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As states like Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, and many others embark on recent mandates to include Asian American and Pacific Islander content in K-12 classrooms, we consider what it means [...]

Seaports provide material foundations for globalization. In the long history of global mobile connectivity that now forms globalization, the Indian Ocean is the world's oldest arena of expansive long-distance sea travel. People have sailed monsoon winds among coastal environments connecting Europe, Africa, India, and China since prehistoric times. Indian Ocean ports grew in number, size, wealth, and permanence over the centuries and anchored the rise of seaborne empires connecting Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Modernity traveled among industrial port cities along with lower unit costs for shipping and a dramatically increasing scale of shipping in volume, value, distance, and speed. Capital investments in seaport infrastructure grew with the scale of mobility through ports connecting producers and consumers by land and sea in commodity chains that eventually embraced people around the world with increasingly intricate, expansive interdependence, and also with ever more entrenched spatial inequity. The result is the current global seaport space of interwoven connectivity strung along the coastlines of globalization on all the continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that contemporary Indian Jewish literature recovers a narrative of lost, Indigenous cosmopolitanism, which effectively reframes the history of the Indian subcontinent. More specifically, it contends that interreligious commensality, particularly between Jews and Muslims, forms the center of this cosmopolitan vision, thereby reimagining the home--rather than the public sphere--as the center of cosmopolitan experience. This gendered focus on food as a site for cultural syncretism and remembrance renders the home as a space that redefines Jewish identity and community, thereby challenging the patriarchal authority of both Jewish law and the Indian state. These texts (fiction, drama, poetry and creative nonfiction) preserve and transmit forms of Indian Jewish identity that are marginalized within India and little known by Jews outside the subcontinent. Despite the precipitous decline in the size of India's Jewish communities, that loss is not defined primarily by externally imposed trauma. Indian Jewish literature therefore offers a distinctive model for remembrance that also challenges contemporary truisms about relationships between Jews and others. The memory of past commensality offers a note of both caution and hope as contemporary Indian Jewish writers wrestle with Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Middle East, where the majority of Jews of Indian descent now reside., Jewish-Muslim relations have long been of interest to literary scholars. Recent work has considered the representation of Muslims and their relations with Jews and Jewishness in texts by such diverse [...]

What value does a leading historian of modern South Asia ascribe to bhasa literature? Meant as an introduction to a volume of papers dedicated to Dipesh Chakrabarty, this essay proposes to read through some of his work and draw out a couple of general responses to this central question. The first one concerns Chakrabarty's larger philosophical engagement with the condition of colonial modernity in India. In his treatment, bhasa literary corpus is a site of difference as well as belonging. He searches for the difference that marks Indian experience of colonial modernity in the literary. The value of bhasa, in this instance, lies in its ability to provide a ground for resistance to the uniform march of enlightenment and capitalist modernity. And, bhasa enables an awareness of historical difference precisely because it provides a sense of belonging. This sense of belongingness is closely tied to a place, a particular location as well as to a sense of everyday intimacy. As the hybrid site of difference as well as belonging, bhasa is then the constitutive cradle of what Chakrabarty calls 'History 2s'. The second one concerns Chakrabarty's more specific analysis of the evolution of history as an academic discipline in modern India. He delineates a sharp devaluation in the political worth of the literary that the rise of rational-scientific history writing brought about in the middle decades of the twentieth-century. As he studies the intellectual careers of particular historians, part of his intent is to elaborate on this process of devaluation. The essay situates this reading of Chakrabarty in a larger discursive context. It briefly looks at the work of some other scholars of modern South Asia who share these intellectual concerns, and seeks to create, as it were, a dialogue between Chakrabarty and others. The essay concludes by briefly introducing the papers in the volume. In different ways, they extend Chakrabarty's preoccupation with the relationship between history and literature, and with the subject of modernity in India at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Page 1 of 2 Books Agardi, Izabella. On the Verge of History: Life Stories of Rural Women from Serbia, Romania, and Hungary, 1920-2020. ibidem Press, 2022. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics [...]

