South

Even today, six decades after his assassination in January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi is still revered as the father of the Indian nation. His intellectual and moral legacy, and the example of his life and politics, serve as an inspiration to human rights and...

In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in...

One of twentieth-century India's great polymaths, statesmen, and militant philosophers of equality, B. R. Ambedkar spent his life battling Untouchability and instigating the end of the caste system. In his 1948 book The Untouchables, he sought to trace...

The aim of Bengal: The British Bridgehead is to explain how, in the eighteenth century, Britain established her rule in eastern India, the first part of the subcontinent to be incorporated into the British Empire. Though the British were not in firm...

Using primarily Urdu sources from the nineteenth century, this book allows us to rethink notions of 'the Muslim', in its numerous, complex and often contradictory forms, which emerged in colonial North India after 1857. Allowing the self-representation...

Often dismissed as the rumblings of "the street," popular politics is where political modernity is being formed today, according to Partha Chatterjee. The rise of mass politics all over the world in the twentieth century led to the development of new...

Partisan Aesthetics explores art's entanglements with histories of war, famine, mass politics and displacements that marked late-colonial and postcolonial India. Introducing "partisan aesthetics" as a conceptual grid, the book identifies ways in which...

In this provocative new work, Mark Condos explores the 'dark underside' of the ideologies that sustained British rule in India. Using Punjab as a case study, he argues that India's colonial overlords were obsessively fearful, and plagued by an...

This book studies Indian overseas labour migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which involved millions of Indians traversing the globe in the age of empire, subsequent to the abolition of slavery in 1833. This migration led to the...

Kyle J. Gardner reveals the transformation of the historical Himalayan entrepot of Ladakh into a modern, disputed borderland through an examination of rare British, Indian, Ladakhi, and Kashmiri archival sources. In so doing, he provides both a history...

India has the largest number of non-schoolgoing working children in the world. Why has the government not removed them from the labor force and required that they attend school, as have the governments of all developed and many developing countries? To...

The Lotus Sutra proclaims that a unitary intent underlies the diversity of Buddhist teachings and promises that all people without exception can achieve supreme awakening. Establishing the definitive guide to this profound text, specialists in Buddhist...

This book includes curious stories of the people who inhabited the exotic and vanished world of Nawabi Lucknow, especially the many rogues and villains, some of them British. Using material not used before and containing a number of previousy unpublished...

Burning the Dead traces the evolution of cremation in India and the South Asian diaspora across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through interconnected histories of movement, space, identity, and affect, it examines how the so-called traditional...

Round Table Conference Geographies explores a major international conference in 1930s London which determined India's constitutional future in the British Empire. Pre-dating the decolonising conferences of the 1950s-60s, the Round Table Conference laid...

Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country. It has more inhabitants than either Russia or Japan, and its national language, Bengali, ranks sixth in the world in terms of native speakers. Founded in 1971, Bangladesh is a relatively young...

The Mutiny of 1857 left a deep mark on Indian society and on the nature of British rule. Thomas Metcalf analyzes the influence of the Mutiny on many facets of Indian life and relations with Great Britain, examining social reform, education, land...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780957502345Author Sanmugam ArumugamFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Diaspora BooksPublisher JKS Books

It can be said of South Asia what has long been said of its great epic poem, the Mahabharata: "there is nothing in it that cannot be found elsewhere in the world and nothing in the world that cannot be found there." South Asia's historic trans-regional...

Social reforms aimed at changing the social, political, or economic status of women in India were important both to British colonial rule and to nascent nationalist movements. Debates over practices such as widow immolation, widow remarriage, and child...

The rise of ethnic and religious conflicts in the post-Cold War era has reawakened consideration of the future of nationalism and the nation state. The Indian subcontinent with its myriad ethnic, religious and linguistic divides provides a focus for...

The Politics of India since Independence provides a comprehensive study of the major political, cultural, and economic changes in India since gaining independence. Paul Brass focuses on the consequences of the centralising drives of the national...

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of...

The authoritative new translation of the epic Ramayana, as retold by the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas and cherished by millions to this day.The Epic of Ram presents a new translation of the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (1543-1623). Written in Avadhi, a...

Honorable Mention, Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians departed for India. Known as the Parsis, they slowly lost contact with their...

Among the legacies of the colonial encounter are any number of contemporary 'mixed-race' populations, descendants of the offspring of sexual unions involving European men (colonial officials, traders, etc.) and local women. These groups invite serious...

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India's greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A...

Rajnarayan Chandavarkar presents the first major study of the relationship between labour and capital in India's economic development in the early twentieth-century. He explores the emergence of capitalism in the region, the development of the cotton...

The Indian Army which was the bulwark of the British Empire in South Asia functioned as an imperial fire brigade force during the Great War. The 'brown warriors' of the Raj defended the British Empire from Belgium and France in the west to Singapore in...

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh contain one-fifth of humanity, are home to many biodiversity hotspots, and are among the nations most subject to climatic stresses. By surveying their environmental history, we can gain major insights into the causes and...

The main contribution of the work is to offer a comprehensive history of the English East India Company during the century 1660-1760. It also examines the commercial economy of the Asian countries in which the Company traded and its political relations...

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru helped create the myth of a nonviolent ancient India while building a modern independence movement on the principle of nonviolence (ahimsa). But this myth obscures a troubled and complex heritage: a long struggle to...

Despite the rapid spread of Buddhism-especially the esoteric system of Tantra, one of its most popular yet most misunderstood forms-the historical origins of Buddhist thought and practice remain obscure. This groundbreaking work describes the genesis of...

In this path-breaking new work, Ali Usman Qasmi traces the history of the political exclusion of the Ahmadiyya religious minority in Pakistan by drawing on revealing new sources. This volume is the first scholarly study of the declassified material of...

The exemplar of Indo-Persian history, at once a biography of Emperor Akbar and a chronicle of sixteenth-century Mughal India.Akbarnama, or The History of Akbar, by Abu'l-Fazl (d. 1602), is one of the most important works of Indo-Persian history and a...

Often identified as leatherworkers or characterized as a criminal caste, Chamars of North India have long been stigmatized as untouchables. In this pathbreaking study, Ramnarayan S. Rawat shows that in fact the majority of Chamars have always been...

Uncivil Liberalism studies how ideas of liberty from the colonized South claimed universality in the North. Recovering the political theory of Dadabhai Naoroji, India's pre-eminent liberal, this book offers an original global history of this process by...

The Defiant Border explores why the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands have remained largely independent of state controls from the colonial period into the twenty-first century. This book looks at local Pashtun tribes' modes for evading first British colonial,...

Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the...

Several years ago in Rajasthan, an eighteen-year-old woman was burned on her husband's funeral pyre and thus became sati. Before ascending the pyre, she was expected to deliver both blessings and curses: blessings to guard her family and clan for many...