Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires PDF Download

Author: William R. Pinch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521851688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 13

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Book Description
This 2006 book is an innovative study of warrior asceticism in India from the 1500s to the present.

Author: William R. Pinch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107406377
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Many people assume, largely because of Gandhi's legacy, that Hinduism is a religion of non-violence. In this 2006 book William R. Pinch shows just how wrong this assumption is. Using the life of Anupgiri Gosain, a Hindu ascetic who lived at the end of the eighteenth century, he demonstrates that Hindu warrior ascetics were an important component of the South Asian military labor market in the medieval and early modern Indian past, and crucial to the rise of British imperialism. Today, they occupy a prominent place in modern Indian imaginations, ironically as romantic defenders of a Hindu India against foreign invasion, even though they are almost totally absent from Indian history. William R. Pinch's innovative and gloriously composed book sets out to piece together the story of the rise and demise of warrior asceticism in India from the 1500s to the present. It will appeal to students of religion and historians of empire.

Author: Alan Tritton
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786726556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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This is the story of two Scotsmen, Baillie and Edmonstone, who went out to India in 1782 and 1791 respectively, to earn their fortune. Neil Edmonstone rose through the ranks to be appointed the Acting Governor-General of India, Secretary of the Secret, Foreign and Political Department and for more than 20 years the Chief Intelligence Officer of the Company. John Baillie was appointed the Political Agent, aged 30, for Bundelkhand, which he brought successfully under British control, before his appointment as British Resident at Lucknow in 1807. Both men had no less than 21 Anglo-Scottish and Scottish-Indian children, 9 of whom were all sent back to Inverness in Scotland to be educated and brought up by John's sister Margaret Baillie. This book tells us their stories as well as those of their parents.

Author: William R. Pinch
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520200616
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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In this compelling social history, William R. Pinch tackles one of the most important but most neglected fields of the colonial history of India: the relation between monasticism and caste. The highly original inquiry yields rich insights into the central structure and dynamics of Hindu society—insights that are not only of scholarly but also of great political significance. Perhaps no two images are more associated with rural India than the peasant who labors in an oppressive, inflexible social structure and the ascetic monk who denounces worldly concerns. Pinch argues that, contrary to these stereotypes, North India's monks and peasants have not been passive observers of history; they have often been engaged with questions of identity, status, and hierarchy—particularly during the British period. Pinch's work is especially concerned with the ways each group manipulated the rhetoric of religious devotion and caste to further its own agenda for social reform. Although their aims may have been quite different—Ramanandi monastics worked for social equity, while peasants agitated for higher social status—the strategies employed by these two communities shaped the popular political culture of Gangetic north India during and after the struggle for independence from the British.

Author: Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120815513
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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how spiritual healing works and how colours, tones, crystals and massage

Author: Robert Travers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139464167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Author: Milinda Banerjee
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110716656X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
This work explores how colonial India imagined human and divine figures to battle the nature and locus of sovereignty.

Author: Hermann Kulke
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415154820
Category : India
Languages : en
Pages : 406

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Book Description
Presenting a grand sweep of Indian history, this work covers antiquity to the later half of the 20th century. The authors examine the major political, social and cultural forces which have shaped the history of the Indian subcontinent. This third edition of the text has been updated to include current research as well as a revised preface, index and dateline.

Author: Valerie Stoker
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520965469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How did the patronage activities of India’s Vijayanagara Empire (c. 1346–1565) influence Hindu sectarian identities? Although the empire has been commonly viewed as a Hindu bulwark against Islamic incursion from the north or as a religiously ecumenical state, Valerie Stoker argues that the Vijayanagara court was selective in its patronage of religious institutions. To understand the dynamic interaction between religious and royal institutions in this period, she focuses on the career of the Hindu intellectual and monastic leader Vyasatirtha. An agent of the state and a powerful religious authority, Vyasatirtha played an important role in expanding the empire’s economic and social networks. By examining his polemics against rival sects in the context of his work for the empire, Stoker provides a remarkably nuanced picture of the relationship between religious identity and sociopolitical reality under Vijayanagara rule.

Author: D D Kosambi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000653471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
First published in 1965, The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in Historical Outline is a strikingly original work, the first real cultural history of India. The main features of the Indian character are traced back into remote antiquity as the natural outgrowth of historical process. Did the change from food gathering and the pastoral life to agriculture make new religions necessary? Why did the Indian cities vanish with hardly a trace and leave no memory? Who were the Aryans – if any? Why should Buddhism, Jainism, and so many other sects of the same type come into being at one time and in the same region? How could Buddhism spread over so large a part of Asia while dying out completely in the land of its origin? What caused the rise and collapse of the Magadhan empire; was the Gupta empire fundamentally different from its great predecessor, or just one more ‘oriental despotism’? These are some of the many questions handled with great insight, yet in the simplest terms, in this stimulating work. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, cultural studies, South Asian studies and ethnic studies.