Popular perception and analyses of Hinduism and Indian society tend to focus on a largely monolithic image of the Brahmans. They emphasize the supremacy of Brahmans over other classes in social and religious domains, and attribute this supremacy mainly to their superior ritual status as members of the priestly class, as well as to their traditional access to learning and literacy. This dominant image has received most attention in scholarly approaches to Hindu-Indian society and religion. Scholars of religious studies have offered various theories to explain the ritual supremacy of Brahmans, while struggles of lower castes against Brahmans have been a persistent theme in historical studies. By stressing the dominance of Brahmans in the hierarchy of power, the theoretical and historical studies have adopted a generalized and hackneyed view of Brahmans. While doing so, they have largely ignored the power struggles within the larger Brahman class. History notes the emergence of various Brahman communities in different regions at different times; it also indicates the dynamism and fluidity inherent in the formation of these communities through continually evolving affiliations with distinct factors such as region, language, sects, occupation, rituals, and ritual texts. Despite the transformations and complexities taking place within this class, the perception of their supremacist identity has persisted. How did multiple Brahman communities that shared space and prominence within a particular region engage one another? Were there any disputes among them as they shared claims to the highest social ranking in the societies of which they were a part? If any such conflicts indeed occurred, did the disputing communities create any hierarchy among themselves just as they have been positing a hierarchy between themselves and other classes? Finally, how did they define their identities as a response to these conflicts and hierarchies, and how do these identities relate to the monolithic and essentialist identity attributed to the Brahman class as such? These questions – despite their critical significance – have surprisingly escaped the scholarly gaze of the specialists in religious studies and historians. This dissertation explores this largely uncharted area by focusing on the interrelationship and identities of the four Brahman groups situated in what we know today as states of Maharashtra and Goa, in the time period from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. During this period the four communities – the Chitpavans, the Karhadas, the Sarasvats, and the Deshasthas – engaged in intense mutual rivalry centered on gaining greater prominence in social, political and religious domains. This rivalry was largely due to contemporary political conditions under the Marathas in the early-modern/pre-colonial period, and later under the British in the colonial period. This dissertation examines five narratives composed during this period that reflect the responses of these four communities to their mutual conflicts. The Sahyadrikhanda, the Sataprasnakalpalatika, the Syenavijatidharmanirnaya, the Konkanakhyana, and the Dasaprakarana contain portrayals by a particular group of itself and its rivaling groups. This dissertation analyzes the discursive and the historical aspects of these narratives to understand the identities of these communities; it identifies the key notions that were integral to their identities and the socio-political circumstances under which they were articulated. Within the discursive aspect, I compare the narratives using the principle of intertextuality and explore how they relate to one another, the common themes they invoke and their textual modes that had a crucial bearing upon the ways in which they affected the identities of the four Brahman groups. Within the historical aspect I study the general and specific contexts within which the Brahmans produced and used the narratives to define their identities in the early modern and colonial eras. This dissertation is divided in two parts; the first deals with the early modern period and the second part focuses on the colonial period. The early modern period was an exceptional period for the Brahmans in western India as they experienced unprecedented social and occupational mobility under the regional polities, in particular under the Maratha rulers. The Marathas offered great opportunities of patronage and employment to regional Brahmans, as well as encouraged them to take precedence in social, political, and religious realms as a way to consolidate their claims to Hindu kingship. As the Brahman class rose to prominence, various Brahman groups, in particular these four prominent Brahman groups, competed against one another to obtain a greater share in patronage and employment. Asserting their own superior Brahmanical status while simultaneously denigrating the status of others was the prime means through which each of these groups staked claims to a greater social standing. These intra-Brahmanical rivalries and the attempts of these groups to project a hierarchy of ideal Brahmanhood found expression in the Sahyadrikhanda, the Sataprasnakalpalatika, the Syenavijatidharmanirnaya, and the Konkanakhyana. These narratives are essentially historical inasmuch as they contain accounts of origins and the pasts of these communities. This suggests that history was the chief site upon which these intra-Brahmanical rivalries were articulated. My analysis indicates that within this overarching scheme of history, the narratives invoked certain key themes in their accounts, which they used to project a superior status of the community that they endorsed and an inferior status of the community they wished to denigrate. These themes include diet, modes of occupation, right to sannyasa, regional affiliation, right to the Satkarma, and a patron deity or an emblematic figure. I