History

<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

This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

(SoHSS) School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Children's Geographies

Caste, space, and schooling in nineteenth century South India

This chapter explores the complex encounter between the missionaries of the Basel German Missionary Society (BM) and local children raised in their boarding schools/orphanages based at various parts of British-ruled Malabar in present-day south India. The BM played an instrumental role in establishing the earliest residential institutions for the children of the labouring poor in the Malayalam speaking region where they sought to also forge ‘model’ Christian communities. Poor, colonized children belonging to lower caste communities were targeted for conversion, which resulted in varying contestations about childhood. In their attempt to erase previous caste-inscribed markers, the missionaries negotiated with local power dynamics and sites of authority, and the children themselves. Often, ‘orphans’ were not always without parents, and the BM employed coercive measures to admit poor children into their orphanages, by arguing against the so-called ‘barbarity’ of Indian parenting, and reorienting norms of childhood. They were not entirely successful as children also influenced decision-making processes and resisted the rigorous disciplinary order and labour regime inflicted on them. This chapter attempts to trace the politics of these boarding institutions and demonstrates ambiguity and racial tension marking the missionary project of schooling poor children in colonial south India even as Christianity brought new ideas of morality and self. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood

Recasting Poor Children: Basel Mission Boarding Schools in Colonial Malabar

World University root node

Special issue: modernity, schooling, and childhood in India: trajectories of exclusion

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

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

Cerebral malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum is the severest form of the disease resulting in the morbidity of a huge number of people worldwide. Development of effective curatives is essential in order to overcome the fatality of cerebral malaria. Earlier studies have shown the presence of salicylic acid (SA) in malaria parasite P. falciparum, which plays a critical role in the manifestation of cerebral malaria. Further, the application of SA for the treatment of acute symptoms in cerebral malaria increases the activity of iNOS leading to severe inflammation-mediated death, also called as Reye’s syndrome. Therefore, modulation of the level of SA might be a novel approach to neutralize the symptoms of cerebral malaria. The probable source of parasite SA is the shikimate pathway, which produces chorismate, a precursor to aromatic amino acids and other secondary metabolites like SA in the parasite. In this work, we performed the immunological, pathological and biochemical studies in mice infected with chorismate synthase knocked-out Plasmodium berghei ANKA, which does not produce SA. Fewer cerebral outcomes were observed as compared to the mice infected with wild-type parasite. The possible mechanism behind this protective effect might be the hindrance of SA-mediated induction of autophagy in the parasite, which helps in its survival in the stressed condition of brain microvasculature during cerebral malaria. The absence of SA leading to reduced parasite load along with the reduced pathological symptoms contributes to less fatality outcome by cerebral malaria. © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.

Fulltext

Biology Open

Chorismate synthase mediates cerebral malaria pathogenesis by eliciting salicylic acid-dependent autophagy response in parasite

Marx’s theory of rent as presented in the Third Volume of Capital has been a well-researched area in the history of political economy but not many of these studies discuss the theory with respect to the exposition of the labour theory of value and primitive accumulation in the FirstVolume. In this backdrop, the chapter attempts to retrace the trajectory of the theory of rent in Marx’s exposition of capitalism by focusing on the status of land as a ‘commodity without value’ (not produced by labour) within this framework. By critically engaging with the writings of David Harvey and Enrique Dussel, the chapter also explores the methodological innovation in the deployment of ‘rent’ within a value-based interpretation of the capitalist mode of production and the productive ambiguity in positing the distinction between rent and interest in a capitalist society, especially in terms of competition and return on ‘fictitious capital’. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019.

"Capital" in the East: Reflections on Marx

Marx’s theory of rent: A ‘speculative’ reading

Future Anterior

Decolonizing South Asia through heritage-and nation-building

In South Asia, local communities most often live near or amidst archaeological places. Their lives are in many ways framed and structured by these places. At the same time, these places too are impacted by the communities that live nearby. Archaeological sites in India are being destroyed at a rapid pace, due to increasing population and development pressures. This story gets further complicated by legislative practices of preservation related to monuments and archaeological sites, which are solely in the hands of the state through its institutions. It is this very act of protection that sometimes leads to conflict between the institutions of the state and local communities. At the same time, several archaeological sites have also survived due to local interests because they have been transformed into ritual spaces or are considered as ancestral places. Additionally, monuments have been converted into heritage hotels and have become an important means of livelihood for the families that own them. Thus, for protection to succeed, the critical intervention and involvement of local communities living in close proximity to monuments and archaeological sites is fundamental. Is it then education that can enable the survival of archaeological places? School education has the scope of involving and alerting children to their environs, whether it is the natural environment or a built one, and this could be a long-term solution. © The Author(s) 2019.