian control of both the government and the party after the split. It concludes that such widespread subversion happened only after the imposition of the Emergency, when Mrs Gandhi succeeded in concentrating power in her hands. Soon after Mrs Gandhi was installed as prime minister in 1966, she sought to break free from the shackles of the party bosses and stamp on the polity the independence of the government from the organization, a convention established in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Jawaharlal Nehru and the party high command. A struggle for power broke out between Mrs Gandhi's camp and the party bosses, which led, in 1969, to a split in the party. This struggle was exacerbated by the erosion of the Congress party's hegemony after the fourth general elections of 1967, when it lost power in a number of states and saw its majority in the parliament significantly whittled down.

What is in the Bharata is everywhere and what is not is nowhere', states The Mahabharata which deals not only with the power struggle between the princes of two clans but also with a variety of branches of learning. Woven into the main theme are lengthy dissertations and treatises on philosophy, ethics, morality, statecraft and metaphysics. The sages who wrote the epic had an almost uncanny understanding of human nature and have depicted it with unemotional clarity. This abridgement, based on Kisari Mohan Ganguli's translation of the Mahabharata, is told in lucid English, using modern idioms, yet wherever possible the metaphors, similes and allegories of the original have been retained.

Prehistoric Research in the Indian Subcontinent is, on the one hand, a commemoration of the 150 years of the study of Indian prehistory, whose beginnings stretch back to Robert Bruce Foote's discovery of the famous sites of Pallavaram and Attirampakkam in 1863, and, on the other a timely study of recent researches in the prehistory of the subcontinent. The first three essays in this volume are valuable in their critical stocktaking of prehistoric research, palaeontological studies, and palaeoenvironmental reconstructions in the subcontinent. The regional and subregional variations of prehistoric cultures are brought out by focusing on a variety of areas like the Son Valley, the Narmada, the Hunsgi Valley, the Teri dune sites, and the central Ganga valley. Essays on lesser known areas like the Ayodhya hill region of West Bengal, cave sites in the limestone karst zone of Nagaland, and the Chakalpunji area in north-eastern Bangladesh add to our knowledge.

This volume contains wide-ranging surveys of various aspects of the history of India's medieval past. Based on a close scrutiny of the documents at the National Archives of India as well as private collections, the volume explores the Persian archival material, from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, highlighting important aspects of our past. Sufi texts are scanned for original administrative documents of the Tughluq period. A manual for the treatment of birds, and ecclesiastical positions under Firoz Shah Tughluq are some other rare finds. These essays also explore Humayun's wanderings around Kabul and the meticulous details of the preparation for the first Mughal expedition to Qandhar under Shahjahan. Some rare and unexplored material on the uprising of 1857 has also been included here.The essays in the volume unearth valuable information, generally missing from chronicles and other works of this period.

Beginning with the Neolithic Chalcolithic phase to the introduction of iron technology in the Megalithic period and its consequent impact in the early historic times, this book examines the variations in iron making in peninsular India. Using archaeological data, where available, of the various regions of Andhra Pradesh (including Telengana), Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, a phase-wise analysis has been presented to highlight the material conditions of the various regions prior to, and after the introduction of iron technology, and to reflect changes in agricultural patterns, artisanal and structural activities and civilizational progress over time. An attempt has also been made to show the regional variations that exist in terms of the adoption of iron and its impact on the agricultural development and the proliferation of arts and crafts. Since it takes into account theories and empirical studies in peninsular India, this book makes a substantial contribution to the literature on iron technology and social change in India.

This book underscores the colonial psyche in articulating conservation policies and uncovers strategies that have been overlooked in the literature on the Environmental history of the Bombay Presidency. Drawing on rich archival sources and some significant secondary literature, this book traces the history of citified infrastructural developments in building warships, houses, bungalows, public buildings, railways and in the manufacturing of furniture in Bombay and the Bombay Presidency that eventually triggered urbanization. Correspondingly, the subject of deforestation of western India in three distinctive phases and ensuing afforestation, which fed the needs of the empire, is also highlighted.

