Pub Date : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2018.1495872
Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali.
The paper examines Sufi ship–body symbolism in a painting on the wall of an eighteenth-century mosque from the riverine hinterland of the Malabar coast as well as in two poems, one in Arabic and the other in Arabi-Malayalam, produced in the region. Focusing on the intricate details of the painting and poems, the paper shows how the ship’s semantic field (sea, storm, pirates, pearls, shore, and so on) is connected to everyday Islamic rituals and mystical ideas and beliefs. In discussion, the paper draws attention to the creative hermeneutics of the local Muslim scholars and the use of an imagery which has a deep resonance in the intellectual history of Islam as well as in the littoral–cultural context of Malabar. The paper highlights the need to include imageries and motifs from inside the mosque when looking at artistic agency in the mosque architecture of the region. The paper argues that the ship painting in the spatiality of the mosque and in the Arabi-Malayalam poems is intended to induce wonderment among its audience, and thereby to inculcate ethical and pietistic dispositions among them.
{"title":"Sailing across Duniyāv: Sufi Ship–Body Symbolism from the Malabar Coast, South India","authors":"Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali.","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2018.1495872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2018.1495872","url":null,"abstract":"The paper examines Sufi ship–body symbolism in a painting on the wall of an eighteenth-century mosque from the riverine hinterland of the Malabar coast as well as in two poems, one in Arabic and the other in Arabi-Malayalam, produced in the region. Focusing on the intricate details of the painting and poems, the paper shows how the ship’s semantic field (sea, storm, pirates, pearls, shore, and so on) is connected to everyday Islamic rituals and mystical ideas and beliefs. In discussion, the paper draws attention to the creative hermeneutics of the local Muslim scholars and the use of an imagery which has a deep resonance in the intellectual history of Islam as well as in the littoral–cultural context of Malabar. The paper highlights the need to include imageries and motifs from inside the mosque when looking at artistic agency in the mosque architecture of the region. The paper argues that the ship painting in the spatiality of the mosque and in the Arabi-Malayalam poems is intended to induce wonderment among its audience, and thereby to inculcate ethical and pietistic dispositions among them.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"49 1","pages":"125 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80118917","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1788279
Raziuddin Aquil
The volume under review comprises, besides an Introduction, 13 rigorously researched and detailed chapters, which offer a whole platter of erudite scholarship seriously reflecting on religious iden...
{"title":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","authors":"Raziuddin Aquil","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1788279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1788279","url":null,"abstract":"The volume under review comprises, besides an Introduction, 13 rigorously researched and detailed chapters, which offer a whole platter of erudite scholarship seriously reflecting on religious iden...","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"50 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138512674","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1821517
Jinah Kim
How was time conceptualized and represented in Indian art? Through case studies re-examining a few canonical examples in Indian art, from Sarnath Buddha, to Udayagiri Varāha tableau, to Ajanta’s Cave 26, this essay demonstrates that the carefully composed insertion of miniature human donor figures can be taken as a visual clue to understand how the sense of history and time was experienced and articulated in ancient India. By adjusting our view to the periphery of a visual program, we may recognize a previously unnoticed female donor figure on a famed fifth-century stone stele from Sarnath depicting Buddha’s first sermon. While we lack detailed historical information on such images’ production and use, a scale-oriented formal analysis of human figures along with the analysis of epigraphic and literary evidence can help appreciate an artistic strategy developed to capture multiple temporalities. The present study contends that the introduction of human body as a portal for collapsing multiple temporalities in one medium, i.e. sculpted religious image, developed in a cultural milieu in which political actors and artistic communities began to innovate strategies to collapse the distance between the narrative time and the lived, historical time.
