Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2162731
Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Aishika Chakraborty
ABSTRACT In India, discourses around the dancing body have long been trapped within the historical studies in and around dancers and their dance practices. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. In the current times, the body discourse has given many of us tools to focus on socio-culturally excluded and dispossessed performers, whose presence and representation have historically been marginalised in the developing discourses on dance. It is, therefore, time to energise research that can generate new ideas of looking at existing binaries around the dancing body and challenging them as well. This essay is an attempt to bring together emerging issues and discourses around dance and the body that have become central through the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state in the post-independence years. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, survival strategies, neo-liberal dispossessions and the problematic constructions of the commodification of the erotic body vis a vis sexual labour, pleasure, desire and agency of dancers in diverse performing contexts, have helped us frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the concrete everyday existence of the body in dance.
{"title":"The dancing body: labour, livelihood and leisure","authors":"Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Aishika Chakraborty","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2162731","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2162731","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In India, discourses around the dancing body have long been trapped within the historical studies in and around dancers and their dance practices. During the last few decades, however, significant scholarly inroads were made into the domain of dance by shaking up the stereotypes, assertions and labels, shaped and moulded by patriarchy, class, caste and power. In the current times, the body discourse has given many of us tools to focus on socio-culturally excluded and dispossessed performers, whose presence and representation have historically been marginalised in the developing discourses on dance. It is, therefore, time to energise research that can generate new ideas of looking at existing binaries around the dancing body and challenging them as well. This essay is an attempt to bring together emerging issues and discourses around dance and the body that have become central through the cultural politics of the Indian nation-state in the post-independence years. Contemporary discourses around identity politics, survival strategies, neo-liberal dispossessions and the problematic constructions of the commodification of the erotic body vis a vis sexual labour, pleasure, desire and agency of dancers in diverse performing contexts, have helped us frame the focus around labour, leisure and livelihood concerning the concrete everyday existence of the body in dance.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"115 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45145988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2162730
Gajendran Ayyathurai
ABSTRACT The study of memory and caste-based oppressed communities in India and in the Indian diaspora is largely an unexamined field. If caste was an imposition of the self-privileging groups then, how do we understand the memory and history of the subalternized communities? Likewise, if those Indians who were oppressed by the brahminical invention of untouchability were actually not untouchables, then in what ways do marginalized Indian communities re-member and sustain their intrinsic cultural and historical identities? Do their language, literature, philosophy, and knowledge practices present alternative perspectives about their memory and history beyond caste? This paper aims to address of some of these questions by focusing on the Buddhist movement of the Tamils, who had been marginalized as outcastes, Parayars/Paraiyars/Pariah. It examines the varying ways Tamil Buddhist cultural and communicative memory affirms their casteless and anticaste identity in colonial India. Furthermore, it argues that a direct consequence of such a retention and revival of Buddhist memory in modern India was that these subordinated communities could sustain alternative ways of identifying, representing, and centering themselves beyond brahminical valorizations of caste.
{"title":"Memory, history, and casteless consciousness: Tamil Buddhists in modern South India","authors":"Gajendran Ayyathurai","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2162730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2162730","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The study of memory and caste-based oppressed communities in India and in the Indian diaspora is largely an unexamined field. If caste was an imposition of the self-privileging groups then, how do we understand the memory and history of the subalternized communities? Likewise, if those Indians who were oppressed by the brahminical invention of untouchability were actually not untouchables, then in what ways do marginalized Indian communities re-member and sustain their intrinsic cultural and historical identities? Do their language, literature, philosophy, and knowledge practices present alternative perspectives about their memory and history beyond caste? This paper aims to address of some of these questions by focusing on the Buddhist movement of the Tamils, who had been marginalized as outcastes, Parayars/Paraiyars/Pariah. It examines the varying ways Tamil Buddhist cultural and communicative memory affirms their casteless and anticaste identity in colonial India. Furthermore, it argues that a direct consequence of such a retention and revival of Buddhist memory in modern India was that these subordinated communities could sustain alternative ways of identifying, representing, and centering themselves beyond brahminical valorizations of caste.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"9 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42325993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-26DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2159120
S. Shneiderman
ABSTRACT This Afterword draws the essays in this special collection together by highlighting how the ‘Buddhist Homeland’ imaginary can be mobilized to advance the agendas of marginalized communities in non-Buddhist state and diasporic spaces. Buddhist practices and identities may be seen as acceptable forms of counter-hegemonic practice, which are not perceived to challenge sovereignty itself in the way that other forms of mobilization from below may. This is in part due to the often deterritorialized nature of Buddhist networks themselves, making it possible to separate claims of belonging to Buddhist places from political claims to sovereignty over specific territorial spaces.
