(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

<p>Shiv Nadar University is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, research-focused, and student-centric University offering a full range of academic programs at the undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. With state-of-the-art infrastructure, the University comprises of academic wings, sophisticated labs, international standard sports facilities, amphitheaters, auditorium, conference rooms and smart classrooms. The University&rsquo;s goal is to become internationally recognized for the quality of its research and creative endeavors and their applicability to improving quality of life, generating new insights and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge creativity. Committed to excellence in teaching, research and service, the University aims to serve the higher education needs of India and the world beyond.</p>

Shiv Nadar University

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History

Medieval History Journal

Introduction: Archaeologies of the Medieval

Agro-pastoralism has been an important economic subsistence among diverse communities in the semi-arid climate and dry-deciduous ecology of the Deccan for the last four millennia. Recent research that looks at the entanglements of human-animal-environment relations in South Asian archaeology and history have highlighted the complex histories that prompt a reconsideration of the contexts within which political authority articulated in medieval India. This essay demonstrates the presence of non-elite agro-pastoral groups based on the evidence from my archaeological survey. I then present results from a limited study the Early Chalukya inscriptions to identify agro-pastoral activities. In addition, I employ limited architectural and iconographic analysis and argue that the non-Brahmanical religious affiliations of pastoral groups played a role in shaping the political and sacred landscapes of the Early Chalukya polity (ca. 550–750 ad) in the Deccan plateau of South India. A related aim in this essay is to highlight the productive engagement of archaeological investigations with ‘conventional’ history research. I suggest that the medieval period of Indian archaeology is a potent arena for such interdisciplinary research. © 2021 SAGE Publications.

Agro-Pastoralism, Archaeology and Religious Landscapes in Early Medieval South India

Industrial effluents and municipal wastewaters are increasingly finding their way into freshwater bodies, posing serious health and environmental challenges. In this paper, the potential for industrial wastewater remediation through agroforestry is explored for a peri-urban farming region in India. Farmers are incentivized under a payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism to convert their farmlands into poplar-based agroforestry and utilize industrial effluents for irrigating trees. Additional income can be derived through sale of poplar timber which enhances the attractiveness of such a PES mechanism. A dynamic optimization model compares farmers' optimal land use allocation to a socially optimal case. Further, the firm's effluent discharge outcomes are compared to an alternative arrangement where it is fined for discharging untreated wastewater into waterbodies in the absence of the agroforestry remediation option. Results support the attractiveness of such PES mechanisms in addressing the industrial effluent discharge problem while simultaneously mitigating the effects of water scarcity through wastewater reclamation. The optimal level of tax required to accomplish complete treatment of effluents by polluting firms is several times higher compared to PES payments. Further, the incentive to convert farmland into poplar plantations improves with PES payments but declines with higher profitability of agricultural crops. © 2021 World Scientific Publishing Company.

Economics

Water Economics and Policy

A Potential PES Mechanism for Agroforestry-Led Industrial Wastewater Remediation using Short-Rotation Trees

Arguing for an expansion of the subject of ecocriticism beyond climate change fiction, this essay examines strategies of representation of vernacular landscapes in contemporary Anglophone South Asian literature from Pakistan and Bangladesh. It suggests that recent writing by Uzma Aslam Khan, Tahmima Anam and Kamila Shamsie recuperates Pakistani landscape from its imbrication within colonial and post 9/11 spatial discourses, enabling a zoecentric re-ordering of regional history, complicating ideas of authenticity, and engaging with deep history in ways that furnish individual affective investments in landscape instead of reiterating the difference-flattening tendency of species-thinking. Finally, it attempts to articulate the geological turn precipitated by the notion of the Anthropocene with frameworks of postcolonial ecocriticism to adapt them to specific contexts in South Asia. © 2021 South Asian Literary Association.

English

South Asian Review

Between Glaciers and Fossils: Landscape, Literature and the Anthropocene in Pakistan

This study explores the co-existent nature of emotions and cognition in humans to build and propose a framework that helps correlate ‘likeability’ and ‘sellability’ of a product by introduction of a relatively new term—unique selling factor (USF). The framework runs on context-based logical correlations among its constituents. The aim of this framework is to qualitatively express the emotional characteristics of a product. As emotions work alongside with cognition, the design attributes of the product under the lenses are first analysed as per the three levels of our brain’s processing. Each design feature corresponds to the processing level based on the consumers’ probable preferences to choose that feature in the first place. After this cognitive breakdown, we further diverge the semantic analysis at emotional levels. Each design feature when stated with the consumers’ probable preference and the cognition level involved can now help develop context of the scenario. This context that triangulates the connect between the design feature, consumers’ preference and processing level plays significant role as the backbone of emotionality in the analysis overall. To apply the understanding built, a logical study is done considering a black V-neck T-shirt as the product under the lenses. For this product, we define the likeability, sellability and the unique selling factor. For analysis, we create a feature analysis table that subdivides the product features first, into its design characteristics. Second, against these characteristics are explored the probable reasons the consumer might have had for opting for those characteristics. Third, each reason for the preference for its respective design characteristic is assigned to its corresponding levels of brain processing. Fourth, for the context developed so far, we can assign emotions involved. The co-existence of emotion and cognition paves way for this product-semantic design language. Thus, the framework proposed works evidently on emotion and cognition and helps provide a novel perspective—that of the most significant stakeholder of all—the customer and the people we design for. The framework follows an ecosystemic approach that provides it with appropriate literature and a holistic approach. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Design

Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies

Product Semantics: The Emotional Design Language

We estimate higher order risk preferences of farmers from a water scarce region in West Bengal, India. We then examine correlations across risk aversion, prudence and temperance attitudes of farmers, and explore associations of these preferences with household characteristics. Our experimental findings indicate risk seeking behaviour of farmers. We find that farmers took more prudent and temperate decisions. Risk aversion and prudence have a significant negative correlation, whereas prudence and temperance have a significant positive correlation. Individual characteristics such as age, education, and entrepreneurship, income and value of assets are also correlated with various risk preferences. Increased stated drought resilience of farmers is positively correlated with prudence. Farmers affected by water scarcity in the Kharif make imprudent choices. Farmers with higher cropping intensities exhibit high levels of prudence and temperance. These findings have important theoretical and policy implications which we discuss in the paper. © 2021, The Indian Econometric Society.

