Thesis (M.Ed.)--York University, 2006. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-133). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR19650

Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2006. / Thesis advisor: Joanne DiPlacido. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-61). Also available via the World Wide Web.

In this dissertation, I analyze interactions between Sanskrit and Persian literary cultures at the Mughal court during the years 1570-1650 C.E. During this period, the Mughals rose to prominence as one of the most powerful dynasties of the early modern world and patronized Persian as a language of both literature and empire. Simultaneously, the imperial court supported Sanskrit textual production, participated in Sanskrit cultural life, and produced Persian translations of Sanskrit literature. For their part, Sanskrit intellectuals became influential members of the Mughal court, developed a linguistic interest in Persian, and wrote extensively about their imperial experiences. Yet the role of Sanskrit at the Mughal court remains a largely untold story in modern scholarship, as do the resulting engagements across cultural lines. To the extent that scholars have thought about Sanskrit and Persian in tandem, they have generally been blinded by their own language barriers and mistakenly asserted that there was no serious interaction between the two. I challenge this uncritical view through a systematic reading of texts in both languages and provide the first detailed account of exchanges between these traditions at the Mughal court. I further argue that these cross-cultural events are central to understanding the construction of power in the Mughal Empire and the cultural and literary dynamics of early modern India.

This study is concerned with the Indian "romance" (qissah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and "occult" sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as "romances," via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq).

This dissertation focuses on the artistic culture of late Mughal Delhi spanning the last century of Mughal rule and the administration of the English East India Company in North India, from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It brings a hitherto unrecognized period of artistic accomplishment to light and studies the transformations within painting culture in the multicultural Anglo-Mughal society of Delhi. Rather than being fixated on the continuum of Mughal painting over centuries, this dissertation suggests that the art of the late Mughal period should be studied on its own terms as a response to immense socio-political and cultural changes. At its core this study is concerned with dissolving the stylistic barriers between Mughal and Company painting in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I take up the question of what the term 'late Mughal painting' entails and discuss how the term privileges the notion of a court centric culture of painting in an era when the Mughal court was only one of many venues of artistic expression. On the other hand, I highlight the inadequacy of the term 'Company painting' to address the variegated nature of works produced under East India Company patronage in this period. Thus, this dissertation attempts to view seemingly disparate works within a common framework of visual analysis. Moreover, it seeks to highlight the agency of painters in creating this diffusion of artistic conventions at Delhi and charts transitions in their working methods. In a period where the story of the Mughal empire appears as an appendage to the dominant historiography of the East India Company's rise to power, this investigation of painting culture in Delhi (the spiritual and historical center of Mughal power) reveals how paintings were critical for either maintaining or upsetting the status quo between court and Company and how this critical balance of power between the two was negotiated in the visual sphere. The first chapter of this dissertation discusses the role of cartography as a means for projecting Mughal imperial identity in the face of a growing Company dominance. Using a body of previously unexplored maps and cartographic drawings I show how painters used topographic markers to illustrate Mughal presence using both European and local conventions of drawing. Such works, I argue, also initiated the creation of visual histories of later Mughal rule at Delhi, as they pictured events often discussed in private correspondence, such as the famous bazgasht or Return of Shah Alam II (r. 1759-1806) to Delhi that marked the re-establishment of the Mughal house Delhi in 1772. Paintings produced in the royal court of Shah Alam II reflected upon the historical legacy of Mughal ideas while referencing the emotive context of Indo-Persian and Braj bhasha poetics that constituted the wider expressive culture of this period. Composed by the Delhi painter Khairullah, court scenes played upon the metaphorical significance of the long lost Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan re-imagining it within the space of the later Mughal court - thus creating a formidable visual imperial identity for the veteran blinded emperor Shah Alam II. Furthermore, Khairullah's younger colleague Ghulam Murtaza Khan took this legacy forward using the shared knowledge of Western perspective and Mughal painterly hieratic to create court scenes for Akbar II (r.1806-1836). His works can also be read for their clever subversion of the Company's attempts to conduct diplomatic meetings on an equal footing. The painter's innovative format for Mughal court scenes was modeled on the picture plane of a one-point perspective, which he used to draw attention to the centrally placed and physically higher figure of the emperor. This, in turn, relegated the figure of the British Resident to a mere courtier rather than the new arbitrator of power in Anglo-Mughal Delhi. Ghulam Murtaza Khan's paintings easily constitute the most substantial visual record of the Mughal court in the nineteenth century. As this dissertation reveals, a large majority of paintings produced in courtly and non-courtly settings were, in fact, executed by the same group of painters belonging to the family atelier of the painter Ghulam Ali Khan (active 1790-1855). This dissertation offers a first look into the network of painters active in Delhi during this period and also offers a plausible genealogy of their family. Later chapters of this dissertation highlight how Ghulam Ali Khan worked in different conventions - of Mughal manuscript painting, architectural, and landscape drawing, and miniatures - showcasing his ability to skillfully modify his technique to suit a particular patron. His working method also indicates that artistic knowledge available to the painter reached him through discrete channels such as the court atelier or through his training in European architectural draftsmanship. However, the melding of artistic conventions in the nineteenth century was subject to the will of the artist and the marketplace. I provide an overview of Ghulam Ali Khan's career spanning the breadth of his early work on architectural views of Delhi's buildings to his work on portrait studies of Delhi's residents for the newly powerful group of Company officers, William Fraser (1784-1835) and Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841). The dissertation also suggests a connection between Ghulam Ali Khan and the British topographical painter Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) through a study of Daniell's scraps (illustrated notes) from his private papers. Moreover, my research situates Ghulam Ali Khan as the driving force for painting at the Rajput court of Alwar and the Jat court of Jhajjar enabling us, for the first time, to create a near-complete picture of his career. This dissertation presents first time look into the pictorial archives at Alwar and uses new evidence to substantiate the painter's pivotal role in shaping painting culture at Alwar in the nineteenth century. The penultimate section of this dissertation presents facets of European patronage that link closely with the cultural and political conditions at Delhi. In particular, I examine the circumstances surrounding the commission of portraits of Delhi's residents by the Company officer William Fraser that were part of the (now) world famous album compiled between the years 1810 and 1825. I draw attention to the pragmatic considerations surrounding land settlement that bore upon Fraser's interest in creating a visual record of the Delhi countryside. Focusing on his professional role as the surveyor, I show how he was able to create an enduring model for land settlement that incorporated his personal and familial links with village residents in the region. This analysis provides the all important context for thinking about rural portraits in the Fraser Album, and their personal as well as professional appeal for Fraser. This dissertation also lays out a near complete picture of Fraser's friend James Skinner's professional life and his interest in creating a pictorial biography through commissions of albums and monumental paintings. Situating the paintings within the socio-political context of Skinner's rise from an adjunct Company officer to a decorated Mughal and Company servant, I discuss how Skinner's search for permanent recognition shaped the content of Ghulam Ali Khan's compositions. Finally, this dissertation charts the later years of painting at Delhi and its dilution into souvenir copies painted on ivory that I call, "Mughalerie". William Fraser's own interest in commissioning copies of popular paintings on ivory is noteworthy here, indicative of rise in the popular taste for European-styled miniatures based on Mughal ideas that fed into the emotional economy of Anglo-Indian residents of Delhi. Overall, this study of painting culture in Delhi aims at enriching the mainstream historiography of the modern period of Indian painting and offers a compelling reassessment of this transition period in Indian art history.

