Papers by Prashant Kidambi
The American Historical Review, 2009
International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2020
Research Methods for History
The American Historical Review, 2018
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2019
The study of law in relation to state and society has emerged as one of the most exciting areas o... more The study of law in relation to state and society has emerged as one of the most exciting areas of historical research on modern South Asia. A growing body of scholarship has begun to focus on the constitutive role of law in shaping power, personhood and property. The volume under review offers eloquent testimony to the analytical rigour and empirical richness of this new research. It has two key aims. First, it sets out to rethink longstanding conceptual binaries that have framed legal history in South Asia-modernity/tradition, rights/norms, abstract rules/customary practices, law/violence-and points to their mutual imbrication in legal discourse and practice. Second, it seeks to situate the workings of law in wider material and normative contexts, thereby highlighting its status as a 'resource in signification' (p. 2). These twin objectives are pursued through four broad thematic clusters. The chapters by Janaki Nair and Rashmi Pant explore the porosity of the multiple legal regimes within Indian society. Nair considers how the Taralabalu Jagadguru Brihan Matha at Sirigere, a monastic institution or matha in the Chitradurga taluka of Karnataka, has emerged as a locus of dispute resolution for a wide swathe of the local population. Nair's subtle analysis shows how the dispensation of justice by such a non-state actor does not represent an alternative to state law. Far from acting as a sovereign power, she argues, the matha is a 'purveyor of state law'. At the same time, Nair contends that the matha's Nyaya Peetha (Seat of Justice) 'achieves what the state law/court cannot achieve, combining or merging conciliative and adjudicative functions' (pp. 50-53). She points to the normative considerations that marked the quest for justice among litigants who sought recourse to such non-state forums. This aspect is
Modern Asian Studies, 2019
The historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of ... more The historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of supplication designed to affirm and reproduce established power relations. This article restores to the analysis of the petition its status as a potential ‘event’ that could exceed its documentary confines and generate new communities of action. Focusing specifically on colonial Bombay, circa 1889–1914, it highlights three ways in which petitioning marked a rupture in the relations between rulers and ruled, and heralded significant shifts in the local constructions of state and society. First, the article shows how Bombay's Indian residents deployed the petitioning process to contest the unprecedented degree of state intervention in their quotidian lives following an extraordinary civic crisis that engulfed the city in the last decade of the Victorian era. Secondly, the article contends that the petitions that ordinary Indians in Bombay submitted to the different agencies of urban go...
The Cambridge Companion to Cricket
In recent months, much of the worlds attention has turned to Anonymous, the rhizomatic, digitally... more In recent months, much of the worlds attention has turned to Anonymous, the rhizomatic, digitally based.Public Culture. It is today widely recognized that world capitalism is in the throes of a massive wave of.Public Culture is a peer-reviewed academic journal of cultural studies, established in 1988 by anthropologists Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai and.Public Culture. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and.show less. Christianity and Public Culture in Africa takes the reader beyond Africas apparent. Pdf icon Download PDF 153. Read more.Public Culture 14. Access article in HTML Access article in PDF. Cosmopolitanism, Constitutional Patriotism, and the Public Spheretion of courts in American public culture, this essay explains how the contradictory embrace of. Pdf. 14 Congress and the Public, Gallup, 2014.In Culture and Public Action. Rao, Vijayendra and Michael Walton ed. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of.Public Culture. 22 consequences and reinvent our own type of existence, political, economic and cultural. Instead of rejecting sexual norms that were meant to.well to the editors of Public Culture for their helpful suggestions and improvements. I wrote this article while resident at the Scientific Research Center, Slovene.I would like to thank Kelly Brewer, Caitrin Lynch, the editors of Public Culture. Following Sharon Zukin 1995, I call this urban space a public culture, which.PUBLIC BOOKS Go to June 1 Issue Public Culture. Public Culture is a reviewed interdisciplinary journal of cultural studies, published three times a year in.Public Culture in. Willy Brandt Series of Working Papers in International Migration and Ethnic Relations. Public culture : bulletin of the Project for Transnational Cultural Studies. 13-Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture. Fortified Enclaves: The new urban segregation teresa cladeira. 13-Hero, celebrity and icon: Sachin Tendulkar and Indian public culture. Chapter DOI.Culture, Public Policy and Happiness. Between culture and happiness, and the role of public policy. 20a20deliberative20civic20culture.pdf.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2013
Planning Perspectives, 2013
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that u... more In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that undermined the systems of rule patched together over the course of the preceding century and triggered a crisis of the colonial ‘information order’ on which these were based. Saliently, these developments led to significant changes in the modes of colonial urban governance, in which a new planning agency played a key role. Integral to this shift was a reappraisal, on the part of the colonial state, of its mechanisms of information gathering and the growing recognition of the need for more knowledge about the swiftly expanding city and its rapidly diversifying population. The census of 1901 reflected, to a large extent, these new imperatives of colonial governance.