{"title":"Reading Time: the Sarnath Buddha and the Historical Significance of Donor Portraits in Early Medieval South Asia","authors":"Jinah Kim","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1821517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1821517","url":null,"abstract":"How was time conceptualized and represented in Indian art? Through case studies re-examining a few canonical examples in Indian art, from Sarnath Buddha, to Udayagiri Varāha tableau, to Ajanta’s Cave 26, this essay demonstrates that the carefully composed insertion of miniature human donor figures can be taken as a visual clue to understand how the sense of history and time was experienced and articulated in ancient India. By adjusting our view to the periphery of a visual program, we may recognize a previously unnoticed female donor figure on a famed fifth-century stone stele from Sarnath depicting Buddha’s first sermon. While we lack detailed historical information on such images’ production and use, a scale-oriented formal analysis of human figures along with the analysis of epigraphic and literary evidence can help appreciate an artistic strategy developed to capture multiple temporalities. The present study contends that the introduction of human body as a portal for collapsing multiple temporalities in one medium, i.e. sculpted religious image, developed in a cultural milieu in which political actors and artistic communities began to innovate strategies to collapse the distance between the narrative time and the lived, historical time.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"2010 1","pages":"190 - 215"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82602084","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1788278
R. Price
The status of the prostitute in the colonial Indian medical, moral and legal imagination has received various scholarly attentions over the years, but none so thorough and evocative as that of Durb...
{"title":"Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought","authors":"R. Price","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1788278","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1788278","url":null,"abstract":"The status of the prostitute in the colonial Indian medical, moral and legal imagination has received various scholarly attentions over the years, but none so thorough and evocative as that of Durb...","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"429 1","pages":"217 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76635071","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 : 2020-07-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1820656
Ifqut Shaheen, R. Khan
This paper adds to the history of Indian archaeology a new chapter. It discusses and analyzes Simone Corbiau’s archaeological expedition to North-West Frontier Province and the Malakand Political Agency in 1938. Corbiau was a Belgian archaeologist having interest in pre-/protohistoric terracottas. In the first place, we give a scholarly background to her research so as to understand the importance of the work. In the early 1930s, D.H. Gordon published some terracotta objects from the then NWFP and Corbiau’s disagreement with him about dating the materials brought her into India in 1936. She did fieldwork and its results were immediately published. Corbiau visited India for the second time in 1938 but her expedition this time could not meet success. She made an unsuccessful attempt to work at Malakand and Swat, in addition to Peshawar, Mardan and Swabi, and it is this obscured story in the history of the area’s archaeology that this paper entirely deals with. We argue that despite the desperate support provided by the Archaeological Survey of India to the party, colonial geostrategic politics coupled with some inherent operational shortcomings in the project doomed it to failure.
{"title":"In Pursuit of Pre-/Protohistory: Simone Corbiau’s Unsuccessful Archaeological Expedition to the North-West Frontier Province of British India","authors":"Ifqut Shaheen, R. Khan","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1820656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1820656","url":null,"abstract":"This paper adds to the history of Indian archaeology a new chapter. It discusses and analyzes Simone Corbiau’s archaeological expedition to North-West Frontier Province and the Malakand Political Agency in 1938. Corbiau was a Belgian archaeologist having interest in pre-/protohistoric terracottas. In the first place, we give a scholarly background to her research so as to understand the importance of the work. In the early 1930s, D.H. Gordon published some terracotta objects from the then NWFP and Corbiau’s disagreement with him about dating the materials brought her into India in 1936. She did fieldwork and its results were immediately published. Corbiau visited India for the second time in 1938 but her expedition this time could not meet success. She made an unsuccessful attempt to work at Malakand and Swat, in addition to Peshawar, Mardan and Swabi, and it is this obscured story in the history of the area’s archaeology that this paper entirely deals with. We argue that despite the desperate support provided by the Archaeological Survey of India to the party, colonial geostrategic politics coupled with some inherent operational shortcomings in the project doomed it to failure.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"83 1","pages":"166 - 176"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86629828","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 : 2020-03-30DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1721119
K. Suganya, M. Rajani
Analysing old maps and correlating patterns with remote sensing (RS) images have been a useful technique for identifying features of cultural heritage. The present work has conducted a geospatial analysis of Mughal Agra by comparing historical maps and satellite imagery. This paper make two distinct contributions: (1) it expands existing findings on the riverfront Mughal city by identifying the position and footprint of all the riverfront complexes (by complex we mean property that have or had Mughal mansions, gardens or tombs) marked in a Mughal map of 1720, and (2) it makes original contribution by delineating the two-tiers of city walls and further attempts to comprehend the spatial transformations of the city since the Mughal period. This exploration resulted in recognizing traces of many lost historical built forms like city walls, gateways and riverfront complexes those of which have transformed, integrated, camouflaged or sometimes lost within the urban fabric of the present city of Agra.
