Introduction: What is this Policy anyway?

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Matters of Policy Podcast

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Bessie, Alexis, Jip and Megan explore the themes presented in the museum’s Collections Development Policy. Why does it say so little about repatriation? Who is the widest possible public? And what even is preservation?

The link to the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Collection Development Policy can be found on the series homepage.

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Matters of Policy Podcast

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Bessie Woodhouse

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Department: Pitt Rivers Museum

Date Added: 04/01/2022

Duration: 00:31:22

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Matters of Policy Podcast

Matters of Policy Podcast

The Pitt Rivers Museum’s Matters of Policy Podcast: Join Bessie Woodhouse, Alexis Forer, Jip Borm and Megan Mahon as they take a deep dive into the Pitt Rivers Museum’s Collections Development Policy, interrogating the language used and debating the relationship between practice and policy in the contemporary museum. Through engaging discussions with professionals across the globe, from community artists to academics, the team uncover the colonial power imbalances within the policy and look for possible pathways forward through the application of decolonial practice.

Funded by the Knowledge Exchange. Special thanks to Marenka Thompson-Odlum for her supervisory role, and to Jack Fawcett for making the original music.

Series photo: Einsamer Schütze

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So Near Yet So Far: Marathi Speakers in Belgaum, Karnataka

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Asian Studies Centre

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Gopa Sabharwal, University of Delhi

Following the widespread dispersal of the Marathi speaking communities over an area much wider than that occupied by the present state of Maharshtra (the formally designated home state of the Marathi speakers – this paper focuses on the Marathi speaking people resident in what was earlier Belgaum (now Belgavi), a region that lay at the margins of two linguistic cultures Kannada and Marathi.

This sizeable Marathi speaking diaspora have a long history of settlement in this region but were left out of the formal grouping of Marathi speaking areas following the linguistic reorganization of Indian states post independence. They were placed instead in Karnataka the home land of Kannada speakers, on the other side of the border and have ever since, lived in a situation of so near yet so far in many respects specially their cultural and linguistic identity. Their lives in Karnataka have led to a continued tussle between them and the Kannada speakers at various levels social, cultural, political and economic.

They have deep ties with the mother state so to say but also have a hybrid culture of their own with intermarriages with the Kannadigas and emotional ties to the land they are settled on. Following an earlier in-depth study of various aspects of ethnic identity formation of this group of settlers in Belguam (in 1993), the current paper intends to look at how the articulation of their linguistic identity and its manipulation by various stakeholders has progressed over the last two decades. It seeks to set out the many dimensions of articulation of ethnic identity and political, economic and educational agendas and the reactions to these by various agencies formal and informal. The recent establishment of the alternate State legislature of Karnataka in Belgaum and the renaming of the town to Belgavi are cases in point.

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maharashtra studies

Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:18:33

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From Russia to Bombay, from Bombay to Soviet Union and back: The journey of Annabhau Sathe’s Maza Russia cha Pravas.

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Anagha Bhat Behere, SPPU, Pune

Annabhau Sathe, a noted Dalit activist and writer in Marathi travelled to the (then) Soviet Union in year 1961. Upon returning, he wrote a travelogue titled “Maza Russia cha Pravas” describing the Soviet state, as he saw it. The travelogue was unusual in many ways and enjoyed an iconic status in the genre of travelogues in Marathi. It is also a very important cultural and historical document as it offers glimpses of life in the (then) Soviet Union.

I translated the travelogue into Russian in 2019. While translating it into Russian I was struck by certain ideological and cultural exchanges that occurred between Annabhau, the (then) Bombay, especially its labour movement and how it drew ideological sustenance from the Russian and early Soviet literature, how Annabhau had reached the Soviet Union through translations of his works and how Annabhau’s travelogue about the Soviet Union in Marathi brought the Soviet Union closer to the Marathi reader.

Translating it into Russian, in my opinion becomes another turn in the back and forth movements and exchange of ideas, images and cultural artefacts. The country which was visited by Annabhau Sathe, namely the Soviet Union has disappeared today from the globe. When Annabhau Sathe visited the Soviet Union, the ordinary Marathi reader harboured a lot of misconceptions about the Soviet Union. Annabahu has tried to dispel them through his travelogue. A Russian citizen today may review them critically but s/he will have to concede to them in principal. Today the travelogue appears to be more interesting for the Russian reader, so as to assess, evaluate and measure up the image of Soviet Union in Annabhau’s travelogue with the lived through reality of Soviet Union.

