Simi Malhotra

Nishat Zaidi

Dilip M. Menon

Saarah Jappie

"Ocean as Method presents a new way of thinking about the humanities and the social sciences. It explores maritime connections in social and humanistic research and puts forward an alternative to national histories and area studies. As global warming and rising sea levels ring alarm bells across the world, the essays in the volume argue that it is time to think through oceans to realign discourses which better understand our future. The volume: - Engages with the paradigms of oceanic narratives to identify connections between continents through trade, migration, and economic processes, thinking beyond the artificial distinctions between the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans; - Discusses oceanic travel accounts by Muslim travelers to counter the idea that the colonial era was marked by European travel to Asia and Africa, without a counterflow of "native travel"; - Examines the connections between South Africa, South Asia, and South East Asia through histories of Indian indenture and the slave trade, and engages with the idea of the ocean and enforced movement; - Compares and connects recent scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities centering the ocean to break away from inherited paradigms which have shaped world history so far. A unique transdisciplinary collaboration, this volume will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of history, especially oceanic history, historiography, critical theory, literature, geography, and Global South studies"--

Thinking with the Maritime

Ocean As Method

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

Literary Cultures from the 18th to the 20th Century

Indian Modernities

Indrani Das Gupta

This book engages with the socio-cultural imaginings of Gandhi in literature, history, visual and popular culture. It explores multiple iterations of his ideas, myths and philosophies, which have inspired the work of filmmakers, playwrights, cartoonists and artists for generations. Gandhi’s politics of non-violent resistance and satyagraha inspired various political leaders, activists and movements and has been a subject of rigorous scholarly enquiry and theoretical debates across the globe. Using diverse resources like novels, autobiographies, non-fictional writings, comic books, memes, cartoons and cinema, this book traces the pervasiveness of the idea of Gandhi which has been both idolized and lampooned. It explores his political ideas on themes such as modernity and secularism, environmentalism, abstinence, self-sacrifice and political freedom along with their diverse interpretations, caricatures, criticisms and appropriations to arrive at an understanding of history, culture and society. With contributions from scholars with diverse research interests, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers of political philosophy, cultural studies, literature, Gandhi and peace studies, political science and sociology.

Gandhi in India’s Literary and Cultural Imagination

Isabel Karremann

Zeno Ackermann

TERRAINS OF CONSCIOUSNESS emerges from an Indian-German-Swiss research collaboration. The book makes a case for a phenomenology of globalization that pays attention to locally situated socioeconomic terrains, everyday practices, and cultures of knowledge. This is exemplified in relation to three topics: - the tension between 'terrain' and 'territory' in Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe' as a pioneering work of the globalist mentality (chapter 1) - the relationship between established conceptions of feminism and the concrete struggles of women in India since the 19th century (chapter 2) - the exploration of urban space and urban life in writings on India's capital - from Ahmed Ali to Arundhati Roy (chapter 3).

Nishat Zaidi

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