Summerhill: IIAS Review

Editor

Pankaj Gupta — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Writing about Lahore of Pre-partition India

Ravinder Singh — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

There was a Sarasvati

Seema Shukla Ojha — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Master Tara Singh and His Reminiscences

Subhash Singh — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Princely States in Social Reforms

Amit Dholakia — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

The history of modern India is predominantly shaped by narratives of British colonial rule and the nationalist movements that resisted and ultimately dismantled the colonial regime. However, the role and contributions of princely states represent a significant yet often overlooked aspect of India's recent history. Many princely rulers, such as those from Baroda, Mysore, Travancore, and Cooch Behar, initiated or supported substantial social changes through various policy measures and social mobilization efforts. Their contributions laid the groundwork for future advancements in women's rights, education and social development in India.

The reign of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda, which lasted over six decades, is characterized by significant socio-economic reforms and progressive governance. Through his reformist policies in governance and social initiatives, Sayajirao left an indelible impact on the life and society of Baroda. This paper highlights his ideas and contributions in areas such as education, welfare for depressed classes, women's empowerment, and the amelioration of regressive social practices.

Sayajirao introduced comprehensive reforms in education, empowerment of the girl child, and industrial and economic development within the Baroda state. His implementation of compulsory primary education and the establishment of a modern higher education system—culminating in a university—positioned Baroda ahead of other princely states. Sayajirao was particularly concerned with overcoming the barriers that caste discrimination posed to social, economic, and moral progress. He actively campaigned against untouchability through personal example and provided financial and moral support to facilitate B.R. Ambedkar’s pursuit of higher education both in India and in the United States. Furthermore, Sayajirao played a pivotal role in advancing the public library movement in India.

While influenced by European and American ideals, Sayajirao remained deeply rooted in Indian traditions and practices, successfully preserving cultural heritage while embracing modern advancements. His reign significantly impacted not only the princely state of Baroda but also contributed to shaping modern India.

Knowledge Transmission in Pre-Colonial India

Ankur Kakkar — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

The history of pre-colonial education in India has largely focussed on ashrams, gurukuls, and few well-known universities of ancient India. However, in pre-colonial India, knowledge was not confined only to a few grand centers or universities. There were a variety of institutions and modes through which knowledge was transmitted. The most prominent modes were temples and tols, palaces and pathshalas, ghatikas and guilds, as also the traditional family homes of various kinds of artists and craftsmen. The Indian education system continued to flourish in all these avenues. This paper throws light on the various modes and networks of indigenous educational institutions in the nineteenth century. In doing so, this paper discusses how knowledge was transmitted in a wide variety of knowledge traditions and practices that were prevalent before the institution of British colonial education.

Mass Mobilization through Perambulation

Jasmine Anand — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Mass Mobilization through Perambulation: M. K. Gandhi

Dr. Jasmine Anand

Assistant Professor of English

Mehr Chand Mahajan DAV College for Women, Chandigarh

jasmine18anand@gmail.com, 8146531523

Mahatma Gandhi was an icon of many things- truthfulness, temperance, chastity, vegetarianism, non-violence, self-rule, cottage industry, and Hindu nationalism to name a few. Amidst the political, religious, humanitarian, and moral outlook of Gandhi we often forget the holistic magnitude of his marches. A journal mentioned that Gandhi walked around 18 kms daily for 40 years and between the period of 1913-1948. During his political campaign he walked a total of 79,000 kms which equalled to walking the earth twice. Interestingly, many of the visual mediums in form of paintings, pictures, and statues of Gandhi represent him walking with a stick. Taking this account further the paper shall study Gandhi’s perambulation in the light of his Collected Works and especially his autobiography The Story of my Experiments with Truth covering the various aspects of his walking.

Walking makes poets in motion, joins roots and routes, gives experience in the wild, is about record breaking fitness, is therapeutic, or leads to revolutions. But for Gandhi it could be seen as solvitur ambulando, that is, sort it out through walking. Thus, his political campaigns can be seen as axis points in creation of his philosophy of walking. Nowadays, with the change in our lifestyle and economic boom there has been a decline in our engagement with walking. The new Fitbit era if at all has increased walking, accounts to mechanical and conscious walking aimed to compete in steps only. With the alarming and rising climate change and poor health, walking the Gandhian way needs to be encouraged culturally to a larger extent. Walking is also about positive and healthy interaction with the public sphere. Hence, in this light the paper will try to explore the dynamic and democratic dimension of Gandhi’s walking.