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Anagha Bhat Behere

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maharashtra studies

Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:19:28

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Embodied Circulation of an Icon: The case of Janata Raja

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Aishwarya Walvekar, JNU, New Delhi

Nostalgia is often defined as a ‘yearning for a past’ (Boym), which circulates across time through memories materializing in oral cultures, texts and scriptures, theatre and performances. The circuit of its circulation is completed when that nostalgia materializes in the genealogies of its tradition and ‘surrogate’ (Roach) and diffuse into different forms. The icon of Shivaji has been circulating across the political, social, cultural landscapes of Maharashtra since the seventeenth century and is appropriated by the different castes and ideologies. The economy of the circulation of the icon of Shivaji is vast and spread across different forms and mediums.

Janata Raja, a three hour play by B. M. Purandare circulates the icon of Shivaji through its form of historical pageantry – catering to thousands of audiences at once on a large scale as well as involving the public sphere in the process of its embodiment. Open to all, the cast of the play is comprised of untrained enthusiasts eager to embody through the recorded voice and costumes a nostalgia of the seventeenth century past. In doing so, the idea of sovereignty is challenged due to the ‘dual-time’ that the theatrical performance creates. This paper attempts to understand nostalgic past and its materialized presence in theatre circulating through the bodies of the actors and reorganizing the public sphere by its propagation. It argues that one needs to address historicism through the idea of circulation rather than a unidirectional approach by analyzing the case of Janata Raja

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Aishwarya Walvekar

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Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:24:04

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त्यांनी पाहिलेली विलायत: मराठी प्रवाशांनी १८६७ ते १९४७ या काळात लिहिलेल्या इंग्लंडच्या प्रवासवर्णनांचा सामाजिक अभ्यास

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Aditya Panse, Independent scholar, London

भारतावरच्या इंग्रजांच्या राजकीय अंमलाची सुरुवात पेशवाईच्या पाडावानंतर, म्हणजे इ० स० १८१८ सालापासून झाली. याचं स्वरूप प्रामुख्याने वसाहतिक होतं, म्हणजे प्रवासाचा, स्थलांतराचा प्रवाह प्रामुख्याने ‘ब्रिटनहून भारतात’ या स्वरूपाचा होता. याचबरोबर, एक उलटा प्रवाहही होता, तो म्हणजे भारतातून ब्रिटनमध्ये जाणाऱ्यांचा.

एकोणिसाव्या शतकाच्या उत्तरार्धाला महाराष्ट्राचा ‘प्रबोधनकाळ’ किंवा ‘पुनरुत्थानकाळ’ (renaissance) म्हणायला हरकत नाही. या काळात इंग्रजी शाळांतून शिकलेली, ‘वाघिणीचे दूध’ प्यालेली, पहिली पिढी बाहेर पडली. मराठी मध्यमवर्गाचा उदयही याच पिढीपासून झाला असे म्हणता येईल. इंग्रजी शालेय शिक्षणामुळे या पिढीने हळुहळू तत्कालीन इंग्रजी समाजाची मूल्ये अंगिकारायला सुरुवात केली. मुद्रित पुस्तकांना ज्ञानस्रोत म्हणून मान्यता मिळणे यालाही याच पिढीपासून सुरुवात झाली. या शिक्षित पिढीने अन्य अर्थांनीही मराठी समाजात बदल घडवून आणायला सुरुवात केली. समाजाच्या जुन्या धारणांत बदल होण्याचा, नव्या धारणांचा उदय होण्याचा, असा तो काळ.

