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De Romanis, Federico. The Indo-Roman Pepper Trade and the Muziris Papyrus. Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
ISBN 9780198842347 / Hardcover / 544 pages / USD 110
About the Book (edited): This volume presents a systematic and fresh interpretation of a mid-second-century A.D. papyrus—the so-called Muziris papyrus—which preserves on its two sides fragments of a unique pair of documents: on one side, a loan agreement to finance a commercial enterprise to south India and, on the other, an assessment of the fiscal value of a south Indian cargo imported on a ship named the Hermapollon.
This study also considers imperial fiscal policy as it related to the south Indian trade, the overall evolution of Rome’s trade relations with south India, the structure and organization of south Indian trade stakeholders, and the role played by private tax-collectors. The in-depth analysis sheds new light on this important sector of the Roman economy during the first two centuries A.D. in two innovative ways: through a balanced consideration of south Indian sources and data, and by drawing comparisons with the pepper trade from late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and early modernity, resulting in a longue durée perspective on the western trade in south Indian pepper.
Table of Contents
Part II. Let Him Look to his Bond: A Loan Contract for Muziris (P. Vindob. G 40822 Recto)
Part III. The Muziris Cargo of a Roman Indiaman (P. Vindob. G 40822 Verso)
Part IV. The Red Sea Tax and the Muziris Papyrus
Appendices
About the Author: Federico De Romanis is Associate Professor in Roman History at the Università di Roma ‘Tor Vergata’ in Rome, Italy. He received his doctorate in historical sciences from the Università della Repubblica di S. Marino in 1992 and has taught at the Università di Catania and at the Università della Tuscia, as well as holding fellowships at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples (1987-8) and at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University (2012-3). His previous publications include Cassia, cinnamomo, ossidiana: Uomini e merci tra Oceano Indiano e Mediterraneo (L’Erma Di Bretschneider, 1996).
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Lekshmi Rajeev and Raghu Rai (2020). “Thiruvananthapuram : an artist’s
impression”.
Westland Books / ISBN: 978-9389648508 / 192 pages / Rs 2999
Excerpt : This capital city of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram has welcomed and housed people from various lands, countries and continents. The relics of the rich past are scattered all over the city and its surroundings; Thiruvananthapuram district is a mine of wonders that extend far beyond the treasures of Śree Padmanabhaswamy Temple.
In the area are many other sites of significance—the Agasthyarkoodam peak, which houses the rare Ārogyapacha plant, and the 1000-year-old cave temple of Lord Śiva on the rock-face of Madavoorpara, which is believed to have been a Jain cave temple earlier, to name a few. But the place seems to shy away from showing off its ancient glories.
In places celebrated as sites where the heroes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana had often visited or lost themselves to tapas, history remains frozen and inert, waiting for a fleeting touch to spring it back to life.
The five-star hotels and shopping malls that rise over the ancient palaces and forts, transferring them into shadowy by-lanes, remind us that it was not long ago that things were different.
Thiruvananthapuram is unlike typical Indian cities, with their dust, hectic pace and bustling crowds: it is clean, green and quiet. Some of it belongs to the twenty-first century, but much of it remains in the unhurried twentieth.’
More info: https://www.amazon.in/dp/9389648505/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fab_QfAHFbTVTD51B
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Mani, Sunil. ed. Kerala and The World Economy. Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies, 2020.
ISBN 9788194819530 / Paperback / 490 pages / Rs 500
About the book (publisher’s description): The book addresses several oft repeated propositions regarding Kerala’s economy with fresh empirical data and methods of data analysis.
These are integration of the state’s economy with the rest of the world, the importance of remittances sent by Kerala workers especially from the Middle East, the state of Kerala’s manufacturing sector and the condition of her environment.
The book deals with these current and longstanding issues in 7 broad groups such as sustainable development, commercial crops, livestock and fisheries, high tech manufacturing and modern industries, international trade, migration and remittances and health.
More info: http://cds.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Announcement-KaWEB.pdf
Book Launch: Centre for Development Studies invites you to attend the release of the book by Dr Manmohan Singh, former Prime Minister of India, on Webex (https://bit.ly/3jmlhkX) on 2nd November 2020 (5:30 p.m. IST).
Shared to the eGroup by V. Sriram, Chief Librarian, K. N. Raj Library, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
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Rajesh, K. Local Politics and Participatory Planning in Kerala: Democratic Decentralization, 1996–2016. Delhi: Primus Books, 2020.
ISBN 9789390022267 / Hardback / 180 pages / Rs 950
About the book (publisher’s description): Local Politics and Participatory Planning in Kerala analyses how micro-level politics impacts and influences local governance and examines the dynamics of its interaction with honesty.
Written within the theoretical framework of Field and Habitus, it incorporates how decentralization and the peoples’ planning campaign, in the early 1990s, reconstructed local governance from its being a mere bureaucratic process to its becoming a highly politicized construct.