{"title":"The power of Buddhist homelands: secularism, space and sovereignty","authors":"S. Shneiderman","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2159120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2159120","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This Afterword draws the essays in this special collection together by highlighting how the ‘Buddhist Homeland’ imaginary can be mobilized to advance the agendas of marginalized communities in non-Buddhist state and diasporic spaces. Buddhist practices and identities may be seen as acceptable forms of counter-hegemonic practice, which are not perceived to challenge sovereignty itself in the way that other forms of mobilization from below may. This is in part due to the often deterritorialized nature of Buddhist networks themselves, making it possible to separate claims of belonging to Buddhist places from political claims to sovereignty over specific territorial spaces.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"90 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48061339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-22DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2159121
Mallory Hennigar
ABSTRACT Nagaloka Centre in Nagpur, Maharashtra is a community centre for local members of the Triratna Buddhist Community. Nagaloka hosts the Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) which provides free training and Bachelors’ degrees in Buddhism and Ambedkar Thought to Indian students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In offering these courses, NTI’s administrators aim to build a pan-Indian Buddhist network and hope to eventually enact Prabuddha Bharat, ‘enlightened India.’ In their view, Prabuddha Bharat will be an India built around the principles of dhamma as Ambedkar understood them. Nagaloka serves as an important crossroads for intra- and international Buddhists to debate and demonstrate their vision of India as Prabuddha Bharat and is a vital location from which SC, ST, and OBC Indian Buddhists are in conversation with international Buddhists to (re)claim India as a Buddhist homeland.
{"title":"Building Ambedkar’s India: Nagaloka centre as a microcosm of Prabuddha Bharat","authors":"Mallory Hennigar","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2159121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2159121","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nagaloka Centre in Nagpur, Maharashtra is a community centre for local members of the Triratna Buddhist Community. Nagaloka hosts the Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) which provides free training and Bachelors’ degrees in Buddhism and Ambedkar Thought to Indian students from disadvantaged social backgrounds. In offering these courses, NTI’s administrators aim to build a pan-Indian Buddhist network and hope to eventually enact Prabuddha Bharat, ‘enlightened India.’ In their view, Prabuddha Bharat will be an India built around the principles of dhamma as Ambedkar understood them. Nagaloka serves as an important crossroads for intra- and international Buddhists to debate and demonstrate their vision of India as Prabuddha Bharat and is a vital location from which SC, ST, and OBC Indian Buddhists are in conversation with international Buddhists to (re)claim India as a Buddhist homeland.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"77 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45945588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-29DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2150747
D. Barua
ABSTRACT Late medieval Mughal sources accuse the Arakanese of incest and label them as ‘Maga.’ The Mughal use of ‘Maga’ echoes its previous application: pre-Islamic Persians were accused of incest and called ‘Maga.’ Colonial officials, however, redefined ‘Maga’ as a derivative of Magadha (historical Buddhist homeland in North India) and argued that the term originally referred to Barua Buddhists living in the Chittagong plains as the latter’s ancestors had arrived in Chittagong from Magadha via Arakan. This colonial ‘Maga-to-Magadha’ narrative suggested that the Baruas were an offshoot of the Arakanese although they have lived in the plains. It explained an anomaly in the colonial Chittagong hills-plains division. With an analysis of the Baruas’ writings, this paper argues that the Baruas themselves employed the same ancestral migration narrative to distance themselves from Arakanese ethnicity and claimed Bengali ethnic belonging. The Baruas’ claim has aligned them with Bengali nationalism but seems insufficient to challenge emerging Bangladeshi nationalism.