This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term "hindu" over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. "Hindu" is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of "hindu" and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of "hindu," part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term "hindu"—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word "hindu" that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China and India's miraculous economic growth has undoubtedly improved the livelihoods of millions of people, but it has also increased demand for already scarce water resources in the region. The hydro-political relationship between the two countries is particularly interesting due to China’s hold of the Tibetan Plateau which houses the heads of most major rivers in the region. China’s general unwillingness to cooperate with their downstream neighbors has become cause for concern, especially for India’s growing economy and population. This study analyzes the quantitative economic and resource consumption changes of China and India since 1980 to demonstrate the sharp changes linked to export-oriented economic development. These data are supported by a holistic analysis of key domestic policy changes as well as current domestic water-related issues in order to fully grasp the current circumstances and hypothesize the potential for escalation to conflict. Using Feron’s rationalist framework, I analyze the key sources of conflict as credibility problems, incomplete information and the indivisible nature of water. These three issues work cyclically and feed into one another, any solution for the issue would have to acknowledge all three elements. This study suggests that domestic water efficiency improvements such as increased water-recycling and smarter irrigation infrastructure coupled with bilateral solutions like joint hydraulic projects on the Brahmaputra and codified data sharing agreements can foment cooperation between the nations. This thesis ultimately establishes a link between the globalization-led development in the region and India and China’s changing hydraulic needs in order to determine the actions necessary to avoid international conflict and ensure long-term water and energy security for both states.

This article argues that contemporary Indian Jewish literature recovers a narrative of lost, Indigenous cosmopolitanism, which effectively reframes the history of the Indian subcontinent. More specifically, it contends that interreligious commensality, particularly between Jews and Muslims, forms the center of this cosmopolitan vision, thereby reimagining the home--rather than the public sphere--as the center of cosmopolitan experience. This gendered focus on food as a site for cultural syncretism and remembrance renders the home as a space that redefines Jewish identity and community, thereby challenging the patriarchal authority of both Jewish law and the Indian state. These texts (fiction, drama, poetry and creative nonfiction) preserve and transmit forms of Indian Jewish identity that are marginalized within India and little known by Jews outside the subcontinent. Despite the precipitous decline in the size of India's Jewish communities, that loss is not defined primarily by externally imposed trauma. Indian Jewish literature therefore offers a distinctive model for remembrance that also challenges contemporary truisms about relationships between Jews and others. The memory of past commensality offers a note of both caution and hope as contemporary Indian Jewish writers wrestle with Jewish-Muslim conflict in the Middle East, where the majority of Jews of Indian descent now reside., Jewish-Muslim relations have long been of interest to literary scholars. Recent work has considered the representation of Muslims and their relations with Jews and Jewishness in texts by such diverse [...]

Jesuits and Race: A Global History of Continuity and Change. Edited by Charles H. Parker and Nathaniel Millett. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2022. Pp. xi, 286. $65.00. ISBN [...]

Welcome. I am Katherine Ewing, Professor of Religion and Director of the South Asia Institute at Columbia University. The South Asia Institute is a National Resource Center, and its programming [...]

