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Through the process of colonization, the university has become the standard model for higher education in modern India. However, the normative status of the university and its emergence has come at the cost of deculturation of the vernacular pedagogic cultures that existed outside modern frameworks of knowledge. This is very pertinent in the case of India, where the whole paradigm of higher education has been derived from the Western model of universities, without due recognition of whether this was fit for purpose within the Indian context. Reflecting on the recent protests over the recruitment of a Muslim teacher in the Faculty of Sanskrit Vidya Dharam Vijnan at Banaras Hindu University (India), this paper examines the pitfalls in importing a 'traditional' discipline into the 'modern' university. It points to how both camps -- the conservative and the liberal -- foreclose the possibility of imagining 'Dharam Vijnan' from outside the axiomatics of the 'modern' university.

We examine the role of aerosol hygroscopicity (κ) on the formation of clouds and precipitation over the Western Ghats (WG) in India using various numerical model simulations (i.e., particle‐by‐particle‐based small‐scale, high‐resolution mesoscale model). For the diffusional growth of cloud droplets, the size‐dependent hygroscopicity is used in the κ‐Köhler equation of direct numerical simulation. The results of the small‐scale model reveal that the distribution of cloud drop size varies from the initial mixing state to the well‐mixed state due to variation in κ. The value of κ is obtained from Humidified Tandem Differential Mobility Analyzer (HTDMA) instruments at the High Altitude Cloud Physics Laboratory, India. The idealized and real simulations using the Weather and Research Forecasting (WRF) model with the aerosol‐aware Thompson microphysics scheme are conducted by changing κ values. Depending on the type of clouds (shallow or deep), different κ values determine the mass and number of cloud and rain droplets. Low hygroscopicity (organics) simulates more and smaller drops, as well as uplifts below freezing level, resulting in more ice‐phase hydrometeors. Organic aerosols have a significant impact on the formation of more snow and graupel hydrometeors. As compared to high κ, low hygroscopicity weakens updrafts at the intermediate level and strengthens them at the upper level in the deep cloud region. The intensity of precipitation varies due to low and high κ. The findings indicate that aerosol composition has a significant impact on the activation of cloud condensation nuclei. This study suggests that aerosol hygroscopicity is essential in weather prediction models to integrate aerosol chemical compositions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital Humanities (DH), as an emergent field, is increasingly gaining traction within the Indian academe. It is credited with pumping fresh life into studying the Humanities at a time when the relevance of Humanities is being questioned. However, the role of the 'digital' in studying the Humanities - whether DH is an autonomous field, or merely a data-driven technique/application, or characterises new methodologies that equip us to probe into new 'objects of inquiries - is often debated. In this article, we revisit the debates, contentions and contingencies around DH, with the intent to stir up conversations on the concerns about and faultlines of what may be referred to as an 'Indian framework' of DH practice. We examine the constituency of DH in India and the epistemic implications of the attempts towards its formalisation, which must be understood as a knowledge project linked to the prevailing episteme. In brief, we examine the 'epistemic rupture' that marks the emergence of DH in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 18th century, scholars have been claiming that Romani people originated from India. Folkloristists, ethnographers, linguists and demographers alike have sought to identify, classify and characterize the 'Roma traits' and map them onto an imagined notion of Indian-hood. Meanwhile, India has reappropriated the originary claim and started to embrace the Roma community as one of their 'own'. This paper focuses on the epistemic and political implications of ascribing an 'Indian origin' to the Roma. How do scholars and savants seek to understand Roma populations with reference to their purported Indian origin and what does it entail epistemologically? To what extent is the 'scientific' legibility of the Roma's origin structured around ideologies of the prevailing episteme? Here, I situate the theory of the Indian origin as a 'field' and argue that its foundation has revolved less around the question of 'scientific' methods and their validity than around reinforcing the episteme in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has a large poor population in spite of having a steady economic growth. Supply of centralized grid power to remote villages of India is not feasible due to adverse topography and poor economic condition of the villagers. To supply the reliable power at a minimum cost including penalty due to carbon dioxide