{"title":"Magadha to Chittagong Buddhist migration: the colonizer-colonized contestation over Arakanese and Bengali ethnic belonging","authors":"D. Barua","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2150747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2150747","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Late medieval Mughal sources accuse the Arakanese of incest and label them as ‘Maga.’ The Mughal use of ‘Maga’ echoes its previous application: pre-Islamic Persians were accused of incest and called ‘Maga.’ Colonial officials, however, redefined ‘Maga’ as a derivative of Magadha (historical Buddhist homeland in North India) and argued that the term originally referred to Barua Buddhists living in the Chittagong plains as the latter’s ancestors had arrived in Chittagong from Magadha via Arakan. This colonial ‘Maga-to-Magadha’ narrative suggested that the Baruas were an offshoot of the Arakanese although they have lived in the plains. It explained an anomaly in the colonial Chittagong hills-plains division. With an analysis of the Baruas’ writings, this paper argues that the Baruas themselves employed the same ancestral migration narrative to distance themselves from Arakanese ethnicity and claimed Bengali ethnic belonging. The Baruas’ claim has aligned them with Bengali nationalism but seems insufficient to challenge emerging Bangladeshi nationalism.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"27 - 43"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44173238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-29DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2150748
S. Mukherjee
protectionism in contemporary India, suggesting a through-line between historical discourses and present-day conflicts. However, the spread of these discourses outside Bengal, and the popularization of animal protectionism beyond the middle class are largely absent from the text. Given that West Bengal today is one of the only eight Indian states without a full or partial beef ban, the shifting geographies and social spaces of the contestation of human–animal relations – and especially human–cow relations – merit attention. The degree to which present-day class contours of animal protection, whether cow-focused or otherwise, parallel or diverge from their colonial-era antecedents also requires further attention. I raise these questions of contemporary parallels and divergences not because I think that Samanta’s book needed to answer them, but rather because she evokes them in her introduction, and because they are suggestive of potential future areas of study. But Meat, Mercy, Morality itself tells a remarkably complete and compelling story of the varied contestations of human-animal relations in colonial Bengal. The book is particularly commendable for, as Samanta puts it, ‘taking the South Asian context as the norm’, as a way to challenge ‘hegemonic’ practices in the writing of global history. The book is a useful model for other scholars because it avoids the assumption that European narratives of animal protectionism were universal, or that South Asia deviated from some expected ‘Western’ process. At the same time, its writing style and narrative remain accessible, even for readers without a significant background in the history of Bengal. Likewise, the book will be useful for a wide range of historians because it provides a model for the close analysis of multiple distinct colonial-era archives. Samanta weaves together a cohesive narrative by drawing on sources ranging from Bengali-fiction to official records and colonial memoirs. Through this diverse array of materials, she effectively demonstrates that although animal protection and cruelty discourses claimed to centre the suffering of non-human animals, they were ultimately used to legitimize colonial racial, class, and social hierarchies, and indeed, the colonial state itself.
