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This book charts the transoceanic history of South Asian women in California through their speech and songs across the twentieth century.Nicole Ranganath reimagines the history of the South Asian diaspora through an examination of gender and the dynamic interplay of water and land in the cultural history of Sikhs, a faith and cultural community that emerged in the Punjab region of north South Asia over 550 years ago. It shows how the history and music of transoceanic communities, in this case Sikhs, spilled beyond the boundaries of regions, empires and nation-states. It emphasizes the heterogeneity of the South Asia diaspora by uncovering the distinct history of women's migration experiences, as well as an alternative oceanic imaginary among Sikhs that envisions unity in the cosmos. It foregrounds the pivotal role that women played in transforming Sikh communities in California through songs and female affinities. Based on six years of fieldwork in rural northern California, it explores song as a window into the interior lives of Sikh women through their performance of diverse genres: gadar anti-colonial songs, folk music, hymns, and autobiographical songs. This sonic history of South Asian women in the diaspora dislodges dominant paradigms in diaspora studies and oceanic humanities that depict men as mobile and women as stationary.Women and the Sikh Diaspora in California will interest scholars of migration, South Asia and South Asian American studies, oceanic humanities, Sikh studies, music, and women's studies. It is also essential reading for anyone who is curious about global music and migration, as well as Sikh history.

This book delves into the unconventional perspectives of writers and artists from Twentieth Century Bengal, exploring their roles as'plant thinkers.'By examining the works of figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Jibanananda Das, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, and others, the narrative delves into how their stories, songs, art, and films, deeply influenced Bengali life and thought. Embracing themes of forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants, these thinkers, including Jagadish Chandra Bose with his scientific experiments, derived their worldviews, poetics, and politics from the intricate world of plants. The work not only explores Bose's scientific research and philosophy but also delves into religious rituals that fostered a profound connection with the natural world. Through a nuanced examination of the affective relationship between individuals and the plant world, the narrative uncovers a subterranean invocation of plant philosophy in both actions and words. Moreover, it highlights the political possibilities beyond the confines of the nation state that emanated from such profound thinking. As the book unfolds, it weaves a rich tapestry of living practices and artistic expressions rooted in plant philosophy. By contemplating the sap and flow of these influences, it prompts readers to reflect on what contemporary consciousness can glean from these thinkers.

ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a family whose very name connoted wealth. The Vanderbilts had a vast empire built on freight through steamboats and railroads. Over a few generations, the wealth-worth billions in today's money-had been frittered away and the business itself faded as new options came up in the freight business. Their story remains an enduring example of what happens when business leaders fail to embrace the future and transform.BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION is a live subject, one that authors R. Gopalakrishnan and Hrishi Bhattacharyya have between them a hundred-plus years of leading in their companies. Their learnings, supported by numerous examples, make for riveting reading. One chief lesson why such transformations succeed or fail has to do withcombining the art and science of the change – the heart and the mind – and getting the balance of the two right. In life as in business, to effect a transformation, one needs a compelling narrative, one that inspires the organisation. Important too is to see transformation as a continuous endeavour and made a part of work culture rather than to consider it an exercise undertaken only in a crisis. Embrace the Future is a major book by two business leaders that will appeal to anyone who has faced change-in today's fluid business environment, most of us. As Gopalakrishnan and Bhattacharyya emphasise, companies that fail to adapt are destined to perish. One needs to learn from the past, manage the present and prepare for the future. We must imagine the future we desire and then fold it into the present.

