Region, Culture, and Politics in India
Contents: Introduction: I. Regions in history and literature: 1. Literature and the development of regional consciousness in medieval Kerala/Rich Freeman. 2. A philological approach to regional ideologies/Irina Glushkova. 3. Writing regional consciousness: Maratha history and regional identity in modern Maharashtra/Prachi Deshpande. 4. Self-definitions and otherness: contexts and sources of early imaginings in late-nineteenth-century Orissa/Bishnu N. Mohapatra. 5. Home away from home? The spatial politics of modern Tamil identity/Sumathi Ramaswamy. 6. The place of Mumbai: circles of urban identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries/Jim Masselos. II. Regions in imagination and ritual: 7. Religious geography and the multiplicity of regions in Maharashtra/Anne Feldhaus. 8. Celebrating allegiances, ambiguated belonging: regionality in festival and performance in Sringeri, South India/Leela Prasad. 9. Celebrating a region through historical commemoration/Daniel Jasper. 10. Inhabiting times and producing spaces/Sanjay Plashikar. III. Regions in politics: 11. Caste politics through the prism of region/Suhas Pashikar. 12. Regions and communities: social identities in contemporary Punjab/Surinder S. Jodhka. 13. The Hindi heartland: a region sacred to Hindus and Muslims/Rajendra Vora. 14. Regional politics, city conflicts and communal riots: Ahmedabad 1985-1986/Sujata Patel. Contributors.
"In recent decades the South Asian subcontinent has seen an often contentious nationalistic and regionalistic splintering which sometimes leads to horrifyingly bloody consequences. In India the process of transforming conceptual and cultural regions into administrative and political units continues to this day, with ever-more-refined regional identities becoming the basis for carving up larger states into smaller ones. For centuries there have also been many regions in India that provide a framework for people\'s cultural lives without attaining political salience.
This book presents a multidisciplinary study of the processes through which regions and regional consciousness get formed and maintained in India. The fourteen essays brought together here examine various modes through which people in different parts of India express, create, and foster a sense of their area as a distinct, coherent, and significant unit to which they belong in some important way. The modes examined include language, oral and written literature, festivals, pilgrimages, everyday rituals, domestic wall calendars, caste identity, religious identity, and political movements. The contributors to the volume belong to a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences: linguistics, literature, folklore, history, religious studies, sociology, and science. The regions they discuss range in location from Kerala to Punjab, and in size from a few square kilometers of the Sringeri area to the whole Hindi-speaking region of North India, with two essays focusing on a single city each." (jacket)
