Suchergebnisse

The second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Tamils contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.

This book looks at movements of communities which formed the lower and middle rungs of society in medieval and early colonial India. It presents migration, mobility and memories from a specifically Indian perspective, breaking away from previous Eurocentric studies. The essays in the volume focus on labour, peasant and craft migrations, and in fleshing out the causes and trajectories taken by these communities, they speak to each other by addressing similar issues as well as documenting varying responses to analogous situations. A fascinating history of migrations of "people from below", the volume adopts a trans-disciplinary approach and uses inscriptions, official records, and literary texts along with community narratives and folk tradition. This will be of great interest to scholars and students of migration and diaspora studies, medieval and modern South Asian history, social anthropology and subaltern studies.

Until a few decades ago, most labour histories did not bother to address women as workers in the domestic or public domain who contributed to a household income or the overall economy. Patriarchal spaces of historical discourse rendered women invisible (or effected distortions) that can only be contested by a rigorous study of women's unrecorded presence in the economy of the household and the broader domain of production. This article is an effort to understand the "being" and "doing" of women, and to map the interrelations of women and work over a vast historical span of time, beginning with women's writings on the theme of women and work and going on to plot women's agency historically in labour processes. In order to make the historical evidence more cohesive, it has been written with special reference to Peninsular India, while also drawing comparisons from the regions to the north of the Vindhya mountains that geographically and culturally mark the north–south divide.

AbstractThis article situates Vishwakarma craftsmen in the socio-economic milieu of early medieval Peninsular India. It seeks to analyse the dynamics of social change among craft groups with particular reference to the smiths, masons and carpenters constituting the Vishwakarma community. This is attempted by locating the dynamics of social change within the processes of temple building and urbanism in the Chola-Pallava period. The essay looks afresh at concepts like caste, guild and community in the speci fic context of technological and economic changes and craft mobility. In so doing the article cuts across conceptual categories in the light of empirical evidence. The study is based on epigraphic evidence, essentially from the Tamil country. Le présent article situe les artisans Vishwakarma dans le milieu socio-économique au début de la période médiévale de l'Inde péninsulaire. Il cherche à analyser la dynamique du changement social parmi les groupes d'artisans plus particulièrement les forgerons, maçons et menuisiers / ébénistes, bref ceux qui constituent la communauté Vishwakarma. Ce travail est effectué en situant la dynamique de l'évolution sociale au sein des divers processus de la construction des temples durant la période Chola-Pallava. L'article propose un nouveau regard sur les concepts tels que caste, association/corps de métier et communauté dans le contexte des progrès technologiques et économiques ainsi que la mobilité de l'artisanat. Cet essai va à l'encontre des catégories conceptuelles à la lumière des preuves empiriques. L'étude est basée sur des preuves épigraphiques du pays de Tamil Nadu.