This roundtable session initially took place as part of the international conference "Childhood, Youth, and Identity in South Asia," organized by the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, and the Centre for Publishing, Ambedkar University Delhi, India, on January 6-7, 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Right-wing extremism has emerged as a global phenomenon manifest in various forms and locations of exclusionary nationalism. Following a concise comparative discourse on the historical and modern resemblances between fascist ideologues, this paper focuses on Hindutva or Hindu fundamentalism which has metamorphosed into a rightwing violent entity. Beginning with a historical outlining of Hindutva - which phases its history into ancient, modern twentieth-century, and postmodern to contemporary paradigms - this discourse moves onto merging the theoretical foundations of Hindutva to its practices of violence and discrimination against minority groups and depressed classes of India and for Indian foreign policy towards other South Asian countries. The second part of this paper studies Hindutva and its paraphernalia as tools of populist politics in India - including but not limited to propaganda through social media, saffron brigades of 'sevaks' or fringe paramilitary groups, and civic organizations advocating to restore Hindu culture. Findings of this paper include: a) Hindutva is not an isolated phenomenon but a piece in the global machinery of farright politics in the contemporary era; b) elements and measures like 'anti-Romeo' squads and ban on meat-eating are used as pretexts for multidimensional violence against Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other lower classes; c) the current Indian occupation of Kashmir can be seen as an extension of Hindutva; and d) by defining Hindus as 'insiders' and Muslims as 'outsiders', the Modi regime has irreparably damaged the South Asian communal ethic of coexistence which has laid the ground for a segregated future for the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces Charles Irvine's and his extended family's engagement with the Swedish East India Company between 1731 and 1770. It shows how changing international and domestic conditions influenced the opportunities British subjects had to cross company lines and national borders and engage in different parts of the Asian trade. Considering the context of the family structure, the article also discusses how immediate and future family interests shaped the agents' interactions with Asian markets. Covering a period of nearly forty years, the article brings to the fore how adaptable the family was to changing circumstances; its members positioned themselves inside and outside the company in ways that allowed them to maximize profits and minimize risks. The results of the study point to the need to consider the mutual dependency that existed between charted companies and flexible families in East Indian trade. Keywords: East India trade, interloper, Eighteenth-century, family, social reproduction., IN THE summer of 1757, Charles Irvine, a Scottish-born former supercargo of the Swedish East India Company (SEIC), paid 8,000 dollars copper money (daler kopparmynt) to have his nephew Thomas [...]

This article reconstructs the life of Gabriel, a Beta Israel child enslaved in mid-sixteenth-century Ethiopia. After two scarcely documented decades in the Arab world, Gabriel reached Western India, where he repeatedly tried to improve his lot through conversion and relocation, until he came to the attention of the Goa Inquisition as a relapsed Muslim, in 1595. This Afro-Indian story of mobility, persecution, and resistance offers rare vistas into the workings of the early modern western Indian Ocean World (IOW): enslavement in the Horn of Africa, slave trading in the Arab world, Habshi life on both sides of the Indo-Portuguese frontier, and religious persecution in Portuguese India. Introducing and analyzing what appears to be the earliest autobiographical text by an enslaved Ethiopian, the article discusses the relevance of Gabriel's multiple identities at different junctures of his mobile existence and explores the tension between agency and structure within his life history. KEYWORDS: Beta Israel, inquisition, slave trade, Habshi, African diaspora, Ethiopia, Indian Ocean World (IOW)., On April 17, 1595, an Ethiopian named Gabriel found himself in front of the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa, accused of 'Muhammedanism.' Like its metropolitan counterpart, this tribunal had been established [...]

The General Assembly of the UN has been discussing this question of the treatment of Indians in South Africa for the past 5 years--without result. Every year condemnation of South African policies is voiced, a discussion takes place at length at the General Assembly sessions and resolutions are passed, but no action is taken by the South African Government with the result that the position remains as before.... The questions arises, can we refer the matter to the Security Council? (1), In 1951, concerned at the lack of progress of the campaign against apartheid at the United Nations (UN), Indian delegates discussed strategies to put the question before the Security Council [...]

Introduction British scholarship of Indian history during the colonial period produced an essentialist construct of an Indian cultural tradition that was deemed unchanged since antiquity and recoverable through archaeological excavations. [...]