This book is a modest attempt to look at and examine the beginnings of ecological concerns in the Buddhist religious traditions, based on a meticulous examination of diverse narratives pointing towards a correlation between Buddhism and environmental issues. By examining the seminal teachings of the Buddha through the concepts of Paticcasamuppada, Kamma (Karmat), the eightfold path, ahimsa, Paṅcaśila and in literature, like the Jātakas, Therīgātha and Theragātha in relation to animals, population dynamics, yajñas and animal sacrifices as well as flora and fauna associated with the Buddha, this book attempts to discover the inescapable connection between the individual's well-being and Nature.

State and Peasant Society in Medieval North India uses a variety of sources--archival records, Indo-Persian court chronic and folk literature --to explore the perception of kingship in the peasant society and its linkages with the changing nature of interaction between the state and the peasant society in medieval north India, especially Mewat. Dwelling on this central theme, the essays in this book delve into a range of issues: the process of state formation in Mewat, the role of state in the socio-economic and religio-cultural transformation of the region's Meo community, the conflictual engagement between the peasant community and state in the late medieval period and the perception of kingship in folktales popular in the peasant society. The book chiefly argues that a nuanced understanding of how the medieval state impacted the peasants' lives can be better arrived at by looking into the subjectivities of their perceptions and experiences.

This collection of twelve essays foregrounds the conjunction of the social phenomenon called 'caste' with the genre of representation called 'life narratives'. Life narratives have long been a constitutive archive and a performative mode for testifying to the breadth and ferocity of caste oppression and for articulating a language of caste dissent. Caste and Life Narratives covers a variety of modes of representing 'actual lives', in whole or in fragments--from autobiographies, and interviews to Facebook posts, biopics, visual representations, and most tragically, a suicide note. It uses the notion of 'Critical Caste Studies', which is vitally animated by Dalit Studies, but is not coterminous with it. While acknowledging the unique status of Dalit and Dalibahujan perspectives, it argues that caste is not the lived reality of Dalits alone and, accordingly, a critical study of caste cannot be solely their burden. . Drawing from postcolonial, Dalit and Critical Caste Studies, this syncretic collection of essays offers a unique theoretical and methodological perspectives, provoking new ways of entering into the burgeoning study of caste.

'The Indian craftsman conceives of his art, not as the accumulated skill of ages, but as originating in the divine skill of Vishwakarma and revealed by him', wrote Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, in his book The Indian Craftsman. For the traditional Indian craftsman, crafts and worship have a symbiotic relationship. Vishwakarma is both God and man, the divine architect of the Gods and the God of craftsmen, worshipped by all the artisanal communities, across the country. He is both signifier and signified. Vishwakarma is 'the sum total of consciousness, the group soul of individual craftsmen of all times and places' and simultaneously a community of craftsmen living their everyday lives--crafting icons and building monumental structures, while struggling to eke out a living as artisans. This volume on the conception and perceived realities of the Vishwakarma seeks to explore the hermeneutics of 'Vishwakarma' and to document a rich tapestry of images as well as historical information regarding crafts and craftsmen through the ages.

The first section of this volume indicates how the city has negotiated space from its formative years right up to the crucial juncture it seems to have reached recently as a result of the drastic shift towards mega-urbanity. The second section provides glimpse into the city in time, through the two global wars in the twentieth century, the Naxalite movement, the rule of the Left Front and beyond. The book seeks to understand the city not only in space and time, but also in imagination. While recognizing that the colonial rulers did play a vital role in the making of the city, the book is primarily about the active native participation in the process of Kolkata’s urban transformation. It highlights the ordinary and the everyday, with special attention paid to the underclasses of the city. It uses a polyscopic perspective and presents the city as a fascinating heterotopia based on a coexistence of the haves and the have-nots, of the old and the new, of formality and informality.

