Books published by Primus Books

The question of water and human dependence on river systems has become a major public concern of the twenty-first century. Based on a long term historical study of a flood country in the mid-Ganga basin, Speaking Rivers: Environmental History of a Mid-Ganga Flood Country, 1540-1885 looks at the changing perception of the people from a useful to a problematic river. Based on environmental, agricultural and cultural histories it explores the British colonial policy that altered the age-old relationship between the people and the river, and the long-term landscape transformations and cropping pattern changes that have been taking shape since early modern times. This book journeys through the flood plains of Bihar where Sher Shah's ideas of local governance and ecological regime were altered by the Mughals and reversed completely by the European notion of a regimented Greater Bengal. Vipul sees a strong connection between economy and environment and goes on to question the presumed relationship between flood control and modernity, and explains as to why even today ecologically vulnerable diara land remains as the centre of conflict and dispute.

Brought together here are ten essays, characterized by their dissent to the commonly accepted notions in the field, a first requirement for the growth of knowledge. Issues such as the dialectical process in the religious history of India; the much talked about Mauryan presence in south India; the contradictions in the construction of Kaliyuga in Purāṇic literature; political criticism in Sanskrit kāvya poetry; regional identity and its varied perceptions; evolution of landlordism; emergence of castes and the use of 'Hindu' idioms in Christian worship and propaganda form the theme of these essays. A seminal essay by M.G.S. Narayanan and Kesavan Veluthat on the Bhakti Movement in south India, included in this collection, breaks new ground. The pieces on Indian religious history, the notion of Kaliyuga and the Mauryan presence in south India, challenge received wisdom somewhat violently. Those on landlordism and castes in Kerala offer bold alternatives to the existing formulations. The Sanskrit poem, Mahiṣaśatakaṃ, uses poetry as protest; and Maṇipravāḷam poetry shows how literature can represent a new sensibility through old genres. The analysis of the work of a Jesuit priest shows the use of anti-Christiansymbols in Christian propaganda. Taken together, these e ssays are likely to unsettle the cozy comfort of the reader.

The text-archaeology correlation in respect of the Harappan Civilization shows that the Harappans and the people of the Ṛgveda were part of the same multi-ethnic, multilingual, multicultural geographical and chronological space; that a prolonged phase of geo-climatic devastations ravaging the VedicHarappan subcontinent triggered an ideology of nature worship in which prayers could be recited only in the Vedic dialect which, in-turn, put the Vedic-speaking community on a high moral pedestal. The increasing number of clients hiring Vedic-speaking chantsmen inflated the ranks of the priesthood with attendant jealousy and infighting, which was further aggravated with the introduction of the Soma oblation. This book tries to identify the Soma plant on the basis of available literary and archaeological evidence as well as trace a hydrographic history of the river Saraswatī between the fourth and the second millennium BC. It also examines the sanctification of the river as the greatest goddess (Devītame), the greatest river (Nadītame), and the greatest mother (Ambitame). The final segment of the book explores the archaeo-textual possibilities and limitations of a faunal reconstruction in the Vedic-Harappan subcontinent.

This volume makes significant and fresh contributions to fields of comparative literature and translation which are assuming increasing importance and relevance in the realm of literary and cultural studies. Divided into four inter-related parts, it presents twenty-one seminal essays--written by distinguished scholars--with new aspects on comparative literature starting with the Sanskrit tradition and coming up to modern theoretical concerns, such as epistemological issues involved in cross-cultural comparative work and symbiosis of comparative literature and world literature. The book will be of interest to scholars and academics of Comparative Literature, Translation, Cultural and Interdisciplinary Studies.

We live in a world of controversies, and often wonder what controversies do to a culture. Do they interpret it? Can one conceive of them as a genre? Can they offer serious diagnostic tools to the social scientist or the cultural historian? In this pioneering study, the author addresses these and similar questions, and examines if and how controversies help us understand the ways in which forms of nationalism and identity formation imagine, shape, and construct themselves. Focusing on major controversies at local and the national levels during colonial and postcolonial times, he deals with seemingly unconnected subjects, such as language, khadi, sexuality, textuality and authorship, and also personalities as diverse as Sarala Das, Radhanath Ray, Fakir Mohan, Tagore, Gandhi and Premchand.