{"title":"Indo-German exchanges in education: Rabindranath Tagore meets Paul and Edith Geheeb","authors":"S. Mukherjee","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2150748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2150748","url":null,"abstract":"protectionism in contemporary India, suggesting a through-line between historical discourses and present-day conflicts. However, the spread of these discourses outside Bengal, and the popularization of animal protectionism beyond the middle class are largely absent from the text. Given that West Bengal today is one of the only eight Indian states without a full or partial beef ban, the shifting geographies and social spaces of the contestation of human–animal relations – and especially human–cow relations – merit attention. The degree to which present-day class contours of animal protection, whether cow-focused or otherwise, parallel or diverge from their colonial-era antecedents also requires further attention. I raise these questions of contemporary parallels and divergences not because I think that Samanta’s book needed to answer them, but rather because she evokes them in her introduction, and because they are suggestive of potential future areas of study. But Meat, Mercy, Morality itself tells a remarkably complete and compelling story of the varied contestations of human-animal relations in colonial Bengal. The book is particularly commendable for, as Samanta puts it, ‘taking the South Asian context as the norm’, as a way to challenge ‘hegemonic’ practices in the writing of global history. The book is a useful model for other scholars because it avoids the assumption that European narratives of animal protectionism were universal, or that South Asia deviated from some expected ‘Western’ process. At the same time, its writing style and narrative remain accessible, even for readers without a significant background in the history of Bengal. Likewise, the book will be useful for a wide range of historians because it provides a model for the close analysis of multiple distinct colonial-era archives. Samanta weaves together a cohesive narrative by drawing on sources ranging from Bengali-fiction to official records and colonial memoirs. Through this diverse array of materials, she effectively demonstrates that although animal protection and cruelty discourses claimed to centre the suffering of non-human animals, they were ultimately used to legitimize colonial racial, class, and social hierarchies, and indeed, the colonial state itself.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"95 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46821726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-17DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2146634
D. K. Chotai
ABSTRACT Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British colonial official, wrote the Ras Mala, a history of Gujarat, in 1856. When he was looking for sources for writing this history, he received a response from his interlocutors in Gujarat that itihasa resides in the volumes of kavya. The essay attempts to understand this response, and study the shared genealogies of history and poetry in the context of nineteenth century Gujarat. It argues that the shared genealogies of itihasa and kavya in Gujarati discursive traditions sustained a plural vision of the past. This plural vision stood at variance from the one that was projected through the European teleological project of history in the nineteenth century Enlightenment philosophy and the Kantian model of education. The essay proposes to read Forbes’ Ras Mala in the light of the shared genealogy of itihasa and kavya to understand how it both contests and collaborates with the dominant European modes of constructing the past. In the light of Ashish Nandy’s concept of the open past, the paper seeks to understand what visions of utopias Ras Mala had to offer on the site of colonial modernity.
{"title":"Utopias of the past: a reading of A. K. Forbes’ Ras Mala","authors":"D. K. Chotai","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2146634","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2146634","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Alexander Kinloch Forbes, a British colonial official, wrote the Ras Mala, a history of Gujarat, in 1856. When he was looking for sources for writing this history, he received a response from his interlocutors in Gujarat that itihasa resides in the volumes of kavya. The essay attempts to understand this response, and study the shared genealogies of history and poetry in the context of nineteenth century Gujarat. It argues that the shared genealogies of itihasa and kavya in Gujarati discursive traditions sustained a plural vision of the past. This plural vision stood at variance from the one that was projected through the European teleological project of history in the nineteenth century Enlightenment philosophy and the Kantian model of education. The essay proposes to read Forbes’ Ras Mala in the light of the shared genealogy of itihasa and kavya to understand how it both contests and collaborates with the dominant European modes of constructing the past. In the light of Ashish Nandy’s concept of the open past, the paper seeks to understand what visions of utopias Ras Mala had to offer on the site of colonial modernity.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"437 - 449"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43141483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-14DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2144329
P. Chakravorty
ABSTRACT What are the connections between bodies, healing, and transcendence? I propose that by examining the intersections of the medical and the socio-cultural body with dance or the performative body, we can shine a critical light on this question. This paper brings Yoga and Indian dance together to explore how notions of health, spirituality, and morality came to be inscribed in particular kinds of bodies leading to selective ideas of bodily transcendence and spirituality in postcolonial India. I show through a diverse range of scholarships how the heterogeneous roots of Yoga have been homogenized in modern India as something Hindu and Brahminical (which is now integrated with rightwing Hindutva). Interestingly, the Indian classical dance revivalism shared the same logic as Yoga revivalism. As a result, the upper caste Hindu bodies distinguished themselves from their cultural others (Muslims and low caste Hindus) through concepts of purity, health, spirituality, and transcendence. I examine how some of these concepts of Yoga, dance, and embodiment from the east and west mingled in recent times and influenced narratives of ‘contemporary dance’ in India and the U.S. In these symbiotic, cross-cultural exchanges, concepts of somatics and neurobiology blended with modern Yoga and dance to render the elite, upper-caste/class bodies, and/or white bodies as universal, righteous, and transcultural.