In a conscious bid to avoid the categorization of 'south' India Streaming the Past: Peninsular India in History changes the framework of the historical meta-narrative of the nation, which has failed to integrate the history of premodern peninsular India within it. This book demonstrates that a collection of varied essays is, in fact, a woven tapestry with perforated boundaries and a stage for interdisciplinary voices to speak to one another in several ways. Put differently, the volume streams the past to create a level playing field for individual historical research designs to interact with the larger patterns of India's history. Focusing on peninsular India, the essays cover diverse topics stretching from megalithic times to the eighteenth century. They rely on classical languages and historical materials to source information, employ versatile methods and examine wide-ranging themes including archaeological sites, trade routes, iron technology, water management, coinage, social hierarchies, goddesses and narrative traditions, performing arts and culture, forms of protests, crime and punishment, and narratives of death alongside socioeconomic and political processes. Individually and collectively, the book intervenes, disturbs and challenges the dominant gaze of history-writing in India, and argues for a more wide-angled and cosmopolitan understanding of India's complex history.

Cross-Cultural Networking in the Eastern Indian Ocean Realm examines the history of the Bay of Bengal and beyond, as initially documented in archaeological recoveries from AD 100 to AD 900 and subsequently the variety of regional historical evidence that demonstrates India's eastern Indian Ocean maritime and northern overland connections to the nineteenth century. In sum, the book highlights the importance and variety of consequence in east-coast India's linkage with the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal and the extended eastern Indian Ocean, especially India's eastern maritime and overland networking with South-East Asia and China. In the eighth century post-Gupta era the Buddhist religious centre at Nalanda in north-west Bengal assumed a major role as the destination of Indian and international Buddhist pilgrims who arrived by sea and land to study at Nalanda, and returned to promote Buddhist and Hindu religious and cultural exchanges in wider India and Sri Lanka, South-East Asia, and China through the fifteenth century. The book details India's long-term historical relationships with the legendary Sumatra-based Srivijaya thalassocracy and its successors in the Straits of Melaka region, sequential Vietnam coastline-based polities c.600-1800s, and the Andaman Islands and Tibet, as populations in northern and eastern Asia selectively localized South Asian culture.

In the 'rebel world' of 1857, indigenous discourse on the great uprising in the form of proclamations, pamphlets and appeals issued by rebel leaders and other ideologues offers primary data for understanding the motives of the rebels, their means of mobilization and the people who were sought to be mobilized. It also helps us to figure out if the appeal by the leaders of the rebellion remained within the earlier traditional framework as well as the kind of 'polity' or 'polities' they envisioned. The material contained in this volume is also likely to throw light on how the sepoys, as members of the most modern army of their times, used modern machines, such as printing facilities, and modern ideas in their fight against their colonial masters, and answer questions regarding the conflict between the Sepoys and the more traditional elements, namely the wahhabis. The data produced here will offer fresh perspectives on one of the largest anti-imperialist uprisings east of Suez during the nineteenth century.

Woods, Mines and Minds: Politics of Survival in Jalpaiguri and the Jungle Mahals deliberates upon a wide spectrum of events and processes as it endeavours to trace the ecological changes brought about by the evolution of two industries, forestry and mining, and their eventual institutionalization in the Bengal Province. An analysis of the topographical changes in this region is essential to render an understanding of the dialectics of colonial rule. The focus on regional history unravels the myriad ways in which colonial intrusion transformed the production process, as well as investigates its impact on the local social fabric. The role of the State, the local stakeholders and the power-liaisons in the colonial and postcolonial period, together with the devolution of authority under the independent government are also examined. The transformation of the two regions, Jalpaiguri and Jungle Mahals into effective official departments, in particular, raises several questions concerning policy implementation and the viability of these institutions as revenue generating bodies ensuring the economic and political intransigent of the colonial state. The vexed issue of development, which had to accommodate the legacy of the erstwhile regime, the proclivities of the rulers, and the resistance offered by the ruled, covert as well as overt, also deserves attention.

India and the Silk Road: Exploring Current Opportunities is based on the historical as well as contemporary relevance of the Silk Road. This volume comprises essays by a number of contributors who have dealt with varied aspects of the reality of this historical road in a new geopolitical context, with the potential of shared prosperity among the states connected with this route. The new Silk Road of the twenty-first century covers almost all modes of communication, infrastructure and transportation, including road network, rail and oil and gas pipelines.

