Contents: Introduction, Culture Defined, Epochs of Indian Culture, The Continuity of Indian Culture, The Cultural Influences of Islam, Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya, Amir Khusrau, The Nature of Indian Culture, Tulsidas, Chaitanya and Mirabai, Kabir, Perspective of Indian Culture, Cultural Interactions in South India (1400-1800), India s Epochs in World-Culture, Indian Culture and External Influence, Indian Culture in the World Perspective, The Degeneration of Indian Culture.

A defence of Indian civilisation and culture, with essays on Indian spirituality, religion, art, literature, and polity. Sri Aurobindo began the 'Foundations' series as an appreciative review of Sir John Woodroffe's book, 'Is India Civilised?', continued it with a rebuttal of the hostile criticisms of William Archer in 'India and Its Future', and concluded it with his own estimation of India's civilisation and culture. In Sri Aurobindo's view India is one of the greatest of the world's civilisations because of its high spiritual aim and the effective manner in which it has impressed this aim on the forms and rhythms of its life. A spiritual aspiration was the governing force of this culture , he wrote, its core of thought, its ruling passion. Not only did it make spirituality the highest aim of life, but it even tried...to turn the whole of life towards spirituality. Sri Aurobindo held that an aggressive defence of India culture was necessary to counter the invasion of the predominantly materialistic modern Western culture. His Foundations is precisely such a defence. Contents: Part I: The Issue; Is India Civilised?; Part II: A Rationalistic Critic on Indian Culture; Part III: A Defence of Indian Culture; Indian Culture and External Influence; The Renaissance in India. Subjects: Indology, Philosophy, Religion, Political Thought, Art, Literature.

These essays explore the blending of structural and historical approaches to American Indian anthropology that characterizes the perspective developed by the late Fred Eggan and his students at the University of Chicago. They include studies of kinship and social organization, politics, religion, law, ethnicity, and art. Many reflect Eggan's method of controlled comparison, a tool for reconstructing social and cultural change over time. Together these essays make substantial descriptive contributions to American Indian anthropology, presenting contemporary interpretations of diverse groups from the Hudson Bay Inuit in the north to the Highland Maya of Chiapas in the south. The collection will serve as an introduction to Native American social and cultural anthropology for readers interested in the dynamics of Indian social life.

This book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation. The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making. This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.

Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics brings together scholars from across the globe to provide diverse perspectives on the continuing impact of the 1947 division of India on the eve of independence from the British Empire. The Partition caused a million deaths and displaced well over 10 million people. The trauma of brutal violence and displacement still haunts the survivors as well as their children and grandchildren. Nearly 70 years after this cataclysmic event, Revisiting India’s Partition explores the impact of the “Long Partition,” a concept developed by Vazira Zamindar to underscore the ongoing effects of the 1947 Partition upon all South Asian nations. In our collection, we extend and expand Zamindar’s notion of the Long Partition to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities throughout the South Asian diaspora. The nineteen interdisciplinary essays in this book provide a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, communities, and regions in South Asia that have received scant attention in previous scholarship. In their individual essays, contributors offer new engagements on South Asia in relation to several topics, including decolonization and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes and terrorism, and nationalism. This book is dedicated to covering areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of how Sindh and Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma call for special attention in coming to terms with memory, culture and politics surrounding the Partition.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

A Nobel Laureate offers a dazzling new book about his native country India is a country with many distinct traditions, widely divergent customs, vastly different convictions, and a veritable feast of viewpoints. In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen draws on a lifetime study of his country's history and culture to suggest the ways we must understand India today in the light of its rich, long argumentative tradition. The millenia-old texts and interpretations of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, agnostic, and atheistic Indian thought demonstrate, Sen reminds us, ancient and well-respected rules for conducting debates and disputations, and for appreciating not only the richness of India's diversity but its need for toleration. Though Westerners have often perceived India as a place of endless spirituality and unreasoning mysticism, he underlines its long tradition of skepticism and reasoning, not to mention its secular contributions to mathematics, astronomy, linguistics, medicine, and political economy. Sen discusses many aspects of India's rich intellectual and political heritage, including philosophies of governance from Kautilya's and Ashoka's in the fourth and third centuries BCE to Akbar's in the 1590s; the history and continuing relevance of India's relations with China more than a millennium ago; its old and well-organized calendars; the films of Satyajit Ray and the debates between Gandhi and the visionary poet Tagore about India's past, present, and future. The success of India's democracy and defense of its secular politics depend, Sen argues, on understanding and using this rich argumentative tradition. It is also essential to removing the inequalities (whether of caste, gender, class, or community) that mar Indian life, to stabilizing the now precarious conditions of a nuclear-armed subcontinent, and to correcting what Sen calls the politics of deprivation. His invaluable book concludes with his meditations on pluralism, on dialogue and dialectics in the pursuit of social justice, and on the nature of the Indian identity.

A commitment to modernity is the underlying theme of this volume. Through essays that are interpretive and theoretical, the author seeks to situate the modern in contemporary cultural practice. She sets up an ideological vantage point to view modernism along its multiple tracks in India and the third world.The essays divide into three sections. The first two sections, Artists and ArtWork and Film/Narratives, raise questions of authorship, genre, and contemporary features of national culture that materialize into an aesthetic in the Indian context. The last section, Frames of Reference, formalizes the polemical options developed across the book. The essays here propose resistance to the depoliticization of narratives, and affirm an open-ended engagement with the avant-garde. They explore the possibility of art practice finding its own signifying space that is still a space for radical transformation.Geeta Kapur is an independent art critic and curator living in New Delhi. Her extensive publications on modern Indian art include the book Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978), exhibition catalogues and monographs on artists. She is currently writing a monograph on Tyeb Mehta. Her essays on cultural criticism have been widely presented in forums of art history and cultural studies. Her curatorial work includes the show Bombay/Mumbai 1992 2001 in the multi-part exhibition titled Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis , at Tate Modern, London, in 2001. Geeta Kapur is a founder-editor of the Journal of Arts & Ideas and advisory editor to Third Text. She has held research fellowships at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and Clare Hall, Cambridge University. For the past three decades, [Geeta Kapur s] has been the singular dominant presence in the field to a point that her writings alone seem to have constituted the whole field of modern Indian art theory and criticism. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Biblio (Delhi), May June 2001. Geeta Kapur is a magisterial presence in the sphere of modern Indian art. [The] insistence on the primacy of bearing witness to creative practice has been the leitmotif of Kapur s work. . . . Kapur s contribution . . . is best understood by reflection on the radical change that her activity has brought about in Indian art criticism. Ranjit Hoskote, Art India (Mumbai), Vol. VI, 1, 2001. When Was Modernism is a book of essays: imaginative, interpretive, argumentative, polemical, political and, in the combined sense of all these, historical. . . . [It] provides an instance of passionate engagement that, at its best moments, verges on the poetic. Chaitanya Sambrani, ART AsiaPacific (Australia), Issue 30, 2001.