One of the most durable figures in modern history, the peasant has long been a site of intense intellectual and political debate. Yet underlying much of this literature is the assumption that peasants simply existed everywhere, a general if not generic group, traced backward from modernity to antiquity. Focused on the transformation of Panjab during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this book accounts for the colonial origins of global capitalism through a radical history of the concept of'the peasant,'demonstrating how seemingly fixed hierarchies were in fact produced, legitimized, and challenged within the preeminent agricultural region of South Asia. Navyug Gill uncovers how and why British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and occupation to generate a new agrarian order in the countryside. The notion of the hereditary caste peasant engaged in timeless cultivation thus emerged, paradoxically, as a result of a dramatic series of conceptual, juridical, and monetary divisions. Far from archaic relics, this book ultimately reveals both the landowning peasant and landless laborer to be novel political subjects forged through the encounter between colonialism and struggles over culture and capital within Panjabi society. Questions of progress, exploitation and knowledge come to animate the vernacular operations of power. With this history, Gill brings difference and contingency to understandings of the global past in order to re-think the itinerary of comparative political economy as well as alternative possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Institutional constraints and weak capacity often hamper the ability of local governments in developing countries to steer urbanization. As a result, there are not enough cities to accommodate an unabated rural-urban migration and many of those that exist are messy, sprawling, and disconnected. The flipside is the emergence of entire cities--more than gated communities or industrial parks--led in whole or in part by private actors. To date, little systematic research has been conducted on the conditions that are necessary for such unusual entities to emerge, on the roles played by private actors, or on the consequences for efficiency and equity.'Private Cities: Outstanding Examples from Developing Countries and Their Implications for Urban Policy'aims to fill this gap. Using an analytical framework that draws on urban economics and political science, it includes inventories of private cities in the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan and provides structured reviews of 14 outstanding examples across all developing regions. Nongovernment actors turn out to be diverse--they include not only major companies and large developers but also business associations, civil society organizations, and even foreign countries. The way local governments interact with these nongovernment actors varies as well, from deliberate neglect to joint ventures. Private actors take on some--but not all--local government functions, while at times embracing unconventional roles. And while private cities tend to be economically successful, they can lead to environmental degradation, social segregation, and even institutional secession. Increasing the capacity of local governments in developing countries will take time.Along the way, inefficient spatial development patterns may be locked in. There is a case for selectively tapping into the comparative advantage of significant private actors while actively using policy tools to avoid the potential shortcomings. In the spirit of a publicprivate partnership for urbanization, land value capture would be at the center of this approach.

This book offers the first social history of music in undivided Punjab (1800-1947), beginning at the Lahore court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and concluding at the Patiala royal darbar. It unearths new evidence for the centrality of female performers and classical music in a region primarily viewed as a folk music centre, featuring a range of musicians and dancers -from'mirasis'(bards) and'kalawants'(elite musicians), to'kanjris'(subaltern female performers) and'tawaifs'(courtesans). A central theme is the rise of new musical publics shaped by the anglicized Punjabi middle classes, and British colonialists'response to Punjab's performing communities. The book reveals a diverse connoisseurship for music with insights from history, ethnomusicology, and geography on an activity that still unites a region now divided between India and Pakistan.

Naked holy men denying sexuality and feeling; elderly people basking in the warmth and security provided by devoted and attentive family members; fastidious priests concerned solely with rules of purity and the minutiae of ritual practice; puritanical moralists concealing women and sexuality behind purdah's veils—these are familiar Western stereotypes of India. The essays in Divine Passions, however, paint other, more colorful and emotionally alive pictures of India: ecstatic religious devotees rolling in temple dust; gray-haired elders worrying about neglect and mistreatment by family members; priests pursuing a lusty, carefree ideal of the good life; and jokers reviling one another with bawdy, sexual insults at marriages. Drawing on rich ethnographic data from emotion-charged scenarios, these essays question Western academic theories of emotion, particularly those that reduce emotions to physiological sensations or to an individual's private feelings. Presenting an alternative view of emotions as culturally constructed and morally evaluative concepts grounded in the bodily self, the contributors to Divine Passions help dispel some of the West's persistent misconceptions of Indian emotional experience. Moreover, the edition as a whole argues for a new and different understanding of India based on field research and an understanding of the devotional (bhakti) tradition. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

The main objective of this book is to analyze prominent literary images of Delhi in post-independence India. The author has probed into a number of eminent writings in Hindi, English and other languages. The author's methodology, a humanistic and phenomenological approach, allows exploration of experiential dimension of writers'and their characters in various genres of literature. An inquiry into perceptions and imagination in literature enriches the understanding of place, space, time, and seasons, the concerns central to geography. The Perceptions of the metropolis of Delhi interestingly vary between authors and their characters. The images of Delhi in plethora of literary works show a wide spectrum of colors. The images evoke feelings of reverence, love, adoration, dislike, indifference or neutrality. Experiences vary from places of beauty and grandeur to utterly ugly environments. Natives express different views and attitudes toward the city of Delhi from those of expatriate writers.