Indian Emigrants to Sugar Colonies examines the relationship between the two phases of migration during the nineteenth century that made Calcutta Port the centre of overseas emigration from specific areas of India. It also delves into the reasons that made the migrants settle near the place of embarkation at the end of the century. Starting with an analysis of the causes of large-scale emigration from parts of northern and eastern India and ending with reasons behind changes in the direction of such population movements, this volume presents a new framework for writing migration history, intermingled with industrial expansion in British India during the nineteenth century. It is, thus, a combination of both external as well internal migration histories, enhanced with a cost-benefit analysis of this migration process and its consequences. The book is a compilation of a wealth of extracts, illustrative tables and comparisons gathered mostly from unpublished archival records, which establish its exposure both theoretically as well as statistically.

Mind and Body deals with the relationships between the ancient philosophical schools of Asia and medicine. It explores the mutually dependent relation between the mind and the body, and argues that Asian and Hippocratic medical systems, as well as the body and consciousness, should not be studied in isolation. The volume also demonstrates how ancient medical traditions can be used to improve the physical and mental health of people today. It comprises papers compiled by medical practitioners and researchers, including specialists of ayurveda, siddha, unani, homoeopathy, Sowa-Rigpa, naturopathy, yoga, and acupuncture, from different parts of Asia, including India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Aimed at addressing the lacunae in academic publications on women dancers in India, The Moving Space highlights the idea of the 'space' created, occupied and negotiated by women in Indian dance. It initiates a conversation between dance scholarship and women's studies, and brings together scholars from a multidisciplinary background, emphasizing that research and practice have roots in both these specific areas. This book takes dance as a critical starting point, and endeavours to create an inclusive discourse around the female dancer and the historic, gendered and contested 'space(s)' that accommodate or are created by her. Highlighting the scope and necessity of using feminist theories in understanding complex relationships between individual experiences, gendered representation and cultural constructions in the realm of dance in India, it traces the lived experience of the dancer--her movements, her voice and her subjectivity. This collection of essays contextualizes women dancers from diverse historical and social milieu--from temple to courtyard, from silver screen to dance bars and from national to regional stages--within the larger rubric of dance studies, and brings out stories of survival, struggle, empowerment, subjugation and subversion.

The deeply entrenched image of the interaction between Hindus and Muslims in India's past--as indeed in the present-- has generally been that of two aggressively antagonistic religious communities, with the superior political power wielded by one community defining its dominance over the other. This original colonial notion has often been contested by positing the thesis of syncretism at the religious level; by citing evidence of patronage across religious establishments, and of participation of both communities in the country's administration. Neither approach, however, took up the critical task of examining the viability of the premise of homogeneity in the composition of the two communities, or how contemporary perceptions may be used as a touchstone for 'othering' in heterogeneous societies of the past. Chattopadhyaya's Representing the Other?, originally published almost two decades ago, makes an attempt to construct perceptions of new ethnic groups in India in an important phase of its history, from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The evidence though insufficient, reveals not homogenous religious communities, but ethnic groups of diverse origins, located in different socio-political contexts as traders, raiders and plunderers, as well as rulers and administrators. The contexts define the characterization of these different categories by either invoking terminologies from the past for others or by coining ethnic terms. Based mainly on contemporary Sanskrit epigraphic and textual sources, this book is expected to be a major corrective to the way students are generally taught to read the history of our country of this period and of what followed.

Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India seeks to undertake two kinds of explorations, one methodological and the other thematic. Methodologically, it examines texts of inscriptions--historians' main source for references to ancient villages--from diverse angles to try and understand the morphologies of villages in relation to different terrains across the country. One important aspect of this exploration concerns understanding, to the extent possible, the relationship of village location/s and sources of water, both for fields and habitats. Thematic explorations, apart from looking for possible physical appearances of ancient villages, extend to the search for the re-examination of the concept of village community, the search for hierarchies among village residents and settlements, and the changing nature of relationship between apex political authorities and villages. The conclusion, deriving from these explorations, makes an argument for the need to depart from the image of India's villages as unchanging, inert, insulated and self-sufficient spatial units to viewing them as varied social spaces in interaction with other spaces, which also went through phases of historical change.