{"title":"Riverfront Gardens and City Walls of Mughal Agra: A Study of Their Locations, Extent and Subsequent Transformations Using Remote Sensing and GIS","authors":"K. Suganya, M. Rajani","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1721119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1721119","url":null,"abstract":"Analysing old maps and correlating patterns with remote sensing (RS) images have been a useful technique for identifying features of cultural heritage. The present work has conducted a geospatial analysis of Mughal Agra by comparing historical maps and satellite imagery. This paper make two distinct contributions: (1) it expands existing findings on the riverfront Mughal city by identifying the position and footprint of all the riverfront complexes (by complex we mean property that have or had Mughal mansions, gardens or tombs) marked in a Mughal map of 1720, and (2) it makes original contribution by delineating the two-tiers of city walls and further attempts to comprehend the spatial transformations of the city since the Mughal period. This exploration resulted in recognizing traces of many lost historical built forms like city walls, gateways and riverfront complexes those of which have transformed, integrated, camouflaged or sometimes lost within the urban fabric of the present city of Agra.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"24 1","pages":"139 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-03-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76296850","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 : 2020-03-29DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1732092
Nonica Datta
There is a common historical stereotype about the women of Punjab that they hardly think for themselves. They are seen to be ignorant and mostly far away from the landscape of creativity, literatur...
{"title":"Piro and the Gulabdasis: Gender, Sect and Society in Punjab","authors":"Nonica Datta","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1732092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1732092","url":null,"abstract":"There is a common historical stereotype about the women of Punjab that they hardly think for themselves. They are seen to be ignorant and mostly far away from the landscape of creativity, literatur...","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"78 1","pages":"216 - 217"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82579210","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2020.1721111
J. Bryant
This article provides a concise introduction to a group of British colonial buildings in Lahore that can be associated with John Lockwood Kipling (1875–93). It argues for their international recognition and protection. Kipling’s contribution to the architecture of Lahore as a teacher, curator, journalist and conservationist is summarised, along with his work as a designer of buildings, several of which have been described in recent literature as by his pupil, Bhai Ram Singh and by the civil engineers Ganga Ram and Rai Bahadur Kanhaiya Lal. While concern spreads at the threat posed by new public transport infrastructure to Lahore’s Mughal shrines, temples and gardens this article encourages appreciation of its Victorian and Edwardian buildings, in terms of their innovative design, historic associations, rarity, settings and coherency as a group.
{"title":"Colonial Architecture in Lahore: J. L. Kipling and the ‘Indo-saracenic’ Styles","authors":"J. Bryant","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2020.1721111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2020.1721111","url":null,"abstract":"This article provides a concise introduction to a group of British colonial buildings in Lahore that can be associated with John Lockwood Kipling (1875–93). It argues for their international recognition and protection. Kipling’s contribution to the architecture of Lahore as a teacher, curator, journalist and conservationist is summarised, along with his work as a designer of buildings, several of which have been described in recent literature as by his pupil, Bhai Ram Singh and by the civil engineers Ganga Ram and Rai Bahadur Kanhaiya Lal. While concern spreads at the threat posed by new public transport infrastructure to Lahore’s Mughal shrines, temples and gardens this article encourages appreciation of its Victorian and Edwardian buildings, in terms of their innovative design, historic associations, rarity, settings and coherency as a group.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":"61 - 71"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74105852","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2018.1550965
Robert A. Simpkins
In the study of medieval and early modern South Asia, archaeologists, historians, and art historians have studied selected monuments in depth or surveyed regions for monumental ruins and other features, but have less commonly studied their datasets as a group to infer processes of socio-political change. Using the example of the Golconda kingdom of India’s Deccan plateau, this study describes the evidence of the kingdom’s physical presence across a wide area, and shows how by combining the distribution across space with evidence of changes over time, aspects of the kingdom’s socio-political evolution can be inferred, from the development of the capital to the kingdom’s changing relationship with its more distant peripheries. Some overlooked monuments, when placed in this context, critically suggest the early formative stages of central political authority; others point to a growing culture of elite wealth, patronage, and competition during the era of increased international trade.