भारतातून ब्रिटनमध्ये, अर्थात ‘विलायतेत’, जाणाऱ्या प्रवाशांची संख्या या काळापासून वाढली. या प्रवासाची कारणे विविध होती : उच्चशिक्षण, सरकारी कामे, कोर्ट-कज्जे, राजकीय / सामाजिक उपक्रमांत भाग घेणे, याबरोबरच ‘टूरिझम’ हा हेतू घेऊनही प्रवास केलेले सापडतात. स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व काळ घेतला, तर विलायतेच्या प्रवाशांमध्ये १८४२ साली प्रवास केलेल्या रंगो बापूजी गुप्त्यांपासून लोकमान्य टिळक, न. चिं. केळकर, आचार्य अत्रे, दादासाहेब फाळके, बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर, बा. सी. मर्ढेकर यांपर्यंत अनेक ठळक नावं सापडतात.

या प्रवाशांनी प्रवासादरम्यान किंवा प्रवासानंतर लिहिलेली प्रवासवर्णने तत्कालीन नियतकालिकांतून प्रसिद्ध होत असत. या प्रवासवर्णनांच्या समकालीनत्वामुळे मौखिक इतिहासाचा उत्तम स्रोत म्हणून या प्रवासवर्णनांकडे बघता येईल. यांना वर वर्णिलेला सुशिक्षित वाचकवर्ग मिळाला, त्यामुळे धारणाबदलांच्या या प्रक्रियेत या स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व प्रवासवर्णनांचा मोठा वाटा असणार असे विधान करता येईल. मराठी समाजामध्ये असलेल्या विलायतेसंबंधीच्या ठळक धारणा काय होत्या हे स्वातंत्र्यानंतरच्या प्रसिद्ध प्रवासवर्णनांतून शोधता येईल.

वरील विधान, अर्थात ‘मराठी समाजात विलायतेबद्दल असलेल्या धारणांचा आणि स्वातंत्र्यपूर्व प्रवासवर्णनांचा काही परस्परसंबंध आहे का?’ हे तपासणे हा या संशोधनलेखाचे प्रमुख उद्दिष्ट आहे. प्रस्तुत संशोधनलेखात मराठी प्रवाशांनी लिहिलेल्या विलायतेच्या प्रवासवर्णनांचा अभ्यास करण्याचा मानस आहे. या प्रवाशांचा परिसंचार ज्या देशकालपरिस्थितीत झाला त्याचे खालील पैलू तपासण्याचा हेतू आहे:

१. सामाजिक निरीक्षणे: राजकीय पारतंत्र्यात असलेली व्यक्ती (पक्षी: प्रवासी) आपल्या जेत्याच्या राष्ट्राकडे कोणत्या नजरेने बघते? प्रवाशाच्या राष्ट्रवादाच्या धारणेवर या सामाजिक निरीक्षणांचा कसा परिणाम झाला? त्यांना वर्णद्वेषाचा अनुभव आला का? राष्ट्रवादाच्या भावनेला सामाजिक अनुभवांतून खतपाणी मिळालं का?

२. एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांबद्दलच्या धारणा: प्रवाशांची एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांबद्दलची मतं काय होती? एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांची या प्रवाशांप्रती वागणूक कशी होती? एतद्देशीय इंग्रजांकडून मिळालेल्या वागणुकीमुळे या धारणांत काही बदल झालेला दिसतो का? या मतांचा मराठी समाजाच्या धारणांच्या जडणघडणीवर कसा परिणाम झाला?

३. इंग्लंडस्थित भारतीयांबद्दलच्या धारणा: या प्रवाशांची इंग्लंडास्थित भारतीयांबद्दल काय मतं होती? ती मतं पूर्वग्रहाने प्रेरित होती की निरीक्षणांवर आधारित होती? या मतांचा मराठी समाजाच्या धारणांच्या जडणघडणीवर कसा परिणाम झाला?

प्रवाशांच्या आणि त्यांच्या प्रवासाच्या काही घटकांचा, वैशिष्ट्यांचा परिणाम वरील गोष्टींवर पडू शकतो. त्यामध्ये येतात प्रवाशाचे (अ) लिंग, (आ) प्रवास करतेवेळीचं वय, (इ) आर्थिक परिस्थिती, (ई) प्रवास करतेवेळीचं सामाजिक स्थान, (उ) व्यवसाय, (ऊ) प्रवासाचे कारण, (ए) प्रवासी ज्यात वावरतो ते सामाजिक वर्तुळ, (ऐ) प्रवाशाची राजकीय मतं, वगैरे.