The book also investigates how the stratagems and social dynamics of political parties, religious groups, and civil society towards grassroots democracy and local development have changed over time, focusing particularly on the extent of participation of women and marginalized sections.
Further, considering the evolving nature of local governance, this work analyses the history of the past 20 years of local governments and participatory democracy in Kerala on the basis of empirical data; how the changes in political regimes in the state have affected the democratic decentralization process; and how this is reflected in the village life of Kerala. Three case studies from different locations of the state document this political transition.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Participatory Democracy
Participatory Planning
Local Politics in the Villages
Civil Society and Religion in the Villages
Decentralization in the Last Decade
Appendices / Bibliography / Index
About the author: K. Rajesh is Senior Fellow at the Integrated Rural Technology Centre, Palakkad. He has two books and a number of articles in reputed journals to his credit. As an activist of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, he has been actively involved with the democratic decentralization process in Kerala for the last two decades.
More info: http://primusbooks.com/local-politics-and-participatory-planning-in-kerala/
Alongside extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author has used memorabilia including photographs, notices, posters, letters, diaries, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, and recollections of the circus community to chronicle the hitherto untold story of the Indian circus.
The book paves the way for a new sociocultural analysis of performance genres and popular culture in the subcontinent against several overlapping contexts. These include the remaking of caste and gender identities, transformation of physical cultures and bodies, interventions of the colonial and postcolonial states, and emergence of new transregional and transnational spaces.
Coda
Bibliography / Index / About the Author
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ISBN 9781506461366 / Paperback / 200 pages / USD 34
About the book (publisher’s description; edited): In St. Thomas and India, scholars trace the historical, religious, and cultural connections that link India’s Syrian Christian community with St. Thomas the Apostle.
They use modern historiographical methods and seek to corroborate the ancient tradition that tells of St. Thomas’s missionary journey to India in the middle of the first century, in which he established seven churches in some of the major commercial centres of Malabar. From these first churches, Christianity spread throughout the region.
St. Thomas and India also examines the legacy of ancient Christianity in the Syrian community in India today, as well as exploring the various cultural and religious connections between the Syrian church in Indian and other ancient churches in the east.
Table of Contents
About the Editors / Preface
Index
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Martin, Matthew. Tantra, Ritual Performance and Politics in Nepal and Kerala: Embodying the Goddess-clan. Leiden: Brill, 2020.
ISBN 9789004438996 / Hardback / 296 pages / USD 149
About the book: In previous studies of South Asian Tantric ritual, scholars tend to focus on one region or context. For the first time, Tantra, Ritual Performance and Politics in Nepal and Kerala: Embodying the Goddess-clan offers a comparative approach to Tantric mediumship as observed in two locales: Navadurgā rituals in Bhaktapur, Nepal, and Teyyāṭṭam in North Kerala.
In this book, Matthew Martin advances a new theory of ritual, which spotlights the way dancer-mediums embody medieval goddess-clans and ancestor deities, through offerings of food and sacrifice, that synchronize their denizens with the land in spiralling web-like ritual networks. Uniquely interdisciplinary in style, this study synthesizes cultural history, ethnography, and theory to explore the continuities – historical, societal, and political – that characterize these ritual traditions across the subcontinent.
About the author: Matthew Martin is an independent scholar of religion, ritual, and society in South Asia.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements / List of Figures / Abbreviations / Style, Format, and Interview Transcriptions
Introduction: Methodology and Context
1. Folk Śākta Performances: Sovereignty, Goddesses, and Macro-Clans
2. Teyyāṭṭam and Navadurgā Compared: The Research Process
3. Methodological Orientations
4. Fieldwork Locations & Informant Introductions
5. Contextual Background
Part 1
1. Introducing the Southern Case Study—Teyyāṭṭam, Northern Malabar, Kerala
1. Ancestors, Land, and Divinities (Teyyam) in Northern Kerala
2. Lineages, Clans, and Ritual Kinship
3. Blood Sacrifices, Offerings, and Swords
4. Cosmology, Metaphysics, and Textual History
5. Caste Identities, Politics, and Performance in North Malabar
2. Introducing the Northern Case Study—Navadurgā, Bhaktapur, Nepal
1. Hindu-Buddhist Tantra in Newar Society: The Case of Bhaktapur
2. Bhaktapur City: Blood Symbols, Goddess-Clan, Space, and Society
3. Monsoon, Power, and the Goddess-Clan: Banmala Dancer-Mediums during the Ritual Cycle
4. Blood Sacrifice, Mohani, and the Navadurgā Cycle
5. Cosmology, Tantric Texts, and Newar Hinduism in Bhaktapur
6. Politics and Caste Structures in Bhaktapur
Part 2
3. Dancer-Medium Communities and Ritual Kinship
1. Introduction
2. Dancer-Medium Communities: Teyyāṭṭam and Navadurgā
3. Teyyāṭṭam
4. Navadurgā
5. Conclusion
4. History and Assimilation in Tantric Cosmology
1. Introduction
2. Teyyāṭṭam
3. Navadurgā
4. Conclusion
5. Sacrifice, Earth Cycles, and Self-Reflexive Affect
1. Introduction
2. Teyyāṭṭam
3. Navadurgā
4. Conclusion
6. Politics, Ritual Performance, and Caste
1. Introduction
2. Marxist-Influenced Politics and Ritual Performance in Postcolonial South Asia
3. Teyyāṭṭam
4. Navadurgā
5. Conclusion
Conclusion
1. Teyyāṭṭam and Navadurgā Compared: Revisited
2. Dancer-Medium Communities and Ritual Kinship
3. History and Metaphysical Underlays of Folk Śākta Ritual
4. Blood Sacrifice and Self-Reflexive Affect
5. Politics and Caste Structure
Glossary of Key Terms / Bibliography / Index
More info: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004439023
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Heike Oberlin and David Shulman, eds. Two Masterpieces of Kutiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019.