Scholarship on the earliest known illustrated manuscripts produced in the sultanate of Golconda has tended to describe these objects as the products of the extension of a powerful influence from Iran over this small kingdom in the Deccan. While this assessment rightly acknowledges the importance of Persianate visual traditions in early Golconda manuscripts and paintings, it oversimplifies the nature of these remarkable objects and the context of their production. In addition, it misrepresents the role of the artists involved in the manuscripts' creation. This dissertation provides a more nuanced consideration of these objects and their making. It offers the first in-depth discussion of six manuscripts produced in Golconda between 1570 and 1610, demonstrating a previously unrecognized sophistication and creativity in the process of their creation. It also presents a newly discovered manuscript, one which significantly alters prevailing understandings of early manuscript painting in the Qutb Shahi sultanate. These studies identify several interrelated modes of engagement with Persianate forms, rather than a single stylistic progression towards local artistic "independence." In addition, they reveal how these various modes were calibrated towards different goals, sometimes using Persianate forms as a platform from which to explore various ways of constructing and illustrating narrative and poetic texts, while at other times using these forms to make claims of cultural sophistication or for the legitimating of new and local cultural phenomena.

This dissertation documents the earliest stages in the emergence of the Smarta Saiva sectarian community of south India as captured by the theological writings of prominent Saiva theologians. I examine the sectarianization of Hinduism in microcosm by telling the story of a particular Hindu sect in the process of coming into being. The Smarta Saiva tradition of south India ranks among a handful of independent Hindu lineages that palpably dominates the public religious life of south India today. As a sectarian religious system, Smarta-Saivism comprises the institution of the Sankaracarya Jagadgurus and the extensive lay populace that has cultivated a relationship of personal devotion with these iconic figures. Historically speaking, however, the Smarta-Saiva tradition equally comprises the trailblazing theologians who first articulated the boundaries of the community, demarcating its distinct sectarian identity in contradistinction to its various Vaisnava and non-Smarta Saiva rivals. As it was these theologians whose pioneering inquiries crafted the systems of meaning that first gave birth to Smarta-Saivism as such, it is in their writings--their doctrine, polemic, ritual procedures, and devotional poetry--that this dissertation grounds its inquiry. My analysis centers on the textual contributions of Nilakantha Diksita--minister, poet laureate, and public theologian of Nayaka-period Madurai, and those connected with him by virtue of kinship, collegiality, or direct antagonism. Nilakantha and his immediate family and dialogical partners form the core of what I refer to as the "Smarta religious system" of the seventeenth century, culturally a direct antecedent of what we know today as south Indian Smarta-Saivism. My analysis takes the form of three parallel case studies, each of which illuminates a dynamic of intersection between intellectual discourse and religious culture that proved foundational to the religious landscape of south India up to the present day. Taken as a whole, these case studies illustrate the micro-dynamics of public theology, articulating key moments of the consolidation of south Indian Smarta identity and religiosity.