Sister Nivedita

Priyanka Vaidya — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Sister Nivedita is a role model for women; she revolutionised education, women's emancipation, Indian monastic order, freedom struggle, social reforms, Vedantic learning and Indian traditions by diving deep into the philosophy of "Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah." Due to her selfless service to humanity, she is given the title "Lokmata". Her quest for spiritual regeneration and the Ocean of Indian consciousness attracted her to enter the karma bhumi in the shelter of the spiritual Master of Practical Vedanta, Swami Vivekananda. Her previous name was Margaret Noble; Swamiji gave her the name Nivedita, meaning devoted or dedicated. She followed the path of Brahmacharya and Karma yoga and dedicated her entire life to serving humanity. Her journey to the East defines the journey of a monk who serves humankind to experience divine existence and spreads the rays of wisdom and knowledge to help the oppressed, uneducated or disillusioned humans. Her hands served during the plague, and her thoughtfulness opened new vistas for women as social reformers and exponents of Indian consciousness. She gave her life to propagate Vedanta worldwide and died an Indian death.

Relevance of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of Rashtra

Sudhir Kumar — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

The paper is a modest attempt to critically examine the relevance of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of Rashtra as represented in his writings in the contemporary contexts of the so-called Euro-Americo-centric discourses of the post nation, the post-human and the post-truth. The essay aims at critically analysing how Sri Aurobindo’s “dharma-centric”, “purushartha-oriented” vision of “ rashtra” cannot be equated or compared with the Eurocentric notions of “nation” or even “the post-nation” - which are primarily grounded in the positivist, rationalist, materialist, historicism or new historicist discourses.

Sri Aurobindo’s discourse of “rashtra“ is grounded in the philosophical matrix of Sanatan Dharma - ( dharma in Indian tradition cannot to be translated as “ religion), and Bharatiya Jnana Parampara - that is, free from the kind of religious, ethnic, political, economic, cultural, linguistic, regional, or ideological dogmatism etc that characterise the discursive trajectories of “ the nation/ post-nation” in the west.

It is interesting to discuss how and why Sri Aurobindo emphasises that “sanatan dharma” is the only politics as well as nationalism (rashtra- vimarsha) that Bharat / India admits of. The essay, this, deals with the analysis of the spiritual-moral connect between “rashtra” and “dharma “that leads to “Swaraj” - the welfare of all.

The paper is also an endeavour to illustrate how the already heavily colonised field of research methodology in contemporary times in Indian institutions of higher education can be decolonised- in consonance with the objectives of the NEP-2020

Reading Karl Marx on India

Shankar Sharan — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

Reading Karl Marx on India

This article tries to draw attention to the negative effect of ideological convictions on scholarship through reading Karl Marx’s views on India. The history of political ideologues points out the negative contribution any ideology of transforming the world to the minds of its adherents. This was and is the evil influence of ideology, which this article attempts to underline. Any pre-fixed ideas, howsoever great, more or less corrupts the mind of its adherents. Karl Marx’s observations about the Indian history, people, religion and culture make an interesting reading in this respect. The article shows that a lot of misreading and misrepresentation was inherent in the approach of Karl Marx about India. So far most Indian scholars have missed the point, though many of them analyzed elaborately Marx’s thoughts about India. Indian intellectuals have no adequate appreciation about what Marx thought about the Indian civilization. Another facet, of Marx’s views about India that remained largely ignored was his evaluation of the pre-British India. The article also brings to notice the view of Karl Marx that the Hindus in India were as much the exploited community under the Muslim rulers as they were under the British rule later on. This was quite contrary to what Indian Marxists propagated for decades. But Marx himself never distinguished between Mughals and the British rulers as ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ as his Indian followers did. He considered both as foreign to the native Indians. Another interesting example of the Marxist historians expurgating the ideas of Marx himself is the evaluation of the 1857 as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’, not as the ‘War of Independence’. The article underlines these points to note the negative role of ideological fixation in social science scholarship.