argue that these themes define a distinct set of criteria for ideal Brahmanhood such as a vegetarian diet, religious modes of occupation, entitlement to sannyasa and to Satkarma, affiliation to a sacred region, and validation of status by an authoritative figure. These criteria define a frame of reference within which the Brahman communities projected a hierarchy of ideal Brahmanhood among themselves. I demonstrate that these criteria had a strong correlation with actual practices (diet, occupation) and associations (regions, deities) of the Brahman communities, and were embedded within distinct socio-political conditions. This suggests that unlike the monolithic, static, and ahistorical notion of Brahmanhood projected in the ideological world of classical texts and ‘Orientalist’ studies, the Brahmanhood to which a Brahman in early-modern Maharashtra subscribed was a pluralistic and fluid notion embedded within a distinctly regional and temporal context. This dissertation also illustrates that far from being restricted to the discursive domain, this notion (and the narratives that constructed it) asserted its relevance and influence in the practical realities of the early modern era in various ways. In other words, the narrative discourse of Brahmanhood had a tangible impact on the identities of the Brahmans in question. The second part of the dissertation examines the colonial period during which this pluralistic, fluid, and distinctly regional notion of Brahmanhood continued be invoked and redefined in debates among the Brahman communities. Triggered by contemporary social and political transformations, these debates mark the continuation of certain elements from the previous era, as well as the introduction of new elements drawn from the changing social and political order. In particular, the ways in which the narratives from the previous era were called upon and redefined in these debates reflect some of the crucial modalities in which a unique synthesis of the new and the old elements was constructed and adapted to these new disputes. By drawing attention to the discursive and the practical fluidities of Brahmanical rivalries and identities through its focus on the narratives, this dissertation calls for more nuanced attention to Brahman communities than they have received thus far. / text

My dissertation discusses refugee rights and post-repatriation integration in South Asia in the context of debates over "citizenship." Postcolonial state-formation processes in South Asia have profoundly shaped questions of belonging and membership. As a result, official citizenship has become an important marker of group inclusion and exclusion in South Asian states. Using the literature on citizenship, I discuss the "belonging" claims of non-citizens (refugees) and argue that in practice this "belonging" extends beyond the state-centric "citizenship" view of membership. In doing so, I address two sets of interrelated questions: what factors determine whether or not refugees will be repatriated in South Asia, and why do some repatriated groups re-integrate more successfully than others in "post-peace" South Asian states? I answer these questions through a study of refugees from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh who sought asylum in India and were later repatriated to their countries of origin. The politics of postcolonial state-formation and subsequent discriminatory policies on language in Sri Lanka and non-recognition of the Jumma people in Bangladesh encouraged many citizens to flee to India as refugees. I argue, first, that India's state-centric politics of non-recognition of the two refugee groups contributed to their later repatriation. In the absence of rights and status in exile, refugees turned to "home" as a place to belong. I then analyze the post-repatriation variations in accommodation in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as most refugees attempted to reclaim the lost identity and "citizenship" at "home" through the process of repatriation. However these countries pursued strategies of limited accommodation, which led to the minimal or partial re-integration of the two returnee-refugee groups.

One of the most critical tasks facing the world in the post-cold war era is to eliminate nuclear proliferation. With the recent nuclear tests by India and Pakistan, the subject of nuclear proliferation has returned to the forefront of international politics. Taking issue with the complacent belief that only a few states unnecessarily jeopardize international peace by acquiring nuclear weapons, I argue that many states in territorial protracted conflict are generally proliferants because of their specific security concerns. Demonstrating how individual and domestic level motivations are not the key determinants of the nuclear choices of the South Asian and Middle Eastern states, I emphasize the role of systemic level motivation, particularly security, in their nuclear decisions. Through a close examination of these states' nuclear weapons choices, I develop a new appraisal of the territorial protracted conflict states' potential to proliferate. While high war-probability has provoked virtually all of these protracted conflict states to seek nuclear deterrent capability and become proliferants, the variations in the type of conflict, regional power structure and geographical proximity have brought about variations in the pace of proliferation among these states. Finally, I expand the implications of this study for IR theory, especially with regard to Realist theory, nuclear deterrence, post-cold war world order, and nuclear arms control treaties. I conclude that the resolution of the roots of regional conflicts will most effectively ensure that more states do not embark on a nuclear weapons program. It is, however, naive to expect the new nuclear states to roll back their weapons programs.