This essay serves as an introduction to a special section on the senses in late colonial India. Participating in the act of decolonising sensory studies, this collection explores the intersections between post-colonial studies and sensory studies by paying particular attention to the sensorium of the colonised. In the historical and geographical context of colonial South Asia, the senses are embedded in acts of distinction across race, caste, class, and bodily and gender hierarchies. The collection intervenes by paying attention to the relationship between power and sense perception as it finds register in media, scientific practices and literature of the period. Across the section, we suggest that making sense of empire is also to make sense of the sensory regimes of empire that have resonances in the contemporary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Partition of august 1947 in South Asian history has become a matter of great significance. Almost two million people have been killed and fifteen million forcefully displaced across the newly drawn border. It redraws the map of subcontinent; relocate/displaced the millions of inhabitants across borders. Researchers begun to dig out that how far it spread and how everlasting were the echoes of partition. Partition presents history that cannot only be narrativized within the structure of the territorial nation-state's history. In fact it produces more than most happenings the tension between the ideas of the history centered on the state and the manifold identities. The Partition of the British India in 1947 was a defining moment in British-Imperial as well as South Asian history. From the imperial perspective, the British rule lost plentiful of its shine after the loss of its jewel in the crown. From the perspectives of the people of the Indian subcontinent, millions died in the ensuing Partition violence and the forced mass migrations following the division of British Indian Empire into two new independent nation states i.e. India and Pakistan. The 'truth' of the partition of 1947, lay at least for its sufferers, in all forms ruthless violence done to them. Million faced the brutality of mass killings accompanied by dozens of other problems, which were started in other parts across subcontinent, and reached to them unnoticeably. The gravity as well as the uncertainty of violence that partition had, received the attention from number of scholars and became matter of debate and great significance, in terms of territorial/geographical and demographical settings. The unparalleled ethnic violence seen in the aftermath of the Partition of India has made it identical with violence. Oral accounts of the violence faced by victims, witnesses and, in some situations, perpetrators of the ferocity have carried to light the terrifying nature of the violence intimidated or put under expurgation for almost half a century. This marks an important advance in revisiting the histories of Partition. The connections between partition and other contemporary developments, which are now seen as discrete, instantly call for analysis. Much remains to be prepared before it can positively be held that partitions place in South Asia's history has been completely understood. We have yet to understand fully the echoes of partition on gender relations, caste praxis, religious behavior etc. and the demanding work requires to be completed before we can be assured how partition impacted the economy, geography, demography, and developments of urbanization throughout South Asian history. On the eve of partition and post-partition period Jammu and Kashmir presented a very muddled and mystifying picture. Both countries sought to regulate the affairs of Kashmir because of its strategic position and geo-political importance. The pervasiveness of Partitions afterlife and unending signs of historical trauma in contemporary times further demand the critical engagement on the subject. This paper will focus on the process of conceptualizing and drawing of multiple borders across Kashmir in the post partition period. It revisits the partition literature, histories, borders and its politics, which played pivotal role in defining the ongoing crisis in Kashmir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1924, the government of Afghanistan wrote to the Jam'iyat 'Ulama-yi Hind looking for legal justifications to support Emir Aman Allah Khan's (r. 1919–29) proposed reforms—particularly those relating to female education. Known for securing Afghanistan's independence from the British, and now recognized as a pioneering modernizer and renegade constitutional monarch, Aman Allah introduced a series of reforms during his reign that Faiz Ahmed has recently characterized as "a burgeoning model of Islamic legal modernism." Yet the story of Afghanistan's experiments with Islamic legal modernism are greater and extend beyond the history of a single state. Taking the above claim about Afghanistan seriously, and in response to Ahmed's Afghanistan Rising this essay offers a close reading of the exchange between Kabul and Delhi to interrogate ideas about Islamic legal reform, Islamic modernity, and inter-Islamic circulations at the time of waning empires and rising nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life writings had time and again been used as source material for historical research both in theWest and the various literary cultures of South Asia. Considering the absence and a deliberate, socially conditioned erasure of Dalit history from the mainstream narratives of Indian historiography, some scholars have introduced the notion of viewing Dalit life writings as exercises in history writing. This article explores several Dalit autobiographies as instances of engagement with the process of constructing history of Dalit communities in India. Starting from this premise, it undertakes a preliminary analysis of various narrative strategies employed in Hindi autobiographies by Dalit authors in the hope of revealing the nature of their engagements with India's past and present. The study presented in this paper is based on four relevant examples of prose in Hindi--by Kausalya Baisantri, Sushila Takbhaure, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the modern literary novel in Hindi has traditionally grappled with contemporary issues impacting society in north India, Bhīṣma Sāhnī's famous novel Tamas ("Darkness") may be considered a unique endavour to revisit the horrific events that marked the transfer of power and partition of British India in 1947. This article represents a preliminary attempt to consider the emergence of a work of literary fiction in Hindi approximately 25 years after the events on which it is based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1980s and 1990s, during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the Gyanvapi mosque in Banaras was identified by Hindu nationalists as the next place to be 'liberated' from Muslim presence. A security plan was then implemented by the government to prevent the occurrence of a 'religious offence' as specified in the Indian Penal Code, namely 'destroying, damaging or defiling a place of worship' (Section 295). Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores religious offence within and beyond its legal definition and examines the contradictory impact that its containment through policing has on everyday life and interreligious relationships in the centre of Banaras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction, we situate the special section, 'Containing Religious Offence beyond the Courts', within and beyond existing scholarship on religious offence in South Asia. Much of this scholarship focuses on the unintended effects of blasphemy laws, showing, for instance, that laws presumably intended to promote religious tolerance end up informing, if not encouraging, disputes around religious sensitivities. But while debates about the effects of law are crucial, we suggest that a more nuanced understanding of religious offence can be gained if we look past full-blown legal proceedings and the spectacular violence performed in the streets during religious offence controversies. This collection, then, directs attention to the friction around religious sensitivities that are handled and often mitigated locally—either entirely outside the courts or through bottom-up initiatives that unfold in combination with, or as a reaction to, top-down measures. Drawing on the extensive empirical field research of six scholars of religion and politics, these essays document existing containment modalities in diverse geographical and socio-religious settings in India and critically scrutinise their functioning and outcomes. They explicitly engage with critical understandings of peace and with scholarship on the micro-mechanism of coexistence and, in so doing, open up new avenues of enquiry about religious offence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

