Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
468
result(s) for
"Uttar Pradesh, India"
Sort by:
Space-body-ritual
Set against the contemporary thinking of the city as a spectacle, Space–Body–Ritual: Performativity in the City establishes everyday life in the city as a ground for authentic experience. Reena Tiwari emphasizes the city as a space of lived experience-an intricately layered space giving people a poetic experience, responding to their memories and desires. She also explores the conflict between two ideas: the idea of thee 'city as text' to be read and understood from a distance, and the 'city as body,' where the body, after writing the text through its performance, achieves the capacity to read and understand it. Space–Body–Ritual demonstrates that the abstract 'seeing' embedded in the 'city as a text' is underwritten by the idea of power operating at deeper levels in the city. This hidden power is the power of the user's body in space. Furthermore, Tiwari proposes that an understanding of the 'city as body' through lived experience-through rhythmanalysis, where rhythms of everyday and extra everyday practices are understood-leads to the design of an environment that is evocative and is able to generate a bodily response from the user. To understand the rhythms, it becomes essential to know the way users inhabit, understand and map or present the city spaces by their bodies. Space–Body–Ritual will compel its readership to think of the parameters of spatial design as cultural generator.
eBook
The warp and the weft : community and gender identity among Banaras weavers
On the social conditions of Muslims and women weavers and influx of communal and ethnic feelings in their social fabric predominantly of Vهarهanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India; a study.
Book
Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India
Offering a fresh approach to the issue of government and administrative corruption through 'everyday' citizen interactions with the state, this book explores changing discourses and practices of corruption in late colonial and early independent Uttar Pradesh, India. The author moves away from assumptions that the state can primarily be associated with the top levels of government, and looks at citizens' approaches to local level bureaucracies and police. The central argument of the book is that deeply 'institutionalised' corruption in India could only have come about through the exercise of particular long term customs of interaction between agencies of the state - government servants and police, and their interactions with local politicians. Because the social hierarchies that condition such interactions are complicated by individual and family connections to state employment, periods of traumatic state transformation lead to a reconfiguration in the meaning of corruption in the local state. Based on principal primary sources and extensive field interviews, this book will be of interest to academics working on political science and Indian and South Asian history.
1. Introduction 2. Administrative power and public morality: hierarchy and corruption in late colonial and ealry independent UP 3. Religion, caste and government servant recruitment 1920s - 1950s 4. Imagining corruption: languages and symbolism in administrative and police power in north India 5. The rise of anti-corruption: government servants and 'citizens', 1940 - 1952 6. The bureaucracy, police and political change: maintaining the 'steel frame' in the 1950s and 1960s 7. Conclusion
\"Gould adds to his oeuvre with another well-researched, well-reasoned study on a perennial topic in India: 'influence' or corruption... A superb and important study useful for understanding India then and now. Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries.\" - R. D. Long, CHOICE (September 2011)
William Gould is Senior Lecturer in Indian History at the University of Leeds, UK. His research interests include Hindu nationalism, the history of 'communalism' and Gandhian nationalism, and the transformation of the Indian state and bureaucracy between 1930 and the present. He is the author of Hindu nationalism and the language of politics in late colonial India (2004).
eBook
Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930
Hindu nationalism has emerged as a political ideology represented by the Hindu Mahasabha. This book explores the campaign for Hindu unity and organisation in the context of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in colonial north India in the early twentieth century. It argues that India's partition in 1947 was a result of the campaign and politics of the Hindu rightwing rather than the Islamist politics of the Muslim League alone.
The book explains that the Mahasabha articulated Hindu nationalist ideology as a means of constructing a distinct Hindu political identity and unity among the Hindus in conflict with the Muslims in the country. It looks at the Mahasabha's ambivalence with the Indian National Congress due to an extreme ideological opposition, and goes on to argue that the Mahasabha had its ideological focus on an anti-Muslim antagonism rather than the anti-British struggle for India's independence, adding to the difficulties in the negotiations on Hindu-Muslim representation in the country. The book suggests that the Mahasabha had a limited class and regional base and was unable to generate much in the way of a mass movement of its own, but developed a quasi-military wing, besides its involvement in a number of popular campaigns.
Bridging the gap in Indian historiography by focusing on the development and evolution of Hindu nationalism in its formative period, this book is a useful study for students and scholars of Asian Studies and Political History.
eBook
Aghor medicine
For centuries, the Aghori have been known as the most radical ascetics in India: living naked on the cremation grounds, meditating on corpses, engaging in cannibalism and coprophagy, and consuming intoxicants out of human skulls. In recent years, however, they have shifted their practices from the embrace of ritually polluted substances to the healing of stigmatized diseases. In the process, they have become a large, socially mainstream, and politically powerful organization. Based on extensive fieldwork, this lucidly written book explores the dynamics of pollution, death, and healing in Aghor medicine. Ron Barrett examines a range of Aghor therapies from ritual bathing to modified Ayurveda and biomedicines and clarifies many misconceptions about this little-studied group and its highly unorthodox, powerful ideas about illness and healing.
eBook
Playing with Fire
Playing with Fire is written in the collective voice of women employed by a large NGO as activists in their communities and is based on diaries, interviews, and conversations among them. Together their personal stories reveal larger themes and questions of sexism, casteism, and communalism, and a startling picture emerges of how NGOs both nourish and stifle local struggles for solidarity.
eBook