Articles on political leaders from Vidarbha, Maharashtra.

Highlights the state of affairs in nine districts of the erstwhile Central Provinces and Berar, alongwith the interpretation of unknown facts, enlarging it from objective empiricism to historicism on the basis of sociological and historical perspectives. Salient Features (i) It identifies the changeability of the educational pattern from indigenous nature to modern perspectives at all levels. (ii) It highlights the emergence of leadership, new values, nationalism and freedom struggle and also shows how education works as condition, instrument and as an effect of social change in the region. (iii) It explains the extent of adoption and non-adoption of educational facilities at all levels in the context of socio-cultural conditions. (iv) It reveals how English models were initiated too slavishly, students were being crammed with undigested knowledge and teachers obsessed with results. (v) It highlights the Hitavada’s relentless crusade for a separate university, forecast of Jabalpur and Amravati Universities and demand for more autonomy in the province. (vi) It shows how the period of four decades in question transformed a society. (vii) It refers over-all educational backwardness of females, low-castes and aboriginal tribes with a growing assertion of claims to social and political recognition. (viii) It reveals how minorities’ interest in education became manifest through conferences and C.P. Legislative Council. (ix) It highlights positional and structural changes occurred due to education. In short, this book shows how poor ‘peripheral’ society of Vidarbha could make headway on the guidelines of ‘core’ societies and achieve the objective of ‘sustainable development’ through educational expansion.

This book is, obviously based on primary source of information. Certain facts were duly corroborated by other sources. It has been objectively analysed, properly interpreted and systematically arranged in a consolidated form. It would be useful as a ready reference to the scholars, interested in undertaking intensive research on individual leaders, and their role in the movement. It would be beneficial to those activists who prefer to take lessons from their past. Therefore, the book is of great value.

In Sound Alignments, a transnational group of scholars explores the myriad forms of popular music that circulated across Asia during the Cold War. Challenging the conventional alignments and periodizations of Western cultural histories of the Cold War, they trace the routes of popular music, examining how it took on new meanings and significance as it traveled across Asia, from India to Indonesia, Hong Kong to South Korea, China to Japan. From studies of how popular musical styles from the Americas and Europe were adapted to meet local exigencies to how socialist-bloc and nonaligned Cold War organizations facilitated the circulation of popular music throughout the region, the contributors outline how music forged and challenged alliances, revolutions, and countercultures. They also show how the Cold War's legacy shapes contemporary culture, particularly in the ways 1990s and 2000s J-pop and K-pop are rooted in American attempts to foster economic exchange in East Asia in the 1960s.Throughout, Sound Alignments demonstrates that the experiences of the Cold War in Asia were as diverse and dynamic as the music heard and performed in it. Contributors. Marié Abe, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Paola Iovene, Nisha Kommattam, Jennifer Lindsay, Kaley Mason, Anna Schultz, Hyunjoon Shin, C. J. W.-L. Wee, Hon-Lun (Helan) Yang, Christine R. Yano, Qian Zhang

This book presents multi-faceted images of religious experience in the Marathi-speaking region of India. In addition to Irawati Karve's classic, "On the Road," about her pilgrimage to Pandharpur, there are three essays by Karve that appear in English for the first time. Here is possession by gods and ghosts, an actual sermon by an inspired saint in the traditional bhajan style, and an autobiographical account of the religious nationalism of the militant R.S.S. These are engaging, true-to-life accounts of the lives of individual Hindus. Essays and imaginative literature, a poem, and a short story interplay the ideas, concepts, personalities, practices, rituals, and deities of Hinduism in a surprisingly coherent manner.

First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"This book is about the deceptively simple question: when Hindu devotional or bhakti traditions welcomed marginalized people-women, low castes, and Dalits-were they promoting social equality? This the modern formulation of the bhakti-caste question. It is what Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had in mind when he concluded that the saints promoted spiritual equality but did not transform society. While taking Ambedkar's judgment seriously, when viewed in the context of intellectual history and social practice, the bhakti-caste question is more complex. This book dives deeply in Marathi sources to explore how one tradition in western India worked out the relationship between bhakti and caste on its own terms. Food and eating together were central to this. As stories about saints and food changed while moving across manuscripts, theatrical plays, and films, the bhakti-caste relationship went from being a strategically ambiguous riddle to a question that expected-and received-answers. Shared Devotion, Shared Food demonstrates the value of critical commensality to understand how people carefully negotiate their ethical ideals with social practices. Food's capacity to symbolize many things made it made an ideal site for debating bhakti's implications about caste differences. In the Vārkarītradition, strategically deployed ambiguity and the resonating of stories across media over time developed an ideology of inclusive difference-not social equality in the modern sense, but an alternative holistic view of society"--