History of transport and communication has surely entered an exciting phase of research in South Asia. The authors of the select titles as well as others working on related fields have been exploring different facets of, what could broadly be labelled as, "transport and communication" history of South Asia. This review article looks at some of the recent writings in the fields of technology, transport, and railways to map the newness in South Asia's transport history. While doing this, it also suggests some possible future areas of research, which will surely build upon these insightful works. In particular, this review essay covers the themes of technology and its scale, questions related to modernity, and imperialism. It makes a plea for going beyond "railway-centrism" towards exploring the intersectional fields of infrastructural histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotions are not a new comer in South Asian studies. Putting them centre stage, however, allow for an increasing complexity and reflexivity in the categories we are researching: Instead of assuming that we already know what love, anger, or fear is and hence can use them to explain interactions and developments, the categories themselves have become open to inquiry. Emotions matter at three levels. They impact the way humans experience the world; they play an important role in the process through which individuals and social groups endow their experiences with meaning; and they are important in providing the motivation to act in the world. This article introduces a collection of articles focusing on emotions in South Asia, extending from the classical period to the present and bringing together a number of disciplines, from literary and religious studies, to history, anthropology, and sociology. It provides an overview over the work that has been done in the field of emotion studies in the last decade with specific reference to South Asia. From there, it questions the relationship between theoretical and methodological reflections on how to study emotions, which until now have been developed mainly on the basis of European and American materials, and the study of South Asian emotions. Three topics stand at the core of the debate: the contribution of emotion to the creation of selves and communities; their place between the micro and the macro level; and finally the role of the non-representational in the study of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the progression of stages toward unintended lives, the two stops on either side of abortion—contraception and infanticide—have been studied extensively by historians of South Asia. We know much less about abortion, particularly during the colonial period. Drawing upon published judgments, unpublished case records, forensic toxicology reports, and treatises on Indian medical jurisprudence, this article suggests that anti-abortion law was generally enforced in colonial India only when women died as a result of illegal abortions. This approach was contrary to the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalized most abortions even when the women survived. The pattern was a continuation of the pre-IPC approach in India. This article explores possible explanations for the lax enforcement of anti-abortion law in South Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considering abortion as experienced by South Asian and British women alike. It proposes as contributing factors: challenges in detection, the social movement for the protection of Hindu widows, colonial anxieties about false allegations of abortion among South Asians, the common phenomenon of imperial (British) husbands and wives living apart, and physicians' desire to protect doctor–patient confidentiality. The article focuses on two key cases involving abortion: the Whittaker-Templeton case from Hyderabad (1896–1902) in which a British woman died following an abortion; and the Parsi matrimonial case of T. v. T. from Bombay (1927), in which a Zoroastrian woman alleged that her pharmacist husband had forced her to terminate three pregnancies by ingesting drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Anchored in the literature on gendered transnationalism, the current study examines intergenerational relations. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with second-generation South Asians in Toronto, findings suggest that these youth [...]