Analysing the evolution of Lahore's social organization, culture and ideologies since Pakistan's independence in 1947, this book explores how social and cultural changes affect the social economy, spatial structure and the urban environment. It uncovers the internal dynamics and functional order of the city that sustain everyday life, despite its challenges and seemingly disorderly institutions. The book offers a strategic vision for the city's development that emphasizes equitable policies for public utilities and the built environment. In addition, the author proposes a complementary programme for social development and civic ethos.This book will be a valuable resource for academics and students in the fields of urban planning, geography, urban studies and sociology and those interested in the urbanism of the global south, particularly Pakistan.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

This book focuses on Sikh communities in east and northeast India. It studies settlements in Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, Meghalaya, and Manipur to understand the Indian Sikhs through the lens of their dispersal to the plains and hills far from Punjab. Drawing on robust historical and ethnographic sources such as official documents, media accounts, memoirs, and reports produced by local Sikh institutions, the author studies the social composition of the immigrants and surveys the extent of their success in retaining their community identity and recreating their memories of home at their new locations. He uses a nuanced notion of the internal diaspora to look at the complex relationships between home, host, and community.As an important addition to the study of Sikhism, this book fills a significant gap and widens the frontiers of Sikh studies. It will be indispensable for students and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, history, migration and diaspora studies, religion, especially Sikh studies, cultural studies, as well as the Sikh diaspora worldwide.

Beginning with the 1990s, the subject of caste has seen a profound increase in interest among scholars. What was until then approached as a fossilized tradition of the ritual-obsessed Hindus refusing to see the progressive spirits of the emerging world and studied as a branch of anthropology, suddenly began to be seen as a complex reality deeply embedded in a range of institutions and social practices, attracting scholars from a wide range of disciplines--sociology, political science, history, literature, and even economics. Underlying this opening of the subject of caste were many factors: epistemic, empirical, and political. Caste is no longer approached through the classical binaries of'traditional'and'modern'; the'East'and the'West'; or the'closed'and'open'systems of stratification. With the growing consolidation of caste-based identities among those ranked lower down in the hierarchy since the 1990s, raising questions of citizenship and dignity, the subject has acquired a new salience. As the emerging research shows, the realities of caste on the ground have always been diverse across regions, often contested and ever changing. This Handbook presents a wide range of essays written by authors representing diverse academic disciplines and perspectives, bringing together the emerging trends in the research, imaginations, and lived realities of caste.

A best-selling journalist's illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism.'Empireland is brilliantly written, deeply researched and massively important. It'll stay in your head for years.” —John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning host of'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver'With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Booker Prize-winner Marlon JamesA best-selling journalist's illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do. From common thought to our daily routines; from the foundations of social safety nets to the realities of racism; and from the distrust of public intellectuals to the exceptionalism that permeates immigration debates, the Brexit campaign and the global reckonings with controversial memorials, Empireland shows how the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism undergirds our everyday lives, yet remains shockingly obscured from view. In accessible, witty prose, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how—in both profound and innocuous ways—imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. Sanghera connects the historical dots across continents and seas to show how the shadows of a colonial past still linger over modern-day Britain and how the world, in turn, was shaped by Britain's looming hand. The implications, of course, extend to Britain's most notorious former colony turned imperial power: the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and yet seems to have inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent. With a foreword by Booker Prize–winner Marlon James, Empireland is a revelatory and lucid work of political history that offers a sobering appraisal of the past so we may move toward a more just future.