संशोधनाशास्त्राच्या परिभाषेत (अ) … (ऐ) हे स्वचल (independent variables) मानले तर त्याचा परिणाम (१) .. (३) या परचलांवर (dependent variables) पडेल. या परस्परसंबंधाची मांडणी या संशोधनलेखाद्वारे केली जाईल.

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Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:18:40

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Travelling Santas, Circulation and Formation of ‘the Multilingual Local’ of World Literature in the early modern Marathi

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Sachin Ketkar, MS University, Vadodara

Though bhakti is often understood as criticism of rituals like the pilgrimages, travelling as part of pilgrimage (tirth-yatra) or religious travel (parikrama or bhrman) has played an essential role in circulation of bhakti tropes, ideological beliefs, genres, and texts in the trans-regional vernacular sphere in South Asia. While the nativist understanding of bhakti assumes that it was as assertion and celebration of monolingual desi identities in opposition to the hegemony of Sanskrit ‘margiya’ traditions, South Asian scholars like Sheldon Pollock see it as a part of the process of ‘vernacularization’, or “the historical process of choosing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture” (1998). Furthermore, postcolonial travel studies very often have limited themselves to the East-West travels, and do not pay significant attention to intra-South Asian travel practices before colonialism.

The paper argues that the experiences of trans-regional travelling to other ‘deshas’ in South Asia by influential Marathi composers such as Namdev (late 13th and early 14th century), Eknath (late 16th century) and Ramdas Swami (mid-17th century) have played a critical role in not only shaping not only their own poetics and cultural politics, but also contributing to significant cultural change in the society. Apart from composing in the north Indian languages and establishing ‘santa’ tradition in the north, Namdev is credited to have introduced ‘nirguna bhakti’ to Marathi by some scholars, and Eknath, who often visited Varanasi, wrote the first important Marathi Ramayana, thus inaugurating a strong Rama bhakti tradition to which Ramdas Swami belongs. According to some hagiographies, Ramdas is believed to have been inspired by more militant devotionalism of the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargovind whom he is believed to have met at Srinagar, Kashmir and stayed at the Golden Temple at Amritsar. After his travels, he is believed to have composed works such as ‘Asmani Sultani’ and an early modern Hindu patriotic utopia named ‘Anandwan Bhuwan’.

These inter-vernacular experiences produced what Durisin (1984) terms as ‘genetic contactual interliterary relations’ that would profoundly impact the development of Marathi literary tradition by establishing a multilingual vernacular hagiographical canon of bhakti by the eighteenth century that would include santas like Kabir, Dadu and Narsinh Mehta, among others, thus creating ‘the multilingual local’ to use Francesca Orsini’s term in a different context, in early modern Marathi (2015). Understanding this inter-vernacular circulation of the santas complicate the conventional understanding of precolonial south Asian vernacular literatures and cultures based on simplistic and vertical binaries of the Sanskrit cosmopolitan margiya and the parochial desi, as well as the notions that the vernacular compositions were derivatively modelled upon the superordinate Sanskrit cultural forms. It also complicates the modern and monolingual nativist reading of the cultural history of the subcontinent. While the conventional conceptualization of world literature has often understood ‘the world literature’ in opposition to ‘the national literature’, more recent theoretical paradigms of world literature that emphasize circulation (Damrosch) and histories of larger interliterary processes (Durisin) allow us to read ‘bhakti’ literature as a world literary phenomenon.

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Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:24:51

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Circulation, Patronage, and Silence in the Practice of History Writing in Early Modern Maharashtra

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 -Roy S. Fischel, SOAS, University of London

The study of western Maharashtra in the early modern period presents a special challenge to modern-day historians. More than anywhere else in India, even in the poorly documented Deccan, historical writing in Maharashtra has been meagre and at best patchy. Particularly problematic is the first half of the seventeenth century, a period during which no official historiography has been produced. This substantial lacuna is closely linked to the sociopolitical processes that took part in shaping the region, highlighting the connections between historical processes and historiographical practices. This paper aims at exploring the practice of history writing in the western Desh around the crisis of the early seventeenth century. I suggest to examine it in relation to three interlinked sociopolitical issues. First is the continuous predominance of Persian chronicles (tārīkh) as the major genre of self-conscious history writing. Second is the association of writing in Persian, and in the tārīkh genre, with the circulation of migratory elites. Third is the role of royal patronage in both history writing and circulation. With these three elements, I argue that the practice of history writing depended on certain sociopolitical conditions, whose persistence necessitated the association with networks of circulation and production. Once those were disrupted, historical writing itself has ceased, leaving us with a daunting void.