{"title":"Inferring Road Networks and Socio-Political Change through Elite Monuments of the Golconda Kingdom","authors":"Robert A. Simpkins","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2018.1550965","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2018.1550965","url":null,"abstract":"In the study of medieval and early modern South Asia, archaeologists, historians, and art historians have studied selected monuments in depth or surveyed regions for monumental ruins and other features, but have less commonly studied their datasets as a group to infer processes of socio-political change. Using the example of the Golconda kingdom of India’s Deccan plateau, this study describes the evidence of the kingdom’s physical presence across a wide area, and shows how by combining the distribution across space with evidence of changes over time, aspects of the kingdom’s socio-political evolution can be inferred, from the development of the capital to the kingdom’s changing relationship with its more distant peripheries. Some overlooked monuments, when placed in this context, critically suggest the early formative stages of central political authority; others point to a growing culture of elite wealth, patronage, and competition during the era of increased international trade.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"1 - 19"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78556324","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 : 2020-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2019.1592941
Eric Mukherjee
In 1793, the East India Company (EIC) drafted the Permanent Settlement, a legal regime designed to stabilize property ownership and incentivize landowning zamindars to improve the agricultural productivity of their land by fixing their tax obligations in perpetuity. The EIC imposed this legal fiction of stability over the unstable riparian landscape of Bengal. As accretion and erosion continued to alter the size of zamindari holdings along riverbanks, the EIC’s bureaucracy was overwhelmed with petitions from landholders demanding reassessment of their settlement based on the material conditions of their property. Despite several regulations designed to bring alluvial land under the Permanent Settlement, the EIC was never able create a legal mechanism that could accommodate the fluctuations of the landscape; they refused to alter their foundational premise that once the landscape was permanently measured and ordered, it would bring monetary and moral improvement to the zamindars which, in turn, would increase their acceptance of EIC rule. Because of this gap between the law and the material conditions it governed, the ability of the Permanent Settlement to regulate the impermanent landscape of Bengal remained incomplete. By 1846, the EIC responded to this contradiction with a moratorium on all alluvial assessment, thus allowing them to maintain their legal fiction in the face of mounting environmental challenges.
{"title":"The Impermanent Settlement: Bengal’s Riparian Landscape, 1793–1846","authors":"Eric Mukherjee","doi":"10.1080/02666030.2019.1592941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2019.1592941","url":null,"abstract":"In 1793, the East India Company (EIC) drafted the Permanent Settlement, a legal regime designed to stabilize property ownership and incentivize landowning zamindars to improve the agricultural productivity of their land by fixing their tax obligations in perpetuity. The EIC imposed this legal fiction of stability over the unstable riparian landscape of Bengal. As accretion and erosion continued to alter the size of zamindari holdings along riverbanks, the EIC’s bureaucracy was overwhelmed with petitions from landholders demanding reassessment of their settlement based on the material conditions of their property. Despite several regulations designed to bring alluvial land under the Permanent Settlement, the EIC was never able create a legal mechanism that could accommodate the fluctuations of the landscape; they refused to alter their foundational premise that once the landscape was permanently measured and ordered, it would bring monetary and moral improvement to the zamindars which, in turn, would increase their acceptance of EIC rule. Because of this gap between the law and the material conditions it governed, the ability of the Permanent Settlement to regulate the impermanent landscape of Bengal remained incomplete. By 1846, the EIC responded to this contradiction with a moratorium on all alluvial assessment, thus allowing them to maintain their legal fiction in the face of mounting environmental challenges.","PeriodicalId":52006,"journal":{"name":"South Asian Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"20 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86648003","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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