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This handbook presents a multilayered and multidimensional history of state formation in premodern India. It explores dense and rich local and subregional historiography from the mid-first millennium BC to the eighteenth century in South Asia. Shifting the focus away from economic and political factors, this handbook revises the conventional understanding of states and empires and locates them in their quotidian conduct and activity on socio-cultural and concomitant factors. Comprehensive in scope, this handbook addresses a range of themes connected with the idea of state formation in the subcontinent. It includes discussions and debates on ritual practices and the Brahmanical order in early...
The book addresses the very topical subject of citizen making. By delving into a range of sources - among them survey questions, historical documents, political theory, architectural design, and public policy - the book provides a unique analysis of when and why citizenship has taken root in India. Each chapter highlights the constant innovation of citizenship that has occurred in India's legal, political, social, economic and aesthetic arrangements as well as providing the basis for comparative analysis across South Asian cases and the European Union.
(Dis)connected Empires takes the reader on a global journey to explore the triangle formed during the sixteenth century between the Portuguese empire, the empire of Kotte in Sri Lanka, and the Catholic Monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs. It explores nine decades of connections, cross-cultural diplomacy, and dialogue, to answer one troubling question: why, in the end, did one side decide to conquer the other? To find the answer, Biedermann explores the imperial ideas that shaped the politics of Renaissance Iberia and sixteenth-century Sri Lanka. (Dis)connected Empires argues that, whilst some of these ideas and the political idioms built around them were perceived as commensurate by the variou...
The central theme of the symposium was elaborated upon according to various religions, periods and areas, such as North India (historical) by H. Kulke, A. Wink, J. C. Heesterman and H. T. Bakker; South India (historical) by D. Shulman, B. Stein and G. Berkemer; contemporary India by C.J. Fuller, L.P. van den Bosch and J. P. Parry; Sri Lanka by G. Obeyesekere; the Byzantine Empire by A. N. Palmer; the Moroccan Sultanate by H. Beck, and the European Middle Ages by M. Gosman. This systematic approach focusing on a well-defined theme in a widely differentiated context appears to be fruitful. An often little recognized, though essential, universal aspect of important places of pilgrimage is their...
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This book deals with kingship in Orissa. However, it is concerned neither with the great kingdoms of central Orissa, nor with the little kingdoms lying on the coast or in the fertile river valleys of Orissa, but with jungle kingdoms lying in the remote hinterland of south Orissa. The discussion is based on material collected by the author during extensive fieldwork and archival research in Orissa during the 1990s. Presenting and interpreting his ethnohistorical data, the author also addresses several issues of more general importance: the nature of kingship and the state in colonial and post-colonial India; the politics of ritual and the rituals of politics; the relation between kings and tribes, the Hinduization of tribal deities; the complementarity of tribal and royal principles of action and organization; or the uses of historical reconstructions as legitimating strategies. It is argued that these and other topics can be shown in new light, not although but because a political unit is the focus of research which hitherto has experienced hardly any scholarly attention: the jungle kingdom.
This second Orissa Research Project presents the eastern province as a multi-centred cultural complex. In an interdisciplinary effort this historical study covers the so-called iron-age in western Orissa and questions the established foundation date of one of the major coastal temples. Conditions of early colonialism are exemplified by a report on a typical road construction, just as popular protest movements of that phase, as well as the ambivalent position of their leaders and the issue of conversions to Christianity are examined. The critical Orissan politico-religious controversies over independence are presented by the visions of the Maharaja of Parlakimedi. Indological contributions in...
Focuses on women and the civilizations and societies in which Islam has played a historic role. Surveys all facets of life (society, economy, politics, religion, the arts, popular culture, sports, health, science, medicine, environment, and so forth) of women in these societies.
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