This dissertation takes the routine marginalization and erasure of Muslim presence in the contemporary social and political life of the western Indian state of Gujarat as an entry point into a genealogy of Gujarati regionalism. Through a historical anthropology of the reconfiguration of the modern idea of Gujarat, I argue that violence against religious minorities is an effect of both secular nation-building and of religious nationalist mobilization. Given this entanglement, I suggest that we rethink the oppositional relationship between religion and the secular in analyzing violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat. The modern idea of Gujarat, I further argue, cannot be grasped without taking into consideration how local conceptions of region and of religion were fundamentally altered by colonial power. In particular, I suggest that the construction of Islam as inessential and external to the idea of Gujarat is a legacy bequeathed by colonialism and its forms of knowledge. The transmutation of Gujarati Muslims into strangers, in other words, occurred simultaneously with the articulation of the modern idea of Gujarat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on the role of nineteenth-century regional history-writing, in which the foundational role of Islam was de-emphasized, in what I call the making of a regional tradition. By highlighting the colonial genealogy of contemporary discourses of Gujaratni asmita (pride in Gujarat), in which Hindu and Gujarati are posited as identical with each other, I argue that colonialism was one of its conditions of possibility. One result of this simultaneous reconfiguration of religion and region, I argue, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to inhabit a Hindu religious identity that is not at the same time articulated in opposition to a Muslim Other in Gujarat. Another consequence is that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for Muslims to represent themselves or advocate for their rights as Muslim and as Gujarati. How the reconfiguration of a Gujarati regional identity is imbricated with transformations in conceptions of religion is part of what this dissertation seeks to think about. Furthermore, I argue that the marginalization of Muslims in Gujarat cannot be understood through an exclusive focus on organized violence or on the Hindu nationalist movement. While recent studies on Gujarat have focused mainly on the pogrom of 2002 to think about the role of the Hindu nationalist movement in orchestrating mass violence against Muslims in contemporary Gujarat, I argue that the pogrom of 2002 is but one part of a broader spectrum of violence and exclusion that permeates the body of the state and society. In addition, I suggest that one of the conditions of possibility for such violence is the sedimentation of a conception of Gujaratiness as identical with Hinduness that cuts across the religious/secular divide. Instead of focusing exclusively on the violence of the Hindu nationalist movement, I explore this process of sedimentation as it manifests itself in the intersecting logics of urban planning, heritage preservation, and neoliberal development in contemporary Gujarat. Through an analysis of the contemporary reorganization and partitioning of the city of Ahmedabad along religious lines, I show how it is continuous with colonial and nationalist urban planning practices of the early twentieth century. Using ethnographic examples, I also argue that the contemporary secular nationalist discourse of heritage preservation is both complicit in the marginalization of Muslims and continuous with practices of urban planning and preservation that were articulated in the late colonial period. Finally, my dissertation demonstrates the enabling nature of neoliberal logics in the organization of violence against Muslims in Gujarat and argues that anti-Muslim violence and prejudice are enabled by and intertwined with narratives about the promises of capital and progress. Combining historical and ethnographic methods, this dissertation seeks to contribute to an anthropology of colonialism, nationalism, religion, secularism and violence in South Asia that is attentive to the continuities and discontinuities that are constitutive of the postcolonial present we inhabit. By historicizing contemporary debates and assumptions about Muslims in Gujarat and describing some of the genealogies that have contributed to their sedimentation, I hope to have argued that colonial legacies have enduring effects in the present and that the question posed by colonial forms of knowledge and representation is not merely epistemological or historiographical but also a political one. Written as a history of the present, this dissertation is motivated by a desire to imagine a future in which Hindu/Gujarati and Muslim are no longer conceptualized as oppositional categories; in which Gujarati Muslims are able to represent themselves as Muslims and in their own (varied) terms; and where Hindus are no longer invited and incited to inhabit a subjectivity that depends on making Muslims strangers to Gujarat.

This dissertation is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Pushkar, India, a Hindu pilgrimage site that doubles as an international tourist destination with an influx of two million visitors each year. Here, I explore the massive enterprise on the part of Pushkar locals to build “heaven on earth,” paying particular attention to how the articulation of sacred space works alongside economic changes brought on by globalization and tourism. Central to my work is an investigation of how tourism and global thinking affect everyday life in this pilgrimage site, and how Hindu ideas—about religion, identity, and belonging—shape the contours of tourism; the goal, then, is to show how religion and tourism are in fact mutually constitutive. In examining the entanglements of making Pushkar paradise, I look to a number of different topics: beliefs about Hindu universalism and how its principles incorporate people from outside of the Hindu fold; ritual repertoires that brahmans perform on behalf of their clients in order to propitiate the gods; mythic tales that boast of Pushkar’s greatness, printed in 5-rupee pamphlets or narrated by priests at the lake; environmental action taken up by locals worried about lake pollution; and guided tours designed to promote the kind of atmosphere where people from around the world can feel as if they belong.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in Education. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-121). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ39232.