Showing all 4 books
“Caste” is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe.
This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity ...
The history of human population is of interest when human beings are aware of the burden they place on the ecosystem. Asia has long contained a major fraction of world population and East and South Asia have accounted for most of that fraction. This book focuses on various aspects of the population of South Asia over the past twenty-five centuries.
Sumit Guha's introduction highlights debates in the population history of Asia. Europe and the Americas. This leads ...
The history of human population is of special interest when human beings are aware of the burden they place on the ecosystem. Asia has long contained a major fraction of world population and East and South Asia have accounted for most of that fraction. This book focuses on various aspects of the population of South Asia over the past twenty-five centuries. An introduction highlights debates in the population history of Asia. Europe and the Americas. This leads ...
In recent years, South Asia's legal history has attracted intense political debate. Contemporary controversies involving fundamental questions of governance and policy have turned on contested reconstructions of past legal arrangements. On the one hand various groups--including secularists, feminists and those endorsing divergent orthodoxies--have turned to historical evidence to support their visions of governance. On the other, every society in South Asia has ...