The object of this thesis is to explain why Pakistan which Muslim nationalist historians claim was created in the name of Islam failed to sustain a democratic political system. This question is explored by examining the politics of South Asian Muslims as a continuity from the colonial to the post-partition period, focusing on the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. The thesis begins by investigating the factors which helped politicize Muslim identity during the inter-war years. The interplay of nationalism, constitutional reforms and common identity based on confessional faith forged political identities which determined the course of subsequent events. Dyarchy set in motion processes which the Government of India Act of 1935 reinforced,- the emergence of political solidarities based on religion and region and alienation from nationalist politics. The Congress was able to neutralize the centrifugal developments among its Hindu constituency. It was not so successful among Muslims partly due to the impact of the Reforms and partly due to the activity of Hindu revivalists in the party. Simultaneously Muslim politics was moving away from the Congress, not towards the Muslim League but to the All-India Muslim Conference, around which most Muslims had gathered in opposition to the Nehru Report. However most regional and communitarian parties were not simply antagonistic to the Congress. They rejected centralist politics as a whole. This was amply demonstrated by the 1937 election results which underlined Jinnah's irrelevance to Muslim politics. Hence Muslims were in their political loyalties divided between strong currents focused on provincial interests and weak ones emphasizing sub-continental unity, national or Muslim. This configuration, the opposition between centrifugal and centripetal forces defined the basic parameters of Muslim politics. The second chapter describes how the political divisions between Muslims was partially overcome. The 1937 elections initiated a major political shift among the Muslim regional parties and caused great unease among the urban groupings. The Muslim regional partie's feared that the Congress Party's control over provincial ministries through a centralized structure and its rejection of the federal basis of the 1935 Act, would lead to their being roped into a Hindu-dominated unitary state. To fight this threat, an alternative political focus at the all-India level came to be considered necessary for the protection of their interests. The Muslim League's revival was indirectly facilitated by the Quit India Movement which temporarily removed the Congress from the arena of open politics and by the encouragement Jinnah received from the Raj. The League was able to gradually pull Muslim groups, particularly those in the Muslim-minority provinces, into its ranks through the use of anti-Congress propaganda. But among the urban masses of UP Jinnah was eclipsed by Mashriqi until the mid-1940s when the Khaksars became a spent force. This development combined with the increasing influence of the Pakistan slogan, vague yet immensely attractive, provided the ideological cutting edge of the League's agenda for Muslim unity. The ideological hegemony allowed the League to focus the forces of community consciousness as a battering ram to breakdown the regional parties resistance. The Pakistan slogan spread from the urban areas and Muslim-minority provinces into the rural areas of the Muslim-majority provinces. But in Bengal the regionalist had taken over the party, in the Punjab Khizr continued to resist and in the NWFP and Sind the Muslim League was a peripheral influence. Hence by the mid-1940s the League was only able to achieve partial unity under the Pakistan banner. The third chapter deals with the brief moment of political unity achieved through the combined impact of mass nationalism and communal riots. After the constitutional deadlock following the breakdown of the Simla Conference the League was able to make major advances by positing a clear choice between their and the Congress's plans for India's future. Muslim nationalism now centred on the League capitalized on the political uncertainties caused by the negotiations and won over many adherents from the provincial parties. An important factor which widened the League's area of influence was the increased significance of economic nationalism. It opened channels of communication between the elites and the masses, drew in groups previously unaffected by the Muslim League and turned the agitation for Pakistan into a mass movement. These factors combined with the weakness of the Congress due to their incarceration during the war resulted in the widespread shift away from the regional parties to the Muslim League. Jinnah was able to achieve for a brief moment political unity and used this as the basis to extract the maximum constitutional concessions from the British and the Congress. However the centralization process was weak and its frailty was at the root of ideological confusion. The confusion was manifest in the changing definition of Pakistan in this crucial period. The problem was compounded by the League's lack of strong party structure to control and enforce discipline over the regional supporters. Jinnah's interventions in the provinces were the exception and not the rule and limited to disciplining local leaders. For expanding the party's influence he was completely dependent on the provincial leaders. The regionalist forces were not genuine converts to Muslim nationalism. They used the League as a stalking horse for their provincial interests. Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan due to the strong pressures from the Muslim-majority provinces who were not interested in a separate homeland for Muslims and later he supported Suhrawardy's attempt to avoid partition of Bengal. Jinnah had to be responsive to these different currents within the party in order to avoid a revolt against his leadership. Besides the internal pressure, pro-Congress opposition was still strong in Sarhad and Sind and they used regional ethnicity as a counter against the League. However the opposition collapsed when the civil disobedience movement mounted by the League at this extremely tense moment triggered off the communal explosion which engulfed northern India and as a result the Congress accepted partition. The fourth chapter deals with the Muslim League's effort to consolidate its position in Pakistan through the construction of a strong state and the potent anti-centre backlash it produced. Pakistan came into existence through the contingent circumstances attending the transfer of power and the League's leadership was ill-prepared to establishing itself in Pakistan. The perceived threat from India and the internal opposition to the leadership convinced them that the country and they themselves could survive politically only if a strong centre was established. However the ethnic composition of the ruling group was a source of tension which bedeviled the centralizing process. The Muslim League leadership was mainly Muhajirs who had no social base in Pakistan. They along with the Punjabis also dominated the military and the bureaucracy. Hence the push for a unitary structure alienated others such as the Bengalis, who were not represented in the upper echelons of the state. The political instability was aggravated by the ruling group's efforts to establish a strong centre not on the basis of a broad consensus but through strong arm tactics. As a result internal and external opposition to the League leadership was suppressed in an authoritarian manner. Karachi used the state apparatus to crush the emerging opposition and interfered in the provinces attempting to put its supporters into power.

This dissertation maps the emergence of a 'secularist ethics' in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my argument that literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism. Through close readings of fictions by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Jamila Hashmi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam, as well as films by M. S. Sathyu, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Khalid Mohamed and Shyam Benegal, which are concerned to address the issue of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, I argue that literary and imaginative endeavors by way of their alternative secularist imaginaries enable us to begin to imagine the possibilities of more habitable futures. Significantly, the 'secularist' fictions and films I invite attention to in my project enable a revisioning of the secular in terms quite different from normative understandings of liberal secularism. Such a renewed secularism seeks to make visible the normalization and neutralization of majoritarian religious beliefs and practices as constitutive of the representative secular-nationalist self in post-Partition India; it also emerges, significantly, from a gendered critique of the deep-seated patriarchal norms underlying most religious communities. Responding to different moments of crisis, predominantly the Partition of India in 1947, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the radical secularist poetics of these works call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limit

South Asia, a land of contrasting landscapes, seasons and climates, is highly vulnerable to climate variability over intra-seasonal to decadal time scales. In winter, precipitation over the western parts of south Asia and fog over the Indo-Gangetic (IG) plains are the two major climatic features. During summer most of the region comes under the grip of monsoon. Winter precipitation over the north-western parts of South Asia is associated with eastwards propagating ‘western disturbances’ originating mostly from Mediterranean. Both observations and regional climate-model simulations show that the winter precipitation increases/decreases during the positive/negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the warm/cold phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). During these phases, the intensification of western disturbances results from the effect of an enhanced trough visible at sea-level as well as at higher altitudes over central Asia. The inter-annual variability of fog is coupled over IG plains with a significant trend in the fog frequencies, both in observations and ERA-Interim reanalysis data. This increase shows two distinct regime shifts in 1990 and 1998 with respect to mean and variance, this in contrast to a gradual increase of the humidity over the region. The thermodynamic analysis of the intra-seasonal summer monsoon active phases (APs) over Pakistan revealed that a few days before AP, an upper-level warm anomaly appears over the northern Hindu Kush-Himalaya region and is reinforced by surface heating. The baroclinic height anomalies, with a low-level anticyclone located east of the warming, causes a moisture convergence, strong enough to overcome the preexisting stable atmospheric conditions. The extratropical dynamics also play an important role for the inter-annual variation of the South-Asian monsoon. It is found that the two leading modes between the upper-level circulation in the Atlantic/European region and monsoon rainfall are the Circumglobal Teleconnection (CGT) and the summer NAO. The positive phase of the CGT is related to a widespread increase of monsoon rainfall, and a positive summer NAO is related to a precipitation dipole with its positive anomaly over Pakistan. / At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Submitted.