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Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:20:59

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Writing and circulation: a Material Approach to Early Modern Marathi Literature

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 -Prachi Deshpande, CSSS, Kolkata

This paper attempts a reconstruction of networks of circulation of early modern Marathi literature. It examines the manuscript archives of the Ramdasi sampradaya, which the early-twentieth-century historian Shankar Shrikrishna Deo collected from various Ramdasi mathas in Maharashtra and beyond, and which are currently housed in the Samartha Vagdevata Mandir in Dhule. The Ramdasi sampradaya, which counted primarily Brahman scribes among its followers, emphasized the daily labours of writing as part of its devotional discipline. It generated a large manuscript corpus of Marathi poetry, including Varkaris, Ramdasis, as well as the so-called Panditi poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

South Asian literary historiography has foregrounded the material contexts of literary practice on the one hand (such as Sheldon Pollock’s framework of script mercantilism), and its multilingual, multiscriptual environments (for example Francesca Orsini’s catchphrase ‘the multilingual local’). The Ramdasi materials – in pothi and bada formats, in mostly Nagari but also occasionally Modi script, in many languages besides Marathi, and from diverse literary traditions - provide a rich empirical standpoint from which to engage with this historiography and its methodological arguments.

Focusing in particular on the circulation of Panditi poetry, and on the “multilingual local” of Thanjavur, I suggest that Ramdasi networks of kirtan performance and devotional copying came to serve as critical nodal points in interactive circuits of text and performance, linking devotees and poets of different stylistic and devotional persuasions, as well as their extended administrative patrons and dependents in Marathi as well as other languages. They were critical to the making of an enduring manuscript archive, and allow us to picture an emergent Marathi literary public that was at once local, trans-regional, and multilingual, sustained through particular skill-sets of oral, literate, and performative skills.

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Prachi Deshpande

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Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:19:58

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Beggars On the Move: Hijra Journeys in the Eighteenth-century Deccan

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Part of the International conference on Maharashtra in September 2021 - Mario da Penha, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

In the eighteenth century, hijras in the western Deccan saw themselves primarily as bhikaris or beggars – constituents in a network of initiation-based monastic orders that sought alms and survived on charity. This form of mendicancy – which also counted gosavis and fakirs among its ranks – was a ritualized vocation that emphasized a life of uprooted-ness through the act of wandering. Itinerant beggars like the hijras often benefited from the chivalrous sanctuary and monetary largesse of successive Maratha regimes, receiving from them inams of land and vatans to collect prescribed, mandatory levies as alms.

This paper draws upon Marathi archival legal and revenue records in the Modi script to map the lives of peripatetic hijra households in the pre-colonial period. It traces the overlapping physical and metaphysical journeys that monastic mendicants embarked on and the differing contexts around them. Hijras and their collaborators, the mundas, traveled between their vastis or residences and ritual centers such as the samadhi of Dnyaneshwar at Alandi or the temple of Bhavani at Tuljapur. Their lineages also performed cyclical annual movements to collect dues from designated patrimonies under their care, granted or guaranteed by state officials.

Further, as people displaced from the mundane life of samsar, but who had not yet extinguished the ‘self’ through the radical act of samadhi, hijras circulated as ritual mediators between the two. Like other monastic mendicants, they connected devotees in the countryside to mausolea such as dargahs and samadhis by transferring benedictions from the latter to the former for a government-regulated fee. These ritual transactions allowed hijras the subsistence required to withdraw from the world of samsar and live monastically.

Episode Information

Series

Asian Studies Centre

People

Keywords

maharashtra studies

Department: St Antony's College

Date Added: 21/12/2021

Duration: 00:16:42

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