The eleven articles in this volume mark a significant advance in Vedic studies. Contributions range widely across critical topics in early, middle, and late Vedic texts and their commentaries, as well as classical themes in contemporary Sanskrit literature. Essays elucidate the explanations and arguments found in Brāhmana texts, the historical and ecological development of Vedic ritual, concepts and underlying messages in Vedic texts, anachronisms in commentarial exegesis, and literary devices in narrative. From a variety of philological, philosophical, ritual, gender, and literary approaches, these articles shed new light on our understanding of these seminal texts of Indian religion and philosophy. This book is dedicated to the life and work of Professor Ganesh Umakant Thite.

State, Power and Legitimacy: The Gupta Kingdom presents a comprehensive account of the Gupta state, with particular emphasis on its strategies of legitimizing its power. The political strategies that characterized this crucial juncture of early Indian history, termed 'threshold times' by Romila Thapar, employed certain features of ancient Indian polity even as new political mechanisms were emerging. This volume argues that this unique combination of political strategizing was a part of the process of legitimizing royal authority, in which religion, literature and art were essential tools. The volume also includes a large selection of prepublished essays which provide the reader with a comprehensive idea of how the Gupta state has been studied by earlier historians together with recent articles which help us to look at the Gupta state and the manner in which it exercised and legitimized its power. A substantive introduction suggests the need to move beyond the nationalist perspective that views the rule of the Guptas as the 'Golden Age' or the Marxist model of 'Indian feudalism'.

An important aspect of India's foreign policy from the 1990s has been its attempt to consolidate its ties of friendship and mutual understanding with its East and South East Asian neighbours. India's Act East Policy has initiated a new positive approach towards South East Asia through its roots which can be traced to India's past history and tradition. While it began primarily with religious interaction which lead to the spread of Buddhism in the far-flung areas of South East Asia, economic and cultural connections followed soon after. Against this backdrop, the present volume analyses various facets of India's connectivity with the South East Asian countries, including its linkages with the north-eastern states of India; a rediscovery of Indian imprinted culture, mainly Buddhism and other religions in the South East Asian region and beyond; the use of the Indian diaspora for economic development; and the implementation of various agreements signed by India with the South East Asian countries. This volume is an interesting combination of the analytical method of historical linkages between India and South East Asia with critical observations of the contemporary dynamics of international politics.

The similarities and differences in the evolution of modern nations across the world are most evident in the ways in which ideas of development and progress engage with the natural environment. India and Australia as nation states emerge from the shared lineage of being part of the British Empire, which has characterized the nature of their respective journeys as modern nation states. Juxtaposing case studies from India and Australia reveals that although both locations differ in their particular historical and social contexts, both contend with similar challenges and compulsions, characteristic of modernity. Employing a multi-scalar and interdisciplinary approach, this work examines issues of nature, nation and development within the context of modernity. While India and Australia have radically different historical imaginations, their paths now increasingly intersect, so that the task of making sense of their very different social imaginaries becomes vital to reimagining the dynamics between nations and nature. In this context, there is much to learn from their respective historic experiences and much that they have in common which demands attention in facing up to the major socioecological challenges of the twenty-first century. This book contributes towards trying to understand the ways in which nations are constantly imagined and find new ways of thinking about nature.

This eclectic collection of essays is embedded in both the past and present of the region's complex interface with modernity. It is pertinent to note that despite the postmodernist critiques of the abstract notion of the term modern, modernity continues to be relevant for an understanding of contemporary social processes. Apart from theoretical debates, 'modernity' as a process and value system as well as a contrast to 'tradition' offers multiple interpretative possibilities which are deeply manifested in the everyday experience of the self and community. While acknowledging both enchantment and disenchantment with modernity, this volume explores the opportunities, contingencies and contestations of the process. Spatializing modernity, therefore, takes the concept to the arena of experience and practice, thereby bringing it closer to the script of the everyday: the contradictory and at times polemical positioning of access and denial, institutional and individual, urban and rural, trader/moneylender and peasant/ zamindar, Jat and Dalit (in context of landownership and access to wealth), and erotic/gender (urban) and ideal (rural). These and other similar themes involve self-positioning and Othering. Modern, modernity and modernization are, therefore, competing, contradictory and overlapping concepts that get situated around the narratives of power, prestige, entitlement and access.