emission, a suitable decentralized energy combination using locally available resources may be a better sustainable solution. The economy of such a hybrid energy supply system significantly depends on storage devices and dispatch strategies. Therefore, selection of appropriate storage devices and dispatch strategy need to be optimized based on available local resources. In this study, the comparative analysis of techno-economic factors for five different storage devices (lead acid battery, lithium-ion battery, vanadium redox battery, zinc bromide battery and pumped hydro energy storage) are studied under two different dispatch strategies, i.e., Load Following and Cycle Charging. The estimated cost of energy and net present cost of the recommended optimum combined energy system are in the range of US$0.197/kWh–US$0.453/kWh and US$3,62,384–US$5,76,369, respectively. The cost of energy, net present cost and carbon dioxide emission for the selected energy generators combination with the zinc bromide battery is 48.964–56.512%, 24.149–32.147% and 43.419–55.865% lower than other storage-based energy systems, respectively. The abovementioned economic and environmental factors are lower by 34.113, 10.489 and 31.094%, respectively, under Load Following dispatch strategy with respect to the Cycle Charging dispatch strategy for the optimum energy combination with zinc bromide battery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim "Indians" (practically, Hindus); and second, to reconfigure India as a site for the pan-Hindutva communion against the Muslim Other. It seeks to understand: How does #SupportCAA as a platform furnish pan-Hindutva discourses, while rendering agency to an "imagined community" of pan-national CAA supporters? How do the CAA ideologues function as "networked publics," and then go on to territorialize certain online spaces/fora? What does the CAA bequeath to the "imagined community" in question? What vocabulary of political partisanship does such territorialization furnish? How does it draw on the discourses of religious nationalism and remain nearly impervious to any dissent? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2019, the Indian parliament implemented the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that gives non-Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries an easy access to Indian citizenship. Across India, the CAA has garnered support and provoked protests in equal measure. This paper examines how #SupportCAA constantly negotiates between two parallel objectives: first, to achieve a pan-national unification of non-Muslim "Indians" (practically, Hindus); and second, to reconfigure India as a site for the pan-Hindutva communion against the Muslim Other. It seeks to understand: How does #SupportCAA as a platform furnish pan-Hindutva discourses, while rendering agency to an "imagined community" of pan-national CAA supporters? How do the CAA ideologues function as "networked publics," and then go on to territorialize certain online spaces/fora? What does the CAA bequeath to the "imagined community" in question? What vocabulary of political partisanship does such territorialization furnish? How does it draw on the discourses of religious nationalism and remain nearly impervious to any dissent? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how the Indian welfare-capitalist state, in responding to the pandemic in diverse ways, has appealed to the 'guilt conscience' and played on the vexed positionality of the mobile elite, who following the pandemic, have to give up their freedom of mobility. We argue that the very condition of political legibility of the mobile subject is predicated upon the ethico-moral ideal of the 'good citizen', who, in the statist imagination, ought to not only feel guilty but also compromise their civil liberties in questions of mobility. Under this quasi-medical dispensation, all mobilities become transgressive acts, while the implementation of the prevailing immobility regime depends more on the good citizen's ethico-moral imperative than any discourses of legality or pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'travelogue' as a genre in late nineteenth-century India is intrinsically linked with colonial exposure, literary modernity and the ethos of a nascent Indian nationalism. This paper uses Bholanauth Chunder's The Travels of a Hindoo to Various Parts of Bengal and Upper India (1869) as a case study to illustrate how travelling practices in colonial India were, among other things, aimed at achieving cultural proximity with the coloniser. It examines how the relationship between the traveller (Chunder) and the 'travelled' was mediated by heuristic categories emerging out of Western imperialism, particularly the conceptual category of 'Hindoo', that were being fervently invoked in the nineteenth century. I argue that Chunder's 'Hindoo' gaze fostered a communal ethos at a time when cultural histories were being woven from a highly contingent process of political partisanship amid struggles over the meaning of nationhood and citizenship, interacting with (anti-)imperialist ideologies laced with notions of territorialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the