ABSTRACT Since the dawn of the atomic age, the United States of America [US] saw the problem of nuclear proliferation as one of its own creation and therefore theirs to rectify. Perhaps motivated by a form of nuclear imperialism, the US held the majority of the aspiration and ability to solve the international problem of nuclear proliferation. In hindsight there is perhaps very little that successive presidential administrations could have done to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons during this period without significantly affecting their own international ambitions. However, the possibility that the US could have obtained the signatures of the nuclear non-signatories of India, Pakistan and Israel on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968) [NPT] became more remote due to the determination of those states to act independently and demonstrate their authority over their own nuclear matters in the shadow of both the superpowers during the Cold War. Furthermore, the American failure to obtain early agreement on the nuclear issue meant that the long-term nuclear ambitions of these nations could not be reversed. Exploiting an array of archival sources, Bring the Bombs out of the Basement analyses the process by which the US sought to bring these non-compliant states into the nuclear non-proliferation regime. It also discusses the significance of the failure of the US to bring the nuclear non-signatories into the fold. Studying the problem under the framework of the NPT as the cornerstone of the nuclear non-proliferation system, it focuses on the period between 1961 and 1974 – from the intensification of NPT negotiations under President John F. Kennedy, to the year in which India detonated its first nuclear device. By analysing the diplomatic interactions between the US and India, Pakistan and Israel, this thesis examines why the US was unable to politically tame one of the most significant scientific research achievements of all time and wield influence in the nuclear arena commensurate to its superpower status. In terms of uniqueness, this is the first study to have comprehensively examined and compared US nuclear policy towards only the nuclear non-signatories.

ABSTRACT Since the dawn of the atomic age, the United States of America [US] saw the problem of nuclear proliferation as one of its own creation and therefore theirs to rectify. Perhaps motivated by a form of nuclear imperialism, the US held the majority of the aspiration and ability to solve the international problem of nuclear proliferation. In hindsight there is perhaps very little that successive presidential administrations could have done to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons during this period without significantly affecting their own international ambitions. However, the possibility that the US could have obtained the signatures of the nuclear non-signatories of India, Pakistan and Israel on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (1968) [NPT] became more remote due to the determination of those states to act independently and demonstrate their authority over their own nuclear matters in the shadow of both the superpowers during the Cold War. Furthermore, the American failure to obtain early agreement on the nuclear issue meant that the long-term nuclear ambitions of these nations could not be reversed. Exploiting an array of archival sources, Bring the Bombs out of the Basement analyses the process by which the US sought to bring these non-compliant states into the nuclear non-proliferation regime. It also discusses the significance of the failure of the US to bring the nuclear non-signatories into the fold. Studying the problem under the framework of the NPT as the cornerstone of the nuclear non-proliferation system, it focuses on the period between 1961 and 1974 – from the intensification of NPT negotiations under President John F. Kennedy, to the year in which India detonated its first nuclear device. By analysing the diplomatic interactions between the US and India, Pakistan and Israel, this thesis examines why the US was unable to politically tame one of the most significant scientific research achievements of all time and wield influence in the nuclear arena commensurate to its superpower status. In terms of uniqueness, this is the first study to have comprehensively examined and compared US nuclear policy towards only the nuclear non-signatories.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 250-265).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Maryland, 1975. / "76-18,706." Xerox reproduction. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 230-248).