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A substantial collection of unpublished articles, lectures and papers from one of the finest Indian historians of the twentieth century.
The author, a historian of repute, confronts important issues of Indian history in this classic work. He raises such questions as “Was there an Aryan Invasion of India in the past?”, “Is the caste system a bane or a boon?”, “Did Indian women enjoy equal rights in ancient times?”, “Was Democracy an alien concept to Vedic Indians?”, “Why Buddhism became extinct in the country of its origin?”, “What is India’s lasting contribution to the field of Science, Mathematics, Astronomy, Medicine, Chemistry, Metallurgy, etc.?”, “Was Indian Culture greatly impacted by foreign religions?”, “How did India influence its neighbouring Eastern and Western countries?”, “Is Sanskrit only an off-shoot of the Indo-European Languages Group?”, “What was the scale of the social, economic and political implosion detonated by two centuries of British Colonial Rule?”. The author has answered the above vexing questions based on an intensive study of Archaeology, Epigraphy, Numismatics, original records in different languages and the travelogues of foreign visitors.(Translator’s Note).
First published in 1965, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline is a strikingly original work, the first real cultural history of India. The main features of the Indian character are traced back into remote antiquity as the natural outgrowth of historical process. Did the change from food gathering and the pastoral life to agriculture make new religions necessary? Why did the Indian cities vanish with hardly a trace and leave no memory? Who were the Aryans – if any? Why should Buddhism, Jainism, and so many other sects of the same type come into being at one time and in the same region? How could Buddhism spread over so large a part of Asia while dying out completely in the land of its origin? What caused the rise and collapse of the Magadhan empire; was the Gupta empire fundamentally different from its great predecessor, or just one more ‘oriental despotism’? These are some of the many questions handled with great insight, yet in the simplest terms, in this stimulating work. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies, South Asian studies and ethnic studies.
In Musicophilia in Mumbai Tejaswini Niranjana traces the place of Hindustani classical music in Mumbai throughout the long twentieth century as the city moved from being a seat of British colonial power to a vibrant postcolonial metropolis. Drawing on historical archives, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews with musicians, critics, students, and instrument makers as well as her own personal experiences as a student of Hindustani classical music, Niranjana shows how the widespread love of music throughout the city created a culture of collective listening that brought together people of diverse social and linguistic backgrounds. This culture produced modern subjects Niranjana calls musicophiliacs, whose subjectivity was grounded in a social rather than an individualistic context. By attending concerts, learning instruments, and performing at home and in various urban environments, musicophiliacs embodied forms of modernity that were distinct from those found in the West. In tracing the relationship between musical practices and the formation of the social subject, Niranjana opens up new ways to think about urbanity, subjectivity, culture, and multiple modernities.
This book explores the social history of colonial Bombay in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, a pivotal time in its emergence as a modern metropolis. Drawing together strands that hitherto have been treated in a piecemeal fashion and based on a variety of archival sources, the book offers a systematic analytical account of historical change in a premier colonial city. In particular, it considers the ways in which the turbulent changes unleashed by European modernity were negotiated, appropriated or resisted by the colonised in one of the major cities of the Indian Ocean region. A series of crises in the 1890s triggered far-reaching changes in the relationship between state and society in Bombay. The city’s colonial rulers responded to the upheavals of this decade by adopting a more interventionist approach to urban governance. The book shows how these new strategies and mechanisms of rule ensnared colonial authorities in contradictions that they were unable to resolve easily and rendered their relationship with local society increasingly fractious. The study also explores important developments within an emergent Indian civil society. It charts the density and diversity of the city’s expanding associational culture and shows how educated Indians embraced a new ethic of ’social service’ that sought to ’improve’ and ’uplift’ the urban poor. In conclusion, the book reflects on the historical legacy of these developments for urban society and politics in postcolonial Bombay. This wide-ranging work will be essential reading for specialists in British imperial history, postcolonial studies and urban social history. It will also be of interest to all those concerned with the comparative history of governance and public culture in the modern city.
