Manohar Publishers and Distributors: 08/12/12

12 August, 2012

State, Society and Economy in the Twenty-First Century: Canada-India Perspectives

Shasrti Indo-Canadian Institute 40^th Anniversary Commemorative Volume

By- A.S. Narang (ed.)

The papers in the volume analyse the trends and patterns of relations between India and Canada in the context of both being poised to play an increasingly important role in the international arena. Both India and Canada are regional powers with a global leadership role. Canada, the second largest country in the world, and India, the second most populous, share a number of common values including a firm belief in democracy, the rule of law and respect for pluralism. The two are among the rare examples of successful federal polities with a parliamentary system of government.

While during the first ten years of India’s Independence the two countries had developed cordial and close relations to the extent of being called ‘Indo-Canadian entente’, the later decades of the twentieth century witnessed almost a freezing of those. The twenty-first century has begun with a renewed interest in the two countries. There is great scope in areas of economic and trade cooperation as well as security-military and non-military- issues including environment.

The essays in the volume bring out new trends in strengthening Indo-Canada relations and hope for a positive growth. At the same time they highlight the challenges in the way. The volume is part of the various efforts initiated to enhance political and cultural understanding between two different nations belonging to two different civilizations, but capable of contributing significantly in world affairs in a positive manner.

Amarjit S. Narang is Professor of Political Science at Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi and President, Shasrti Indo-Canadian Institute.

ISBN 978-81-7304-836-4 2009 398p. Rs.995/ Pounds 55

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South Asia in 2008 : A Review

By- Hernaikh Singh and Tridivesh Singh Maini (eds.)

South Asia in 2008: A Review is a collection of papers written by researchers at the Institute of South Asian Studies in 2008. Focusing on significant developments in South Asia, this publication highlights the key issues that dominated the news in the subcontinent last year.

It examines positive developments in the South Asian region such as the return of democracy in several of the countries, economic growth and cooperation. These papers also cover some of the fundamental challenges facing the region, including terrorism, the economic slowdown and obstacles to socio-economic development among countries in the region. Attention is also given to South Asia’s relationship with the principal partners such as China, Russia, the United States and Southeast Asia.

This publication is intended as a comprehensive and current reference to the complex issues that shape the political, economic and social landscape of South Asia.

Hernaikh Singh is an Associate Director at the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), National University of Singapore (NUS). He started his career with the then-Trade Development Board (now International Enterprise Singapore). He then joined the Singapore International Foundation before coming on board at the Institute.

Tridivesh Singh Maini is a Research Associate at ISAS.

ISBN 978-81-7304-830-2 2009 496p. Rs.995/ Pounds 65

Society, Religion and Patriarchy: Exploring Medieval Punjab Through Hir Waris

Society, Religion and Patriarchy: Exploring Medieval Punjab Through Hir Waris

By- Ishwar Dayal Gaur

The kind of social history of medieval Punjab, which has been attempted in this book, does not subscribe to a narrow communitarian emplotment of the people of the region. The author, has endeavoured to construct a fresh profile of the Punjabis from their own socio-cultural point of view.

The book involves investigations of the lived experiences and representations of everyday life of the people of medieval Punjab, who in the colonial and post-colonial historiography are presented as ‘Muslim’, ‘Sikh’ and ‘Hindu’ Punjabis. Gaur has assigned them a prefix ‘Punjabi’ and hence has presented the social and cultural profile of the ‘Punjabi’ Muslims, instead of reading them as ‘Muslim’ Punjabis. The book reveals the evolution of socio-cultural fusion in the land of five rivers, which a student of history discovers by employing folklore/people’s literature as source-material. Thus the selection of Hir Waris, as an unconventional source of history writing, is a methodological departure, particularly when intervention of political ideologies in the craft of writing social history has been active since long, and when the semantic of culture has shifted from diversities to difference.