Journal of Quantitative Economics

Exploring Higher Order Risk Preferences of Farmers in a Water-Scarce Region: Evidence from a Field Experiment in West Bengal, India

For a considerable span of human history, following the adoption of agricultural economies but prior to the emergence of settlements that we label as ‘urban’, small permanent communities or ‘villages’ were the main types of settlements, as also were places intermittently occupied by mobile, nomadic groups. The context of these, however, differed from those small or rural settlements that existed within an integrated network of centres in urban and state societies. A third scenario is the case of small-scale rural settlements that may exist at the margins of complex societies and, hence, outside state/political control but could still be socially and economically networked with other centres. Thus, the concept of ‘rural’ needs to be situated and interrogated within specific political, social and economic contexts. While archaeological research has addressed village settlements in pre-urban periods, once urbanism and the state societies emerged, urban settlements became the focus of attention. Even though surveys have shown the distribution of settlements of varying sizes, we do not seem to know much about early historic and medieval villages, in terms of settlement layouts, domestic spaces, crafts, if any, or even subsistence practices. It is this lacuna that we are trying to address through our work at a small, rural settlement in the Upper Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Some of the questions that we raise in this article deal with terms like ‘urban’, or ‘rural’, whether these should be viewed as binaries, or whether it may be more fruitful, as others have suggested, to see settlements in a continuum. © 2021 SAGE Publications.

Ephemeral Traces: Archaeology of a Medieval Rural Settlement

In this paper we quantitatively analyze the real and nominal frictions which have shaped up economic fluctuations in the past two decades for the Indian economy. Our results provide guidelines for building future structural models to replicate its business cycle properties, for both real and monetary variables. We use the Monetary Business Cycle Accounting framework (Sustek in Rev Econ Dyn 14(4):592–612, 2011; Chari et al. in Econometrica 75(3):781–836, 2007), and quarterly data from 1999–2017, which is a first for the Indian economy. We find that the distortions in efficiency and investment wedges capture most of the fluctuations in output, investment and hours worked. Up to half of consumption dynamics however are accounted for by the labor wedge. We also find that investment frictions have decreased but labor market frictions have increased over time, indicating reforms in financial sector making an impact and the need for reforms in labor markets. Taylor’s Rule wedge matches up to 50% of inflation, and interest rate is well accounted by the asset market wedge. © 2021, The Indian Econometric Society.

Monetary Business Cycle Accounting Analysis of Indian Economy

Municipal effluents running off into natural wetlands pose significant challenges to the latter's sustainability while also threatening the livelihoods of dependent communities. In this study, the potential for promoting constructed wetlands on agricultural farms is explored as a means towards restoring degraded natural wetlands. Specifically, a payment for ecosystem services mechanism is developed where farmers are compensated for discharging treated wastewaters into streams entering natural wetlands. Farmers can also utilize the treated wastewater for irrigating their crops, thus augmenting farm incomes. An optimization model derives constructed wetland adoption rate on agricultural farms in order to maximize ecosystem services benefits and farmers' incomes. Ecosystem services from wetlands include direct benefits to the community through the availability of clean water and improvement in fish stock abundance through reduced nitrogen concentrations in the natural wetland. Results suggest that such payment for ecosystem services mechanisms are likely to provide strong incentives for constructed wetland adoption when both water quality valuation and fisheries-based incomes are taken into consideration. This study contributes to the literature on cleaner production and sustainability through the design of a framework for incentivizing constructed wetland technology adoption on private farms that would result in restoration of degraded natural wetlands and mitigation of pollution in rivers and waterbodies, thereby increasing their long-term sustainability. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd

Journal of Cleaner Production

Restoring natural wetlands through financial incentives based adoption of constructed wetlands on agricultural farms

Typefaces are the primary means of reading. Without a quality display of the typeface on the display screen, reading becomes difficult. The paper aims to identify the display issues with the Indian typefaces on display screens. Further, the paper encounters the challenges and difficulties in the type design process with Indian scripts. India is a multilingual country with various scripts. Indian letterform structures are complex and sinuous. In this paper, the technical challenges related to the design process of Indian typefaces such as hinting, glyph positioning and substitution have been discussed. Hinting is a challenging task for Indian scripts since the letter structures are complex. Developing glyphs substitution instructions is a tedious task due to the large number of characters set. In the context of letter design, Indian letters lack a letterform grammar and visual language of type forms. Anatomical nomenclature and grid system are the primary deficiency in the design process that hinders the quality font production. Apart from that, identification of the legibility parameters is required for the Indian scripts to make the letters reading friendly and visually enhancing. Research on Indian typeface legibility has not been studied extensively. Therefore, a review on the current issues and challenges of Indian typeface becomes essential. The present paper is an attempt to discuss the design challenges and display issues with the Indian typefaces. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.