ISBN 9780199483594 / Hardback / 348 pages / Rs 1,795
Description (of digital edition)
Kutiyattam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. The actors and drummers create an entire world in the empty space of the stage by using spectacular costumes and make-up and by an immensely rich interplay of words, rhythms, mime, and gestures.
This volume focuses on Mantrankam and Anguliyankam, the two great masterpieces of Kutiyattam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history.
Authored by scholars and active Kutiyattam performers, this is the first attempt to bring together a set of sustained, multi-faceted interpretations of these masterpieces-in-performance. With an aim to open up this ancient art form to readers interested in South Indian culture, religion, theatre and performance studies, philology, as well as literature, this volume offers a new way to access a major art form of pre-modern and modern Kerala.
The University of Tuebingen in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel were partners in a long-term project studying and documenting Kutiyattam performances, including initiating full-scale performances of major works in the classical repertoire. We have been, in particular, focusing on the study of the two major, complex and ancient works, Mantrankam and Anguliyankam, both of which we have seen and recorded in full. The articles in this volume are one of the results. They are supplemented with video-clips of lecture demonstrations provided online.
Table of Contents
Foreword (by K. K. Gopalakrishnan) / Introduction
Opening Up
1. Anguliyankam and Mantrankam
Sudha Gopalakrishnan
2. Some Remarks on the Ascaryacudamani
Lyne Bansat-Boudon
Mantrankam
3. Mantrankam, an Ancient Integration Project?
Heike Oberlin (née Moser)
4. What Is Mantrankam?
David Shulman
5. Pracchana Barhaspatyam
Orly Hadani Nave
6. Reflection and Arul
Hemdat Salay
7. Vasantaka
Indu G.
8. Mantrankam
Elena Mucciarelli
9. The Mantrankam Paribhasa from a Historical Linguistics Perspective
Ophira Gamliel
10. Tying the Universe
Elena Mucciarelli and Heike Oberlin
Anguliyankam
11. Anguliyankam, Ramayana-Veda of the Cakyars
Virginie Johan
12. Anguliyankam
P.K.M. Bhadra and Rajneesh B.
13. The World of Hanuman
Einat Bar-On Cohen
14. Distinct Conventions in the Staging of Anguliyankam Kuttu
Ammannur Kuttan Chakyar and Aparna Nangiar
Tying Up
15. My Experience of Performing Anguliyankam and Mantrankam
Margi Madhu Chakyar
16. Knowing and Being
Manu V. Devadevan
17. An Actor in Red and White
Sivan Goren Arzony
Index / Editors and Contributors
More info:
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Mathew, P. T. Between the Sea and the Sky: Lived Religion on the Sea Shore. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020.
ISBN 9781506451992 / Paperback / 200 pages / USD 34
About the book: Between the Sea and the Sky is an inquiry into the religious world of a traditional fishing community on the southwest coast of India. It explores the vital role religious and spiritual beliefs play in sustaining people in such a precarious, even deadly occupation.
About the author: P. T. Mathew holds a PhD in Christian Studies from the University of Madras and did post-doctoral research at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, California. He has taught systematic theology in the faculty of theology at Vidyajyoti College in Delhi. He is the author of We Dare the Waters: The World and the Worldview of Mukkuvar (2001), and Human Persons in the World: Explorations in Christian Anthropology (2017).
Table of Contents
1. Lived Religion in Times of Crisis
2. Marine Fisheries and the Traditional Fisherfolk
3. The Religious Roots of the Fisher People
4. Neithal Cosmology: Worldviews in Conflict?
5. Learning from the Rituals of Coastal Life
6. The Molding of Neithal Catholicism
7. Neithal Catholicism as Lived Religion
8. The Structure of Lived Catholicism
Conclusion / Glossary / Selected Bibliography / Index / Back Matter
More info: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvr0qt5p
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