Informed by decades of archival research, this ground-breaking book provides the first detailed and holistic analysis of the impact on North India's rural and urban economies of colonial British India's major infrastructural investment in railways, covering their first fifty years (1860-1914). By 1914, a dense 4,800 mile rail network was in place in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India's most populous state. This book provides a wide-ranging analysis of railways'economic, social, demographic and environmental effects in this key region. It provides new insights into how rail construction adapted to North Indian conditions, how the state pioneered more efficient railway building and operations in the 1870s, and how the western part of the UP and ‘independent'cultivators benefitted from rail opportunities while the river-served East UP became involuted, buttressed by migrant remittances, among many other topics. This book will be an essential read for those seeking to understand economic developments in Colonial India and railways'role.

This reference text introduces the classical probabilistic model, deep learning, and big data techniques for improving medical imaging and detecting various diseases.The text addresses a wide variety of application areas in medical imaging where deep learning techniques provide solutions with lesser human intervention and reduced time. It comprehensively covers important machine learning for signal analysis, deep learning techniques for cancer detection, diabetic cases, skin image analysis, Alzheimer's disease detection, coronary disease detection, medical image forensic, fetal anomaly detection, and plant phytology. The text will serve as a useful text for graduate students and academic researchers in the fields of electronics engineering, computer science, biomedical engineering, and electrical engineering.

This volume examines urban South Asia through the ideas of neighbourhood and neighbourliness. With a focus on the affective socio-spatial and sensorial experiences of non-metropolitan, small and intermediate cities, the chapters in the volume look at neighbourhoods as a key to exploring the textures of urban life. Bringing together scholars from a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning, and social history, the book highlights urban heterogeneity and contemporary transformations in South Asia. It discusses the linkages between urban lived spaces and social life; memory, migration, and exile; and the city and its society through practices of everyday life in neighbourhoods. With studies from Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and India, the volume addresses a wide range of issues pertaining to urban experiences in their regional specificities and in a broader context of the Global South.This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of urban sociology, anthropology, urban studies, planning and development, social history, political studies, cultural studies, geography, and South Asian studies. It will also interest practitioners and policymakers, architects, planners, civil society organisations, and thinktanks.

Nanotechnology refers to the manipulation of atoms at the nanoscale level that has numerous worthwhile applications in the real world. Unique physical and chemical properties of nanomaterials can be exploited for high performing applications that benefit the society. Nanotechnology has the potential to penetrate the grassroots of the society, hence everyone should know and aware of this technology especially the students. Owing to the important of nanotechnology, this book'Essentials of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology'has been prepared. This book contains nineteen chapters and covers both basics of nanoscience and nanotechnology and the applications of nanomaterials in varied disciplines. In the basics of nanoscience and nanotechnology part, this book briefs about the different properties of nanomaterials, various synthesis methods, and its characterization using important analytical instruments. Whereas in the application aspect, this book covers different disciplines, such as Agriculture, Food industry, Energy and Environmental Management, Medical science, Toxicology, and Biotechnology. This book has been written in a very simple format enabling easy understanding by the readers and students who have aspiration to know nanotechnology. All the chapters are framed, based on the ICAR's prescribed B.Sc. Agriculture Undergraduate syllabus, hence this book will be more useful for both Undergraduate students and general readers.

The global practice of skin bleaching is predominantly understood as an internalized legacy of colonialism and an embodiment of Western ideals of beauty. This book offers a new perspective on fair skin preference in India: it challenges the assumption that desires for light skin are always a desire of whiteness. Rather than talking back to the colonial centre, skin colour politics reorganise and reinforce social distinctions in Indian societies, which are neither exclusively local nor global. Based on primary research conducted in Delhi, this multi-dimensional study shows how skin colour intersects with and reproduces other categories of social distinction – primarily gender, class, caste, race, region and religion. It historically embeds fairness as an Indian, precolonial yet transnational ideal of beauty. The bleached body emerges as an active and thus, potentially resistant part of negotiating social status within multiple power relations and complex beauty regimes. By mapping a whole geography of skin colours in India, this book shows how fair skin as a locally embedded beauty norm and whiteness as a global cultural imperative interrelate.