South Asia

The macro-region of South Asia – including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – today supports one of the world’s greatest concentrations of cities, but as James Heitzman argues in the first comprehensive treatment of urban South Asia, this has been the case for at least 5,000 years. With a strong emphasis on the production of space and periodic excursions into literature, art and architecture, religion and public culture, this interdisciplinary study is a valuable text for students and scholars interested in comparative history, urban studies, and the social sciences.

This book offers a comprehensive and accessible treatment of recent academic and policy studies of basic education in South Asia.

The History of the Book in South Asia covers not only the various modern states that make up South Asia today but also a multitude of languages and scripts. For centuries it was manuscripts that dominated book production and circulation, and printing technology only began to make an impact in the late eighteenth century. Print flourished in the colonial period and in particular lithographic printing proved particularly popular in South Asia both because it was economical and because it enabled multi-script printing. There are now vibrant publishing cultures in the nation states of South Asia, and the essays in this volume cover the whole range from palm-leaf manuscripts to contemporary print culture.

This pioneering work traces the emergence of the modern and contemporary art of Muslim South Asia in relation to transnational modernism and in light of the region's intellectual, cultural, and political developments. Art historian Iftikhar Dadi here explores the art and writings of major artists, men and women, ranging from the late colonial period to the era of independence and beyond. He looks at the stunningly diverse artistic production of key artists associated with Pakistan, including Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Zainul Abedin, Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha, Sadequain, Rasheed Araeen, and Naiza Khan. Dadi shows how, beginning in the 1920s, these artists addressed the challenges of modernity by translating historical and contemporary intellectual conceptions into their work, reworking traditional approaches to the classical Islamic arts, and engaging the modernist approach towards subjective individuality in artistic expression. In the process, they dramatically reconfigured the visual arts of the region. By the 1930s, these artists had embarked on a sustained engagement with international modernism in a context of dizzying social and political change that included decolonization, the rise of mass media, and developments following the national independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Bringing new insights to such concepts as nationalism, modernism, cosmopolitanism, and tradition, Dadi underscores the powerful impact of transnationalism during this period and highlights the artists' growing embrace of modernist and contemporary artistic practice in order to address the challenges of the present era.

This report analyzes how closer regional connectivity and economic integration between South Asia and Southeast Asia can benefit both regions, with a focus on the role played by infrastructure and public policies in facilitating this process. It examines major developments in South Asian–Southeast Asian trade and investment, economic cooperation, the role of economic corridors, and regional cooperation initiatives. In particular, it identifies significant opportunities for strengthening these integration efforts as a result of the recent opening up of Myanmar in political, economic, and financial terms. This is particularly the case for land-based transportation—highways and railroads—and energy trading. The report’s focus is on connectivity in a broad sense, covering both hardware and software, including investment in infrastructure, energy trading, trade facilitation, investment financing, and support for national and regional policies.

There seems to be no end to the growing number of victims of civil war, terrorism, guerrilla warfare and military repression on the Indian subcontinent, despite the absence of interstate wars over the past ten years. These conflicts often involve armed paramilitary militias or insurgents of one sort or other, and it is their ideology, sociology and strategies that the contributors to this book investigate. Whether based on ideological motives--such as the Maoists and Naxalites in Nepal and India--or invested with a fundamentalist religious mission--the Hindu nationalist Bajrang Dal in India, the Sunni SSP in Pakistan, or Islamist militias in Bangladesh--all these movements use violence to exercise social control, challenge the authority of the state and impose their own particular worldview. Although they seek also to undermine the state, depriving it of the monopoly on legitimate violence that it supposedly holds, governments are equally adept at exploiting them to make them serve their own ends. For the authorities, these movements can be useful tools for their pursuit of both moral and social order. However delegating power to such groups for short term political gains can be an extremely risky enterprise, as demonstrated by Indira Gadhi's patronage of the Sikh militant group that later assassinated her. Armed Militas of South Asia is the first comprehensive book of its sort and will be required reading for all those interested in the politics of the subcontinent and Myanmar.

A wide-ranging survey of the Indian sub-continent, Modern South Asia gives an enthralling account of South Asian history. After sketching the pre-modern history of the subcontinent, the book concentrates on the last three centuries from c.1700 to the present. Jointly written by two leading Indian and Pakistani historians, Modern South Asia offers a rare depth of understanding of the social, economic and political realities of this region. This comprehensive study includes detailed discussions of: the structure and ideology of the British raj; the meaning of subaltern resistance; the refashioning of social relations along lines of caste class, community and gender; and the state and economy, society and politics of post-colonial South Asia The new edition includes a rewritten, accessible introduction and a chapter by chapter revision to take into account recent research. The second edition will also bring the book completely up to date with a chapter on the period from 1991 to 2002 and adiscussion of the last millennium in sub-continental history.

This volume explores ideas of home, belonging and memory in migration through the social realities of leaving and living. It discusses themes and issues such as locating migrant subjectivities and belonging; sociability and wellbeing; the making of a village; bondage and seasonality; dislocation and domestic labour; women and work; gender and religion; Bhojpuri folksongs; folk music; experience; and the city to analyse the social and cultural dynamics of internal migration in India in historical perspectives. Departing from the dominant understanding of migration as an aberration impelled by economic factors, the book focuses on the centrality of migration in the making of society. Based on case studies from an array of geo-cultural regions from across India, the volume views migrants as active agents with their own determinations of selfhood and location. Part of the series Migrations in South Asia, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of migration studies, refugee studies, gender studies, development studies, social work, political economy, social history, political studies, social and cultural anthropology, exclusion studies, sociology, and South Asian Studies.