The present study does not simply ‘reproduce’ the medieval Punjabi society as ‘reflected’ in Hir Waris; rather it seeks to unfold the folk legend of Hir-Ranjha in the wider political, social, cultural and religious contexts of medieval Punjab. The volume suggests that a society, its folklore and history are organically linked with one another.

Ishwar Dayal Gaur is Reader in History at the Department of Evening Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. He specializes in culture, literature and folklore. He has versified the cultural mosaic of Punjab in two collections of poetry.

ISBN 978-81-7304-826-5 2009 260p. Rs.675/ Pounds 45

Notions of Life in Death and Dying : The Dead in Tribal Middle India

Notions of Life in Death and Dying : The Dead in Tribal Middle India

By- Eva Reichel

This anthropological study, sparked off by fieldwork among the Ho of Orissa and Jharkhand, is about ‘The Dead in Tribal Middle India’ who continue to be involved in the lives of the living.

The structured ceremonious treatment of corpse and soul of the dead and the symbolic interaction of the mourners - kin and affines – provide for the actors’ orientation and guidance from ritual. The public expression of the emotional response towards the ‘organic event’ in grieving is socially informed and life-oriented as much as death-centred. It is indicative of a culture-specific concept which conceives of death as a drawn out tranformative process and of the dead as integrally linked to the living and rooted in a known cosmic - societal perspective. The social obligations enacted in the drama of death and life contribute to reproducing tribal society, revealing marked differences from the radically decentred Western notion of the human condition with its focus on the individual as representing the supreme value.

This volume explores the cultural logic surrounding the conceptual unity and continuity of life, death and afterlife by examining the social and ideational setting of tribal middle India. The main body of the study is an analysis of the meaning of death as conveyed in the ethnographic literature on the Hill Juang of Keonjhar, the Sora in eastern Orissa, the Koya of Malkangiri, the Muria Gond of Bastar and the Ho of Singhbum and Mayurbhanj. The material on the Ho discussed here has so far not been published or is only locally accessible. Apart from anthropologists and sociologists, this volume will be of considerable interest to South Asian scholars, especially those working on Orissa and Jharkhand.

Born in 1948, Eva Reichel studied English language and literature and worked as a teacher. After retiring she read social anthropology at the Free University of Berlin where she currently is a lecturer at the Institute of Ethnology.

ISBN 81-7304-823-4 2009 124p. Rs.425/ Pounds 35

MANOHAR PUBLISHERS & DISTRIBUTORS
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Medicine, Disease and Ecology in Colonial India: The Deccan Plateau in the Nineteenth Century

By- Laxman D. Satya

Colonial Deccan like the rest of British India had all the social, economic, and material ingredients for the proliferation of epidemic diseases. Its population lived in the most unsanitary conditions, consumed contaminated water, and was crowded for space, living in wretched houses, extremely poverty stricken, sunk in debt, and suffered from serious food shortage and malnutrition. Diseases claimed lives on a regular basis even in the ‘officially’ designated non-famine and non-drought years. Failure to look at the material condition of the masses was in fact a reflection of not only the oppressive nature of British imperialism in India but also the insensitivity of European colonizers. The existence of mass poverty and its denial by the colonial state made the situation worse. This book argues that the reason for dysentery, diarrhoea, and bowel complaints was really malnutrition, undernourishments, and the general poverty of the masses.

Even though all the diseases were intimately associated with colonial modernization, yet the British imperial medical establishment continued to blindly adhere to the non-contagion miasmatic ideology. When the imperial state covered hundreds of miles of roads and railways, diseases like cholera, malaria, smallpox, plague, influenza, etc., travelled and proliferated everywhere. The absence of proper infrastructural response from the imperial establishment, made these epidemics even more deadly. This long-awaited study shows how the infrastructual changes brought about by British colonialism created eological conditions for the diseases to become epidemic.

Laxman D. Satya is a Professor of History at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. This is his third book on the subject of British imperialism, political economy, agrarian, and environmental history.

ISBN 81-7304-314-0 2009 310p. Rs.775/ Pounds 50