Land, Water, Language and Politics in Andhra
Land, Water, Language and Politics in Andhra

Author: Brian Stoddart

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1317809750

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This book explains how access to and use of land, water and language helped shape Andhra politics in India from 1850 down to the present day. After independence, the debate over land reform and policies on irrigation has shaped the fortunes of various governments, while the debate over the make-up of the language-based state has stimulated separatist movements like the one in support of Telangana. The book discusses how British innovations in irrigation in coastal Andhra in the mid-nineteenth century transformed the economy there from food crops to cash crops, and created new markets for local entrepreneurs. This stimulated increased education and social reform in the region, which in turn supported new politics in search of constitutional concessions. The drive for a Telugu language-based province then arose in concert, and those political resources were then used to determine local patterns down to independence. The 1930s ruse of the socialists, then the communist organisations, was an extension of land and water tax debates, which impacted the political nature of development — both before and after — independence. This is one of the first books on Andhra that recounts this story and is based on extensive archival research exploring the deep relationships between land, water, language and politics. It would be of primary interest to those studying modern nationalism in India, natural resource management, Indian politics and economic growth.

Water and the Environmental History of Modern India
Water and the Environmental History of Modern India

Author: Velayutham Saravanan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350130834

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This important new study investigates the competing demand for water in the Bhavani and Noyyal River basins of south India from the early 19th century to the early 21st century from a historical perspective. In doing so, the book addresses several important questions: * Did policy-makers visualise the future demand while diverting water from distant places or other basins? * Was efficient use ensured when the water was diverted or was it diverted in a manner that resulted in pollution and serious damage to the entire river basin? * Were natural flows taken care of in order to preserve the ecology and environment? * What were the factors that aggravated the competing demand for water and what were the consequences for the future? In the context of the current discourse on the competing demands for water, this book takes the debate forward, expanding the horizon of environmental history in the process. Until now, agriculture, industry and domestic water supply and their consequences for ecology, the environment and livelihoods have been given scant attention. Velayutham Saravanan's comprehensive account of both the colonial and post-colonial periods corrects this shortcoming in the field's literature and gives a holistic understanding of the problem and its full historical roots.

The Indian Media Economy (2-volume set)
The Indian Media Economy (2-volume set)

Author: Adrian Athique

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-12-29

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 0199091781

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The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of India as a major media producer and consumer market increasingly engaged with the global economy. Aided by rising incomes, technological remediation, regulatory strategies, and a shifting political terrain, the business of media has been given official recognition as a substantive component of India’s economy and as a prominent feature of its economic thinking. In light of these developments, these two pioneering volumes investigate the dynamics of an increasingly integrated media economy encompassing television, film, music, sport, and telecoms. Volume 1: Industrial Dynamics and Cultural Adaptation illustrates the distinctive industrial dynamics of India’s media economy, tracking the deeply embedded cultural, political, and economic forces that determine its everyday operation. The selection of essays serves to demonstrate the unique patterns of development and the complex field of exchanges that have constituted India’s media economy. As a whole, this volume posits a comprehensive approach to understanding the nature of media resources, the negotiation of industrial norms and the cultural context of a media economy firmly situated in the realities of India’s distinct regions, cultures, and human networks. Volume 2: Market Dynamics and Social Transactions provides a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking markets that constitute the media economy, focusing upon its particular commodity forms, labour conditions, and spaces of consumption. Taking account of a rich set of case studies, this volume argues for the necessary consideration of multiple and interdependent markets in explicating our everyday encounters with media. By foregrounding the social transactions that encapsulate market exchanges, it begins to illustrate some of the novel aspirations, meanings, and relationships arising with India’s media economy.

An Environmental History of India
An Environmental History of India

Author: Michael H. Fisher

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1108679811

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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 implications of the Indian subcontinent's current conditions. This accessible new survey begins roughly 100 million years ago, when continental drift moved India from the South Pole and across the Indian Ocean, forming the Himalayan Mountains and creating monsoons. Coverage continues to the twenty-first century, taking readers beyond independence from colonial rule. The new nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have produced rising populations and have stretched natural resources, even as they have become increasingly engaged with climate change. To understand the region's current and future pressing issues, Michael H. Fisher argues that we must engage with the long and complex history of interactions among its people, land, climate, flora, and fauna.

India's Foreign Relations, 1947-2007
India's Foreign Relations, 1947-2007

Author: Jayanta Kumar Ray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 715

ISBN-13: 1136197141

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This book analyses India’s relations with its neighbours (China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and other world powers (USA, UK, and Russia) over a span of 60 years. It traces the roots of independent India’s foreign policy from the Partition and its fallout, its nascent years under Nehru, and non-alignment to the influence of economic liberalization and globalization. The volume delves into the underlying reasons of persistent problems confronting India’s foreign policy-makers, as well as foreign-policy interface with defence and domestic policies. This book will be indispensable to students, scholars and teachers of South Asian studies, international relations, political science, and modern Indian history.

Scoring Off the Field
Scoring Off the Field

Author: Kausik Bandyopadhyay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1000084051

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This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel, unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It explains how football became a viable popular social force with a rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of anti-imperial nationalist movement and postcolonial political tension and social transformation. In the process, it investigates certain key questions and problems in the social history of football in Bengal, which have hitherto been ignored in the existing works on the subject. The author offers some original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society. It strengthens the premise that social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, has tried to consider some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion. It indicates that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.

Rituparno Ghosh
Rituparno Ghosh

Author: Sangeeta Datta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-19

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 131735608X

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An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.

Escaping the World
Escaping the World

Author: Manisha Sethi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-11-29

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1000365786

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The book attends to a historical question — how to account for the high numbers of renouncers (sadhvis) mentioned in medieval and ancient texts — which has been acknowledged and raised, but left unaddressed within Jain studies. It does so through ethnographic data gathered through extensive fieldwork among the sadhvis in Delhi and Jaipur. The volume foregrounds the primacy of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’— upheld by the nuns themselves, who associate asceticism with autonomy, freedom, joy, spiritual well-being, self-worth and peace, and grihastha (household) with loss of independence, fettered existence, degradation, burdensome familial obligations and social responsibilities. It also examines whether it may be apt to term Jain nuns as practitioners of an ‘indigenous mode of feminism’. The book challenges the existing sociological theories of renunciation and tests the feminist concepts of agency and autonomy by investigating the culturally coded roles ascribed to women in Jainism, which are variegated, and examines how a fractured discourse and reality is resolved in the subjectivities and identities of female ascetics. The very legitimacy of the institution of female asceticism, and the way in which the society (samaj) upholds and sustains it, renders female asceticism into a socially approved alternative institution — albeit one that allows Jain nuns to create spaces of relative and autonomy and even prestige for themselves.