Concentrating on the first two national poet laureates of democratic South Africa, Mazisi Kunene and Keorapetse Kgositsile, this article investigates the readings that may be elicited in putting them in conversation with their exilic interlocutors in the context of the Cold War. Bringing their literary historiography into focus reveals the political and aesthetic networks they created in the black diaspora and in their relationship with Eastern Europe. Central to this study are the black and red periodical cultures, publication avenues, and understudied cultural venues that produce a generative reading of how black radical traditions and particular histories of nationalism intersect with those of socialist internationalism, pan-Africanism, and Soviet modernity. They demonstrate a rich production and dissemination of South African literature through anticolonial and anti-imperialist networks of exchange, collaboration, and translation. Through the scrutiny of these materials and relationships, it is possible to establish a triangulating model that eschews a 'counterculture to modernity' born in the northern Atlantic, thus rebutting a vertical North-to-South influence that is common in transnational readings. By decentering the northern metropoles, I contend that Euromodernity has blinded itself to other forms of modernity and that has overdetermined its influence as universal. Thus, the universal can be claimed from any cultural position, but can never be owned. Upon close inspection of the South-to-South transcontinental and transracial networks detailed in this study, it is possible to delineate new literary histories of the Global South to demonstrate how we may 'provincialize Europe.', INTRODUCTION Keorapetse Kgositsile, democratic South Africa's second national poet laureate, crossed over to the realm of ancestors on the 3rd of January 2018. Two weeks later, on the 23rd of [...]

INTRODUCTION The 1955 intergovernmental Conference of Asian-African Countries at Bandung is widely regarded as an important prelude to the non-aligned movement. It is less well known that eleven days prior [...]

IN June 1954, the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) published the first edition of its Anti-Colonial Bureau News Letter. After reporting the recent Bureau meeting in the Burmese hill-station of Kalaw, [...]

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COLONIAL British India witnessed a large spurt in the formation of socio-religious reform movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kenneth Jones aptly describes this period as 'an age of [...]

In this study, we investigate the possible presence of an east–west divide in Indo-Aryan languages suggested in previous literature (Peterson, John. 2017a. Fitting the pieces together – towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond). Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 4(2). 211–257.), with the further hypothesis that this divide may be linked to the influence of the Munda languages, spoken in the eastern part of the subcontinent. Working with 217 fine-grained variables on a sample of 27 Indo-Aryan and Munda languages, we test the presence of a geographical divide within Indo-Aryan using computational methods such as cluster analysis in combination with visual statistical inference. Our results confirm the presence of a geographical divide for the whole dataset and most of the individual features. We then proceed to compute the degree of similarity between the Indo-Aryan languages and Munda, using a Bayesian alternative to a t-test. The results for most features support the claim that the languages identified in the eastern clusters are indeed more similar to Munda, thereby opening up further research scenarios for the history of this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A question that should be asked in all cases of proposed convergence areas is whether the observed similarities do in fact reflect convergent developments or are due to chance. This paper presents three case studies from South Asia which demonstrate that accidental similarities are more common than is often acknowledged. To rule out chance similarities, convergence accounts must be supported by fine-grained examinations of the geographical and historical evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of world regions beyond theNorth Atlantic realm has gainedmuch greater visibility in Germany in recent decades than it previously enjoyed. Dietmar Rothermund, the eminent and internationally renowned specialist of South Asian history who from the early 1960s taught at Heidelberg University, played a crucial role in this process. In the wake of his death earlier this year, this article offers a short intellectual biography of Rothermund, reflecting on major scholarly and institutional shifts and transformations in the study ofwhat is nowoften called the "Global South." It provides a portrait of Rothermund as one of the most versatile and cosmopolitan German historians of his generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]