{"title":"The body and the contagion: a symbiosis of yoga, dance, health and spirituality","authors":"P. Chakravorty","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2144329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2144329","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What are the connections between bodies, healing, and transcendence? I propose that by examining the intersections of the medical and the socio-cultural body with dance or the performative body, we can shine a critical light on this question. This paper brings Yoga and Indian dance together to explore how notions of health, spirituality, and morality came to be inscribed in particular kinds of bodies leading to selective ideas of bodily transcendence and spirituality in postcolonial India. I show through a diverse range of scholarships how the heterogeneous roots of Yoga have been homogenized in modern India as something Hindu and Brahminical (which is now integrated with rightwing Hindutva). Interestingly, the Indian classical dance revivalism shared the same logic as Yoga revivalism. As a result, the upper caste Hindu bodies distinguished themselves from their cultural others (Muslims and low caste Hindus) through concepts of purity, health, spirituality, and transcendence. I examine how some of these concepts of Yoga, dance, and embodiment from the east and west mingled in recent times and influenced narratives of ‘contemporary dance’ in India and the U.S. In these symbiotic, cross-cultural exchanges, concepts of somatics and neurobiology blended with modern Yoga and dance to render the elite, upper-caste/class bodies, and/or white bodies as universal, righteous, and transcultural.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"250 - 262"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42919231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-13DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2142897
David Geary, Douglas Ober
ABSTRACT In recent centuries, the concept of an ‘original’ Buddhist homeland located in India and Nepal has come to mark the aspirations, identities, histories, and memories of diverse Buddhist communities and nation-states. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we examine some of the ways Buddhist homeland narratives are used to (re)build ties to physical and imagined landscapes of belonging and how these discourses intersect with certain claims to identity, citizenship, and belonging in modern South Asia. Two themes are particularly evident in our analysis: the memory of place and geography, and the ongoing importance of religion in the sphere of politics.
{"title":"Buddhist homeland(s), memory and the politics of belonging in South Asia","authors":"David Geary, Douglas Ober","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2142897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2142897","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In recent centuries, the concept of an ‘original’ Buddhist homeland located in India and Nepal has come to mark the aspirations, identities, histories, and memories of diverse Buddhist communities and nation-states. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we examine some of the ways Buddhist homeland narratives are used to (re)build ties to physical and imagined landscapes of belonging and how these discourses intersect with certain claims to identity, citizenship, and belonging in modern South Asia. Two themes are particularly evident in our analysis: the memory of place and geography, and the ongoing importance of religion in the sphere of politics.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47476206","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-11DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2142898
P. Mukherji
ABSTRACT This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine – a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.
{"title":"Artistic labour in dance and painting: revisiting the theory-practice debate via mimesis (Anukrti) and the abject body","authors":"P. Mukherji","doi":"10.1080/19472498.2022.2142898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2142898","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article will critically explore how the intersection of mimesis and labour may open up another perspective on the much-theorized relationship between practice (prayoga) and theory (śāstra) in dance and painting. Labour or śrama, a loaded term by itself, will be taken in its complex sense of not only involving labour as skill that informs acts of painting, acting-dancing but also as a thematic of representation. Interspersed into these two senses is ritual labour or the labour involving acts of propitiating the divine – a domain not sufficiently thought out beyond the truism that religion pervades all spheres of Indic life. What this mode of inquiry aims to bring out is a tense relationship between manual/artistic labour and ritual labour both as a site of complicity and conflict amongst the actor-dancers and the authors of the treatises.","PeriodicalId":43902,"journal":{"name":"South Asian History and Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"140 - 152"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46419157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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