Journal of Urban History, 2013
Journal of Urban History, 2012
Studies of Indian nationalism have frequently acknowledged its “urban roots” but seldom considere... more Studies of Indian nationalism have frequently acknowledged its “urban roots” but seldom considered in a systematic and sustained fashion the ways in which nationalism shaped the city. Focusing on colonial Bombay, c. 1890-1940, this article explores the changing relationship between Indian nationalism and the city. The first section examines the period spanning the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and highlights forms of middle-class political activity in the urban public sphere that expressed a distinctive civic patriotism and local identity while simultaneously affirming loyalty to the British Empire. The second section shows how popular nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s spawned an extensive repertoire of collective performances and extraconstitutional forms of public action and protest that sought to reterritorialize the city as nationalist space. At the same time, the article also points to the constraints and contestations that marked the nationalist makeover of the “colonial ...
Journal of British Studies, 2014
As part of the LSE Literature Festival, the South Asia Centre held a panel on the revolutionary p... more As part of the LSE Literature Festival, the South Asia Centre held a panel on the revolutionary power of cricket in South Asia. Here panellist Prashant Kidambi speaks to Sonali Campion about the first Indian cricket team to tour England, and how a bucolic pre-industrial English game is now the sub-continental passion.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2021
is informed by and employs critical archival hermeneutics which is a valuable methodological inte... more is informed by and employs critical archival hermeneutics which is a valuable methodological intervention. Another taxonomic excess in the colonial archive that Mitra importantly draws our attention to is that of the primitive. She points out that social analysts emphasised how female sexual deviancy was a remainder from the primitive past and hindered progress into modern civilisation and society. The superimposition of the category ‘prostitute’ onto the primitive needs to be investigated further since the primitive itself was a spatio-temporal and anthropological construct. This entanglement provokes questions about the historicity of the abstract universal primitive that is often taken as an archival fact in legal and tribal histories. Mitra urges historians to approach archival empiricism and authority with deep caution, and to question presumptions that are constitutive of objective social facts. This book will be of value to scholars across diverse fields of enquiry ranging fr...
It is a matter of considerable debate among historians as to whether colonialism was instrumental... more It is a matter of considerable debate among historians as to whether colonialism was instrumental in introducing ‘modernity’ to the Indian subcontinent, as colonial authorities themselves often claimed. Was Indian society imprisoned in ‘tradition’ until the beginning of colonial rule? The term ‘modernity’ may be said to refer not only to some material changes, i.e. industrial or print capitalism, or systems of sewage and sanitation, but also to new institutional spaces, such as museums, public libraries, and voluntary associations, as well as to new sensibilities, of individualism and bureaucratic rationality. The cities were among the earliest spaces within which these changes and transformations were made most visible and this Unit considers the colonial city from the perspective of whether or why it merits the term ‘modern’. To begin with, let us consider the ways in which cities and modernity are usually linked.
Urban History
The Dyos Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the best article submitted to the Urban H... more The Dyos Prize has been awarded annually since 1992 for the best article submitted to the Urban History journal in each calendar year. The articles are judged by the journal editors and two independent adjudicators. The prize is named after H.J. Dyos (1921–78) to commemorate his innovative contribution to the development of the field of urban history. To reflect the catholicity and interdisciplinarity which Dyos encouraged, no temporal, geographical or thematic restrictions exist, except that the paper must make a significant contribution to the study of urban history. The prize consists of a cash sum and the publication of the paper in Urban History. Previous prize winners have included
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Papers by Prashant Kidambi