This book is a comprehensive history of city planning in post-independence India. It explores how the nature and orientation of city planning have evolved in India’s changing sociopolitical context over the past hundred or so years. The book situates India’s experience within a historical framework in order to illustrate continuities and disjunctions between the pre- and post-independent Indian laws, policies, and programs for city planning and development. It focuses on the development, scope, and significance of professional planning work in the midst of rapid economic transition, migration, social disparity, and environmental degradation. The volume also highlights the need for inclusive planning processes that can provide clean air, water, and community spaces to large, diverse, and fast growing communities. Detailed and insightful, this volume will be of interest to researchers and students of public administration, civil engineering, architecture, geography, economics, and sociology. It will also be useful for policy makers and professionals working in the areas of town and country planning.
About the Book A NUANCED AND POWERFUL MICROHISTORY SET AGAINST THE SWEEP OF INDIAN HISTORY. Dharmman Bibi rode into battle during the revolt of 1857 shoulder to shoulder with her patron lover Babu Kunwar Singh. Sadabahar entranced even snakes and spirits with her music, but eventually gave her voice to Baba Court Shaheed. Her foster mothers Bullan and Kallan fought their malevolent brother and an unjust colonial law all the way to the Privy Council—and lost everything. Their great-granddaughter Teema paid for the family’s ruination with her childhood and her body. Bindo, Asghari, Phoolmani, Pyaari … there are so many stories in this family. And you—one of the best-known tawaifs of your times—remember the stories of your foremothers and your own. This is a history, a multi-generational chronicle of one family of well-known tawaifs with roots in Banaras and Bhabua. Through their stories and self-histories, Saba Dewan explores the nuances that conventional narratives have erased, papered over or wilfully rewritten. In a not-so-distant past, tawaifs played a crucial role in the social and cultural life of northern India. They were skilled singers and dancers, and also companions and lovers to men from the local elite. It is from the art practice of tawaifs that kathak evolved and the purab ang thumri singing of Banaras was born. At a time when women were denied access to the letters, tawaifs had a grounding in literature and politics, and their kothas were centres of cultural refinement. Yet, as affluent and powerful as they were, tawaifs were marked by the stigma of being women in the public gaze, accessible to all. In the colonial and nationalist discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this stigma deepened into criminalisation and the violent dismantling of a community. Tawaifnama is the story of that process of change, a nuanced and powerful microhistory set against the sweep of Indian history.
Our Stories Remember retells Native American stories.
For over five hundred years, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of northern and central India, starting with the Ghurids in the 1190s through the fracturing of the Mughal Empire in the early eighteenth century. Scholars have long drawn upon works written in Persian and Arabic about this epoch, yet they have neglected the many histories that India’s learned elite wrote about Indo-Muslim rule in Sanskrit. These works span the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire and discuss Muslim-led kingdoms in the Deccan and even as far south as Tamil Nadu. They constitute a major archive for understanding significant cultural and political changes that shaped early modern India and the views of those who lived through this crucial period. Audrey Truschke offers a groundbreaking analysis of these Sanskrit texts that sheds light on both historical Muslim political leaders on the subcontinent and how premodern Sanskrit intellectuals perceived the “Muslim Other.” She analyzes and theorizes how Sanskrit historians used the tools of their literary tradition to document Muslim governance and, later, as Muslims became an integral part of Indian cultural and political worlds, Indo-Muslim rule. Truschke demonstrates how this new archive lends insight into formulations and expressions of premodern political, social, cultural, and religious identities. By elaborating the languages and identities at play in premodern Sanskrit historical works, this book expands our historical and conceptual resources for understanding premodern South Asia, Indian intellectual history, and the impact of Muslim peoples on non-Muslim societies. At a time when exclusionary Hindu nationalism, which often grounds its claims on fabricated visions of India’s premodernity, dominates the Indian public sphere, The Language of History shows the complexity and diversity of the subcontinent’s past.