The Routledge Companion to Northeast India

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India
Author: Jelle J. P. Wouters
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2022-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000636992

The Routledge Companion to Northeast India is a trans-disciplinary and comprehensive compendium of a vital yet under-researched region in South Asia. It provides a unique guide to prevailing themes, theories, arguments, and history of Northeast India by discussing its life-forms – human and not – languages, landscapes, and lifeways in all its diversity and difference. The companion contains authoritative entries from leading specialists from and on the region and offers clear, concise, and illuminating explanations of key themes and ideas. A hands-on, practical, and comprehensive guide to Northeast India, this companion fills a significant gap in the literature and will be an invaluable teaching, learning, and research resource for scholars and students of Northeast India Studies, South Asian and Southeast Asian societies, culture, politics, humanities, and the social sciences in general.

Nepal

Nepal
Author: Axel Michaels
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2024-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197650937

This comprehensive history of Nepal spans pre-historic times and the Licchavi Period to more recent developments, such as the Maoist insurgency and the rise of the republic. In addition to religious history and histories of selected regions (Mustang, Sherpa, Tarai, and others), it covers the nation's relations with its powerful neighbors and its cultural aspects, especially its rich history of arts, architecture, and crafts.

Gods in the World

Gods in the World
Author: Aftab S. Jassal
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231560559

In the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the Central Himalayas, Hindu deities are ever present in the lives of devotees. Through ritual practices of placemaking, spirit mediums, oracles, priests, and other specialists bring these beings into embodied form, calling on them for healing and counsel. In exchange for alleviating human suffering, deities ask that a place be made for them—in homes, villages, and temples, and in bodies, lives, and communities. Gods in the World is a richly descriptive and evocative ethnography of Hindu ritual practices that shows how deities and other supernatural agents come to matter to ordinary people. Aftab S. Jassal traces how acts of placemaking, including healing practices that repair and restore relations between people and deities, allow deities to participate and intervene in human affairs. Many of the professional healers, storytellers, musicians, spirit mediums, and lay devotees who are chronicled belong to marginalized Dalit communities. These communities are at the forefront of combined pressures of tourism, neoliberal development, and Hindutva nationalist politics and often find creative ways of responding to their changing worlds. Bringing together fresh insights on the dynamics of caste and gender with enduring questions about ritual, healing, and the nature of human-divine relations, Gods in the World offers a striking account of everyday Hinduism in a contested and rapidly changing region.

Frontiers into Borders

Frontiers into Borders
Author: Ainslie T. Embree
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2020-01-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0190990171

The contemporary status of the eight South Asian nations was determined by the creation of the British Indian empire and the process of decolonization. This book by the late Ainslie T. Embree is an insightful exploration of how the boundaries of these states were created between 1757 and 1857. During these one hundred years, political and military developments in the Indian subcontinent made a significant impact upon the definition of borders as they (almost) exist today. The narrative begins after Aurangzeb’s death, when vast areas of the Mughal Empire were taken over by regional powers, following which the East India Company swiftly expanded its territory, thus altering the boundaries of the region. Embree explores the meaning of ‘boundaries’ and ‘frontiers’; while the British stressed on ‘natural frontiers’, those shaped by natural landscapes, there was also the French sense of ‘natural borders’, which represented state borders reflecting social composition. Artfully written, with a careful examination of archival materials from England and India, this book reveals the colonial and local interests at work while modern states were carved into being.

Ranis And The Raj

Ranis And The Raj
Author: Queeny Pradhan
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2022-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9354927327

Traditionally, history has been telling us the stories of kings. In the long tradition of history writing, his-story has always dominated over her-story. Though queens evoke a sense of romance and their stories are told like fairy tales, it is common enough to find that these stories end in tragedy. In India's history, not all queens are remembered today. Some are celebrated; while others have been almost ignored by historians. In Ranis and the Raj, Queeny Pradhan has selected six queens. All the six queens are fromthe nineteenth century and have faced the British Raj, the East India Company and the Crown. From the Rani of Sirmur, who was the earliest to deal with theBritish authorities, to Rani Chennamma, Rani Jindan, Begum Zeenat Mahal, Rani Lakshmi Bai, to the Sikkim Queen from the 1860s to 1890s, Pradhan has attempted to carve an engrossing historical narrative for each of these important figures in Indian history. Unlike the biographical convention in traditional history writing, theresearch in this book can be placed in the realm of 'microhistory'. The life stories of these queens are fragmented due to the 'silences' and 'invisibilization' in political history of the time, and this book aims to fill these gaps.

Kashmir as a Borderland

Kashmir as a Borderland
Author: Antia Mato Bouzas
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2019-08-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9048543991

*Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control* examines the Kashmir dispute from both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) and within the theoretical frame of border studies. It draws on the experiences of those living in these territories such as divided families, traders, cultural and social activists. Kashmir is a borderland, that is, a context for spatial transformations, where the resulting interactions can be read as a process of 'becoming' rather than of 'being'. The analysis of this borderland shows how the conflict is manifested in territory, in specific locations with a geopolitical meaning, evidencing the discrepancy between 'representation' and the 'living'. The author puts forward the concept of belonging as a useful category for investigating more inclusive political spaces.

Trans-Himalayan Borderlands

Trans-Himalayan Borderlands
Author: Dan Smyer Yü
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Ethnology
ISBN: 9789462981928

This book explores the changes to native senses of place, the conception of border - simultaneously as limitations and opportunities - and what the authors call "affective boundaries," "livelihood reconstruction," and "trans-Himalayan modernities."