Claude Markovits

Society and Circulation: Mobile People and Itinerant Cultures in South Asia, 1750-1950 - Anthem South Asian Studies Claude Markovits

Jacket Description/Back: The idea of an "eternal India," based on stable and unchanging villages, has been in disarray for at least two decades. However, having demolished this myth, historians have been rather less able to construct an alternative vision. This volume sets out to do just that, using the idea of "circulation" in relation to South Asia in the colonial period. It comprises a set of complementary essays which deal with merchant circulation, pilgrimages, cartography, policing, labor mobility, and the movement of itinerant groups from colonial administrators to wandering bards, demonstrating that the South Asia of this period was made and remade by changing patterns and the logic of circulation. Once this perspective is integrated into the analysis of society, new and disturbing questions emerge on issues such as culture, identity and ethnogenesis, which are normally treated in the context of fixed and stable societies. The essays in this volume - written by some of the leading authorities in South Asian history - break new ground in suggesting the outlines of a different framework for historical analysis. This volume will interest not only South Asianists, but also those interested in historical method as well as wider comparative perspectives on early modern and contemporary history. Biographical Note: Claude Markovitz and Jacques Pouchepadass both hold the position of Directeur de Recherche at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Paris. Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes en Science Sociales, Paris. Table of Contents: List of Contributors; Preface; 1. Introduction: Circulation and Society under Colonial Rule; 2. Circulation and the Emergence of Modern Mapping: Great Britain and Early Colonial India, 1764-1820; Labour Circulation: Labour Circulation between Sri Lanka and South India in Historical Perspective; 4. Circulation through Seafaring: Indian Seamen, 1890-1945; Pattern of Circulation among Merchants: Merchant Circulation in South Asia (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries): The Rise of Pan-Indian Merchant Networks; 6. Predicaments of Mobility: Peddlers and Itinerants in Nineteenth-century Northwestern India; The State and Circulation: 7. Circulation and Authority: Police, Public Space and Territorial Control in the Punjab, 1861-1920; 8. Intinerant Kings and Touring Officials: Circulation as a Modality of Power in India, 1700-1947; Tellers of Tales, Sellers of Tales: Bhojpuri Peddlers in Northern India; 10. Circulation, Piety and Innovation: Recounting Travels in Early Nineteenth-century South IndiaMarc Notes: Originally published: 2003.; The essays in this volume, written by some of the leading authorities in South Asian history, are ground breaking in suggesting the outlines of a different framework for historical analysis. Publisher Marketing: The essays in this volume, written by some of the leading authorities in South Asian history, are ground breaking in suggesting the outlines of a different framework for historical analysis.

Contributor Bio:  Markovits, Claude fm.author_biographical_note1Contributor Bio:  Pouchepadass, Jacques National center for scientific research, parisContributor Bio:  Subrahmanyam, Sanjay Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a Distinguished Professor of History, and the Navin and Pratima Doshi Endowed Chair in Pre-Modern Indian History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as founding Director of the Center for India and South Asia from 2005 to 2011. Educated at the University of Delhi and the Delhi School of Economics, he held positions at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the University of Oxford before joining the UCLA faculty. In 2012, he received the Infosys Prize in the humanities, and in 2013, he was elected to the chair in Histoire Globale de la Premiere Modernite at the College de France in Paris. He was Joint Managing Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review for over a decade, besides serving on the boards of a number of other journals in the US, UK, France, Portugal, and elsewhere. He is the author or editor of many articles and nearly thirty books that have been translated into multiple languages, including The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 1700: A Political and Economic History (1993), The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (Cambridge University Press, 2007).