statist imagination of the 'nomad' pitted against an overtly instrumental understanding of space, 'modern' techniques of statist demographic control, and increasing surveillance on mobility, the trope of nomadology in the context of India often characterizes 'the return of the repressed'. The Buddhists in the Ancient, the Bhakti–Sufi practitioners in the Medieval, and certain anti-imperialist ideologues in the Modern have perpetually latched on to the trope to articulate political dissidence. Thinking in these terms, the invocation of nomadology in Critical Theory – by Deleuze and Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Michel de Certeau and Edward Said, among others – alluding to non-conformity, non-linearity and political subversion, has an intellectual history that is often purportedly grounded onto 'India'. My article will explore how the dichotomy between the 'good' wanderer and the 'bad' wanderer in the 'Indian tradition' was premised upon a highly contingent process of religio-political partisanship and struggles over territorialization. Using the nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse on the Romani community and the Beats' obsession with 'India' (cf. the Beat Movement) as case studies, this article, from the postcolonial vantage point, demonstrates how the impulse to assume nomadology as characteristic of 'India(n-ness)' – to have perpetually existed in the 'Indian' cultural repertoire – is symbolic of an ahistorical and essentialist notion of 'India'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to benchmark the solvency status of Indian general insurance firms. Design/methodology/approach – The paper collects, compiles and analyses the key financial, operational and business data of eight Indian insurance firms. The authors first decide on initial firm-specific economic variables and use data of last five years from IRDA Reports and Company Annual Reports. The NAIC IRIS ratios method was used to obtain an initial risk classification. This was used as a proxy of insolvency risk. Linear regression and logit techniques were thereafter applied to estimate the significant factors (direction-wise and magnitude-wise) which influence insurer solvency. Findings – The results suggest that the factors that most significantly influence Indian non-life insurers are lines of business, the firm's market share, the premium growth rate, the underwriting performance and the claims incurred. Further, the factors which have the strongest effect are market share, change in inflation rate, firm size, lines of business and claims incurred. Research limitations/implications – The sample of Indian general insurers used is limited with regard to the time span. No holdout sample was used and the entire data set was subjected to statistical analysis. These somewhat limit the findings and implications. Practical implications – The paper provides insurers with easy-to-use operational and marketing indicators to benchmark their solvency risk. It will lead to competitive goal setting for continuous improvement. Estimation of appropriate market/economic parameters can be a useful input for regulators. A few suggested indicators are new. Originality/value – Previous studies of insurance companies have focused on developed economies (USA, Europe) or the Asian Markets (China and Japan). This paper determines a set of marketing, financial and operational variables to predict benchmark financial strength of general insurance firms in India. It incorporates qualitative inputs from practising managers and industry experts before carrying out quantitative modeling and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has a large population and its fossil fuel-based power is about 70%. Most of the Indian power is supplied by large power plants through the national grid. It is currently facing the formidable challenge to meet the mission: 'clean electricity for all'. Distributed power supply using local renewable resources, maybe a better shift from existing practice, specifically for new areas of electrification. This study explores the feasibility of distributed generation with available local renewable resources for a remote village on the Himalayan Mountains of a northeast state of India. Currently, electricity in this village through the national grid is unavailable. Villagers are forced to use diesel generator (DG) sets. This study explores the feasibility of using local renewable options to meet the local load demand with a minimum cost of electricity (COE). HOMER simulation and MCDM approach is used for an optimized decentralized hybrid renewable energy solution (wind-hydro-battery) with minimum DG support. A minimum COE ($0.63/kWh) and CO 2 emissions (481 kg/year) are estimated for optimum uninterrupted power supply. • Distributed generation using local renewable resources is studied. • Integrated hybrid renewable energy system with storage is studied. • HOMER simulation and MCDM approach is done to find the optimum energy system. • Optimization is done both for economy and GHG emission. • Methodology for energy solution for remote Indian villages discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]