Review of the Changing Gaze

Journal of Social Issues and Development, 2023

The present paper looks at the Issues and trends in the writing of the history of the Himalayas with special focus on Uttarakhand and highlights some of the areas that need special focus in today’s context. This is attempted by trying to locate the major strands that have created a paradigm of the Himalayas.The word Himalayas means the abode of snow in Sanskrit and is the highest range of mountains in the world. They form the northern boundary of the Indian subcontinent and run over 2700 km through Kashmir, northern India including Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan and southern Tibet. History is replete with examples of how hordes of diverse ethno linguistic communities crossed over the Himalayan ranges into the subcontinent. It is from the Himalayas came the pre-Aryans and the successive waves of Scythians and Islamic invaders. The socio-cultural norms and ways of life having their origin in and beyond the Himalayas have influenced the people’s life patterns, especially the religious system of the land from earliest times to present day. Over the years much has been written on this region by social scientists and geographers. Therefore, any new writing on the Himalayas is both an interpretative exercise and also a compilation of a new corpus and where both thedistinctions between the primary and the secondary sources are blurred we constantly use new categories with the benefit of hindsight. Both geographical and ethnographic studies have been baffled on account of the remote location, difficult terrain, and extreme ruggedness of the region.

Anusandhanika Vol. IX No. I , 2011

Literature of Ethnicities: “The Underbelly of History: A Subaltern Reading of the Tribal and the Pre-historic in Mahashweta's Devi’s "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the modern concept of the nation state, based on the discourse of progress is continually challenged from spaces that are silenced by the official versions of History. While the modern state is valorized by a rationalistic discourse that insists on the desirability of the nation-state on grounds of democratic principles, these disruptive spaces challenge these very ideological assumptions and subvert the ensuing cultural indoctrination. While such a discursive resistance is being focussed on in the works of the Subaltern Historians in theory, its manifestation in the realm of imaginative literature is relatively less conspicuous.

Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 2019

Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2002

Indian Historical Review, 2020

The paper analyses the formation of state-polities in Central India, where according to Ashokan edicts āṭavī tribes had been present in the third century BCE. From several of these tribes, āṭavīka-rājās (forest kings) arose by the fourth century CE and the Gupta monarch Samudragupta reduced them to the position of servants. The paper argues that the two ruling houses - the Parivrājaka and the Uchchakalpa, rose to power in the second half of the fifth century CE in eastern Madhya Pradesh from āṭavīka background and erected their state apparatus similar to that of their overlord Gupta rulers. In the epigraphs of the Parivrājaka rulers, Ḍāhala region, comprising much of eastern Madhya Pradesh with Tripurī (near Jabalpur) as its centre, is mentioned as a part of their rājya. The Parivrājaka and the Uchchakalpa rājyas had common boundaries and the epigraphs indicate the presence of some territorial conflict between these two. The paper proposes that both of these ruling houses, having being subordinated to the Guptas, made land grants to brahmanas and temples for the integration of their territories. The goddess Pişṭapurikādēvī that received land grants from both the Parivrājaka and the Uchchakalpa rulers, this paper argues that had been a local tribal goddess, which was absorbed into brahmanical pantheons as Lakṣmī- the consort of god Viṣṇu due to the efforts of a non-brahmana individual, Chhōḍugōmika. The state formation, accompanied by cult assimilation in central India therefore had been a complex and multilayered process.

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1999

Indologica Taurinensia , 2014

REFLECTIONS ON THE FATE OF NORTHWESTERN BRAHMINS * 0. In this presentation I will first discuss what, as I see it, happened to the Brahmins of the extreme north-western parts of the Indian subcontinent during the three centuries separating Alexander of Macedonia's incursions (326-325 BCE) from the beginning of the Common Era. After that, I will consider a form of ritual practice that was apparently in use in the northwest at the time of Alexander, and the way it finds expression in surviving Vedic and para-Vedic literature. 1. There were Brahmins in the northwestern regions from an early date onward. Many Vedic texts, including most notably the Ṛgveda, were composed in the region more or less overlapping with modern Panjab and surroundings, including eastern Afghanistan. 1 More interesting for our present purposes is that the famous Sanskrit grammarian Pāṇini lived in Gandhāra. 2 What is more, Michael Witzel has recently argued (2011) that Gandhāra played a central role in the formation of the Vedic canon.