KNOWING INDIA: COLONIAL AND MODERN CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE PAST

Essays in honor of Thomas R. Trautmann

Edited by Cynthia Talbot

Series: New Perspectives on Indian Pasts

New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011

392 pp.

ISBN: 978-93-80403-03-8

Knowing India honors the contributions of Thomas R. Trautmann to the fields of anthropology and history by presenting research from leading scholars who are his contemporaries, colleagues, and former students. Divided into four sections, the 17 essays in this volume look at modes of conceptualizing and classifying traditional South Asian society, perceptions of the precolonial past in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aspects of precolonial India's historical development and writing. Contributors include reputed contemporaries of Trautmann such as Madhav Deshpande, David Lorenzen, Romila Thapar, and Sylvia Vatuk.

In addition, the volume features essays from former students like Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Bhavani Raman, and Parna Sengupta who engage with and take off from questions raised by Trautmann. Also containing essays by Michael Dodson, Kenneth Hall, Anne Hardgrove, Judith Irvine, Carla Sinopoli, and Cynthia Talbot,the book ends with three tributes to Trautmann by Tom Fricke, Richard H. Davis and Rama Mantena.

Table of Contents:

Foreword: A Return Gift, by Peter Granda

Acknowledgments

Note on Contributors

1. Introduction

      Cynthia Talbot

PART I: MUSINGS ON (MOSAIC) ETHNOLOGY, LANGUAGE, AND KINSHIP

2.  Language Fields: Robert Needham Cust?s Language Map of South Asia, 1878

        Judith T. Irvine

3. Thomas Maurice and Domestic Orientalism, c. 1790-1820

      Michael S. Dodson

4. Henry George Raverty and the Colonial Marketing of Pashto

      Shah Mahmoud Hanifi

5. Muslim Kinship in the Dravidian Heartland: Kinship Terminology and Close Kin Marriage among Urdu-speaking Nawayats

      Sylvia Vatuk

PART II: SEEING THE PRECOLONIAL THROUGH COLONIAL / MODERN EYES

6. Recovering Attestation Practices from the Footnotes of a Colonial History: The Treatise on Mirasi Rights Revisited

      Bhavani Raman

7. Contesting Knowledges in Colonial India: The Question of Prithviraj Raso's Historicity

      Cynthia Talbot

8. Astral Time: Almanacs and Colonial Modernity in Bengal

      Parna Sengupta

9. Sex and the City: Debates over the Medieval Pasts of Khajuraho

      Anne Hardgrove

10. Hindu Sects and Hindu Religion: Precolonial and Colonial Concepts

      David N. Lorenzen

PART III: TAKING THE LONG PERSPECTIVE: THE PRECOLONIAL PAST

11. Was There Historical Writing in Early India?

      Romila Thapar

12. Local Histories and Historical Narratives in the Central Tungabhadra Region of South India

      Carla M. Sinopoli

13. Secondary Cities and Urban Networking in Cola-era South India

      Kenneth R. Hall

14. Will the Winner Please Stand Up: Conflicting Narratives of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Debate from Karnataka

      Madhav M. Deshpande

PART IV: TRIBUTES TO TRAUTMANN

15. Trautmann's Gift: Dravidian Kinship as Dana

      Tom Fricke

16. The Paramparas of Trautmann

      Richard H. Davis

17. Excavations of British and Indian Intellectual Traditions in Thomas R. Trautmann's Languages & Nations

      Rama Sundari Mantena

List of Trautmann Publications