Pondicherry under the French: Illuminating the Urban Landscape, 1674-1793 explores how the town of Pondicherry developed as the epicentre of the French presence in India, becoming a major centre of Company administration. It evaluates the relative significance of inland trade and overseas commerce in generating mercantile wealth by examining the volume and value of commercial transactions and the interactions between the French, Tamils, Telugus, Gujaratis and the Armenians. This resulted in the urbanization of the town, which in turn dramatically and radically changed its skyline. The collective composition of the external agencies, cross-cultural connections and knowledge networks led to new forms of art, architecture and culture with the French attempting to convert the urban reality of Pondicherry into a smart city. As the French presence evolved from a trading company into a colonial state, Pondicherry, called 'The Pearl of French India', became one of the most advanced cities in the world in terms of governance, politics and global linkages.

Professor Kesavan Veluthat, in a significant departure from the existing scholarship, represented by K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, T.V. Mahalingam, and Elamkulam P.N. Kunjan Pillai, explored aspects of historical transition, political structures, settlement patterns, agrarian relations, religion, and ideology in early medieval Tamil Nadu and Kerala, thus changing the terms of the debate and reconstructing the study of South Indian history in ways that are irreversible. His more recent studies in the literary and intellectual traditions of Kerala have, by their ingenuity and provocativeness, overturned long accepted historiographical positions. Clio and Her Descendants is a collection of essays dedicated to honour Veluthat's scholarship, and brings together the work of thirty historians who look to expand the horizons of South Asia's diverse and polyphonic past. The variety of themes, concerns, and methodologies that these essays explore, not only capture the vibrancy of the historiography of the present, but also offer invaluable signposts for future research. This volume is essential reading for any student of South Asian history and will remain so for years to come.

A hermeneutic engagement with Maithili folk songs allows this book to hinge upon the notions of living and dying in the contemporary world despite the admission that medicine, insurance, market, and media may condition human experiences. Amidst the binaries of union and separation, rigid religion and fluid faith, popular and folk, modernity and tradition, central to this book is the pluralism of cultural script(s) and their philosophical musings on living and dying, folk philosophy, cultural subversion as well as reconciliation. Predominantly sung by women, the folksongs of Mithila are woven around calendar of events, rites of the passage, and everyday life situations. The cultural scape of sound and sight thus conjures a fusion of epistemology and ontology, knowledge and existential being, the classical Sanskritic-textual and the folk subaltern-oral. Straddling the particular context of Maithili folksongs and the generic aspects of folk world view, steering across Hinduism, tradition and modernity, and folklore in the age of mechanical reproduction, this book contributes to the sociology and social anthropology of, inter alia, folklore, religion, gender and mythology. Moreover, this makes for a contribution into sociology and social anthropology of death in South Asia.

During his lifetime Dwijendralal Roy (1863-1913) was one of Bengal's best known poet-musician-dramatists, and his lyrical songs and comic poetry which captured the imagination of the people were used in historical and social dramas and satires of the period. His songs (called Dwijendra-geeti) combined Western music styles with sophisticated lyrics in Bengali and in doing so marked a breakthrough in the Indian music tradition. Dwijendralal skilfully used historical memory in his plays to highlight values that he considered crucial for the creation of an ideal India nation, based on compassion and integrity. His groundbreaking use of humour and satire to highlight the injustices that bedevilled society in late nineteenth-early twentieth century India won him innumerable admirers. His immense contribution to music and literature notwithstanding, his rich oeuvre has suffered monumental neglect, and there is an appalling lack of awareness about the man and his work. This volume attempts to put that right by documenting as well as undertaking a serious study of the creative genius of this artist.