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Malti Goel, Science Diplomacy for South Asian Countries: Insights and Breakthroughs. Springer Singapore, 2021, 214 pp. ISBN: 978-981-16-3024-8 (Hardcover). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Historians are generally coy and diffident when it comes to engaging with the moral question despite it being a critical aspect of doing history. However, historians of empire cannot evade the moral question given the ethical dilemmas that imperialism posed for the men at its helm. To portray the colonists as hypocrites is too facile and cynical an explanation. So, what allowed the British colonists to manage the conscience that they indeed possessed? As Priya Satia boldly argues in Time's Monster: How History Makes History, the answer to this question resides in historicism, which became the new ethical idiom from the nineteenth century onward. It enabled the British colonists to assuage their conscience and made the empire an ethically thinkable reality. It helped whitewash colonial violence and generate public acceptance for colonization. The historians' power lay in anointing history as providence and in using it to paper over the cracks in the British conscience. Being able to narrate was itself a manifestation of power. It was only after the Second World War that history renounced its pact with power and a reimagination of the historical idiom emerged. Various shades of South Asian and Caribbean anti‐colonial leaders and postcolonial writers began to think beyond the historicist category of the empire. These efforts to dismantle the empire's historical narratives were paralleled by the writings of British historian E. P. Thompson, although he remained tied to the idea of history as progress. The moral question, however, remains unsettled. It endures for present‐day historians because the teleserials, nostalgic period dramas, and "great men" histories continue to hold sway over the public mind, generate debates about the "benefits" of the empire, and feed Britain's anti‐immigrant sentiments. Satia's book lies at the intersection of three sets of historiographies—histories of British political thought, postcolonial writings that highlight alternate conceptions of the past and the significance of orality, memory, and community history, and, lastly, histories of violence—all of which engage the moral question in some form or another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A review of Padma Kaimal, Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space, Seattle: The University of Washington Press, 2020, 288 pages, 62 b&w illus., 19 color plates, ISBN: 9780295747774. An important contribution to South Asian architectural history, this book is well worth reading for both its content and methodology. Through a complex interweaving of thick description and analysis, the author destabilizes traditional ways of approaching temples and invites readers to encounter the goddess through multiple historical frames. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shah Mahmoud Hanifi (Ed.), Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia: Pioneer of British Colonial Rule (London: Hurst & Company, 2019), xxxviii + 418 pp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir By Saiba Varma. Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi By Dwaipayan Banerjee. [Extracted from the article]

Sudhir Chella Rajan, A Social Theory of Corruption: Notes from the Indian Subcontinent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 384 pp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hindi-Urdu controversy had only grown in the preceding decades, which suggests that the debates around language and community in the magazine were more diverse than Dubrow's chapter suggests. In chapter 1, Dubrow outlines the emergence of a new class of professional Hindi-Urdu authors in the late nineteenth century who used the new technology of serial publication to establish themselves as literary authorities and as sources of income. Nevertheless, Dubrow's fascinating study of the interactions among Sarshar, the I Avadh Punch i circle, and the Urdu reading public is a welcome addition to the literature on Urdu print culture. [Extracted from the article]

As with Mafia businesses elsewhere 'the world of crime does not exist in an alternative domain to that of the state but is deeply entangled with the actually existing state' (p. 1). The title of the book brings to mind the economic history of the American west defined by a 'bourgeois settler history and a radical history of subordination and primitive accumulation' in which the reach of the state was minimal (p. 2). [Extracted from the article]

Although most of the case studies are limited to the Indian subcontinent, this volume still mounts a powerful theoretical case in favor of a renewed transnational approach to heritage, mounting a direct challenge to linear views of religious and cultural development. And if this small book makes no attempt to be all-encompassing and overambitious in this approach, it nevertheless teems with informative footnotes that are a stand-out feature of the book. I first opened this volume roving past Siem Reap, a few hundred miles away from where, a decade earlier, the Thai-Cambodian border battles flared over the Preah Vihear temple. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Historische Zeitschrift is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Sumit Guha's History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 develops important arguments about the public significance of historical knowledge and the essential role of historians in public life. All societies need collective memories to sustain their cultural identities, as Guha shows in this wide‐ranging account of how such memories have been constructed in South Asian societies since the thirteenth century. The knowledge of historical experts is increasingly challenged or derided by contemporary social groups and political activists, who circulate their own historical narratives via new networks of communication. Political uses of historical knowledge are not new, however, as Guha shows in detailed accounts of how Hindu, Muslim, and British imperial regimes all used historical narratives to justify their own power. He also explains how other social groups challenged official historical narratives with their own popular stories about the past. This book contributes to recent work in global intellectual history by comparing similarities in the historical practices of premodern Europe and South Asia, discussing the cross‐cultural exchanges in colonial‐era institutions, and describing postcolonial challenges to European ideas. Guha thus offers an insightful analysis of how social and political forces influence and respond to the cloistered institutions that produce historical knowledge and construct collective memories. He concludes that evidence‐based historical narratives must be continually defended amid current public assaults on historical knowledge in both South Asia and the United States. More generally, Guha's book suggests the need for ongoing analysis of how public events, social conflicts, and new communication systems can reshape or discredit the work of historical experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ISBN: 9783030795795 Love has a long relationship with revolution, not least in the European tradition, where the political revolutions of the eighteenth century that opened up greater liberties to a broader range of people came to be so closely tied to affective transformations in the family. I Love and Revolution i contributes to our understanding of this relationship with a particular attention to anti-colonial and postcolonial political movements in South Asia and southern Africa across the twentieth century. [Extracted from the article]

Braithwaite and D'Costa's Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peacebuilding in South Asia delves into the impact and violent legacies of war and violence in South Asia, and selected other areas around the globe. The authors argue that given certain conditions acts of violence are able to cascade throughout society as a response or reaction to violence. Yet, just as violence can proliferate across time and space, given the proper conditions and willing actors peace and non-violent responses to violence can also cascade. In this article I review Braithwaite and D'Costa's new book, giving particular attention to the 10 propositions they develop to explain the cascading of violence, and what can be done to prevent such events. These propositions are the key outcomes of the authors' work around war and peacebuilding in South Asian countries. I conclude with brief thoughts on the empirical, theoretical and practical implications of these propositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]