Urban Life in Early East Punjab - Rupnagar (Ropar)

Ashish Kumar — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

At a distance of about forty kilometres from Chandigarh, Ropar (Rupnagar) is situated in the Shivalik hills on the left bank of river Sutlej, and the archaeological excavation (1952-1955) under Yagya Datt Sharma has attested the presence of a town here from the Harappan period to nearly the present times with intermittent (apparently short) episodes of desertions. Unfortunately, Y. D. Sharma never published a detailed excavation report, and we only have short reports and articles by him on the archaeological remains from Ropar for the study of this town’s historical past. In the absence of a detailed excavation report, we do not have much information about the context of the artefacts that are found in excavation at Ropar. Therefore, in this paper, an artefact centric approach is adopted. This paper treats the artefacts that are found in Ropar as social products, and they are studied as integral part of everyday life of early Ropar’s residents. Following this presumption, it is proposed that the artefacts found in excavation at Ropar can be used as evidence by identifying their purpose, significance in human life, and consumption pattern, to uncover the complex character of the urban life in early Ropar. Several artefacts that are found in Ropar are similar to those artefacts that are discovered in several contemporary sites in the Ganga valley and Northwest as well as Central India. This scenario allows us to analyse the artefacts from Ropar in the light of previous studies on similar artefacts from other sites, and based on this analysis, an attempt is made in this paper to uncover this town’s early to the late historical past (from circa 600 BCE - CE 700) with a focus upon its urban life.

Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma

Pramod V. Pathak — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

In this article, the theist approach towards epistemology and knowledge of universe creation is discussed. It is based on fourteen propositions about existence of the Brahman i.e. the Supreme Entity. These are in tune with the understanding of the creation theories of the modern cosmology. R?gvedic theism asserts that there is a Supreme Entity (SE) which manifests itself in different forms. As the present author proposes, all the knowledge of every type, regardless of discipline, related to basic and advanced sciences, astronomy and cosmology is part and parcel of the brahmajñ?na. Here only the development of scientific theories in science in the West through sheer intuition is discussed. Scientists who discovered those theories were no way influenced by the theistic or theological background. They had no inkling towards attributing these discoveries to any SE. Thus a) Einstein’s discovery of the ‘principle of equivalence’ leading to the general theory of relativity; b) the initial perception of the loss of energy from the black holes by Stephen Hawking; c) Cosmologist Tryon’s visualization of the universe erupting out of nothing as a quantum fluctuation and explanation of the critical density of the universe stands on par with ?di Shankar?c?rya’s dictum brahma satya? jaganmithy?| Brahman real, the world illusion; d) the technical marvels created by the ancient and mediaeval temple architects, engraving fractal like patterns on the walls in many south Indian temples, all these were intuitive and not strictly mathematical. In many instances what the ancient seers and sages perceived through grand intuitive perceptions run parallel with the intuitive perceptions of the modern scientists and cosmologists. P?tañjala Yogas?tras give us clues towards an intuitive reception of the universal cosmological and even the materialistic laws in the physical sciences

The Untragic Indian Stories

Umesh Patra — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0530

By a comparative study of the genre of tragedy originating in the Greco-Roman period and the Indian classical theatre, this paper claims that there are subtle differences between European and Indian worldviews, one of which would necessitate the birth of tragedy and the other which would obviate its genesis. The paper claims that the characteristic Indian hero, depicted in the classical Indian epics, mythological narratives, and theatrical genres up to the medieval period, is one who treads the path of righteousness and is free from hamartia—which is regarded as a distinctive feature of the European tragic hero. In the Indian and European mythological narratives and theatrical genres, the virtue of a hero would be tested through a series of trials, often involving superhuman suffering. The misery that would befall the heroes would often stem from their actions, either wilful or inadvertent. The tragic worldview aims to showcase the struggle of a valiant hero who is admired for the chutzpah of pointing the heroic finger at a foe far mightier than a human subject. The tragic hero, therefore, has to succumb to a catastrophe, evoking a sense of tragic waste. On the other hand, the Indian worldview is rooted in the firm conviction of the righteousness of the universe, epitomised in the dictum “Satyameva Jayate”, meaning “Truth always triumphs”. Ergo, the Indian narratives showcasing the suffering of its principal characters would nonetheless end with the resolution of all entanglements, or at least with a sense of hope. The Indian narratives and theatrical genres exhibit an exemplary infallible hero who would come out unscathed from the terrible crucible of fate by dint of their virtuous actions, thereby fostering faith in an essentially moral universe