{"title":"Sumit Guha","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"history-and-collective-memory-in-south-asia-1200-2000-book-sumit-guha-9780295746210","title":"History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200-2000","description":"In this far-ranging and erudite exploration of the South Asian past, Sumit Guha discusses the shaping of social and historical memory in world-historical context. He presents memory as the result of both remembering and forgetting and of the preservation, recovery, and decay of records. By describing how these processes work through sociopolitical organizations, Guha delineates the historiographic legacy acquired by the British in colonial India; the creation of the centralized educational system and mass production of textbooks that led to unification of historical discourses under colonial auspices; and the divergence of these discourses in the twentieth century under the impact of nationalism and decolonization.  Guha brings together sources from a range of languages and regions to provide the first intellectual history of the ways in which socially recognized historical memory has been made across the subcontinent. This thoughtful study contributes to debates beyond the field of history that complicate the understanding of objectivity and documentation in a seemingly post-truth world.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49735914062097,"sku":"NGR9780295746210","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0295746211.jpg?v=1767175872"},{"product_id":"tribe-and-state-in-asia-past-and-present-book-sumit-guha-9780924304958","title":"Tribe and State in Asia, Past and Present","description":"Every literate person today will encounter the word \"tribe\" in many settings. What does this word mean? When and how did its use begin? Is it a good label for any contemporary social organization? Is it relevant for policymakers to think with? Academics have often critiqued its use, but that has not suppressed its ubiquity. Why?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e This book offers answers to all the above. In order to keep it manageable, these questions are investigated only for the span of Asia that runs from Siberia to Sri Lanka and Suez to the Sea of Japan, and over the past 2,500 years. It thus starts at the beginning of the Iron Age and looks at both unwritten cultures dominant in the past and the hypertextual world of today. Its four chapters successively analyze the Asian uses of tribe-like categories, European deployment of the term in the age of imperialism, the environments where it flourishes and those it makes and the diversity of tribes across Asia today. The book will be of great interest to historians, journalists, policymakers, and to anyone studying the history of Asia.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49740146835729,"sku":"NGR9780924304958","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50006343909649,"sku":"CIN0924304952G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0924304952.jpg?v=1751108894"},{"product_id":"ecologies-of-empire-in-south-asia-1400-1900-book-sumit-guha-9780295751498","title":"Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900","description":"Reveals how imperial power and local resistance have shaped landscapesThe perception, valuation, and manipulation of human environments all have their own layered histories. So Sumit Guha argues in this sweeping examination of a pivotal five hundred years when successive empires struggled to harness lands and peoples to their agendas across Asia. Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400–1900 compares the practices of the Mughal and British Empires to demonstrate how their fluctuating capacity for domination was imbricated in the formation of environmental knowledge itself.   The establishment of imperial control transforms local knowledge of the world into the aggregated information that reproduces centralized power over it. That is the political ecology that reshapes entire biomes. Animals and plants are translocated; human communities are displaced or destroyed. Some species proliferate; others disappear. But these state projects are overlaid upon the many local and regional geographies made by sacred cosmologies and local sites, pilgrimage routes and river fords, hot springs and fluctuating aquifers, hunting ranges and nesting grounds, notable trees and striking rocks.  Guha uncovers these ecological histories by scrutinizing little-used archival sources. His historically based political ecology demonstrates how the biomes of a vast subcontinent were changed by struggles to make and to resist empire.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51000675336465,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51000678154513,"sku":"NIN9780295751498","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0295751495.jpg?v=1767434847"},{"product_id":"environment-and-ethnicity-in-india-12001991-book-sumit-guha-9780521640787","title":"Environment and Ethnicity in India, 12001991","description":"Drawing on a rich collection of sources, Sumit Guha's 1999 book reconstructs the history of the forest communities in western India to explore questions of tribal identity and the environment. In so doing, he demonstrates how the ideology of indigenous cultures, developed out of the notion of a pure and untouched ethnicity, is in fact rooted in nineteenth-century racial and colonial anthropology. As a challenge to this view, the author traces the processes by which the apparently immutable identities of South Asian populations took shape, and how these populations interacted politically, economically and socially with civilizations outside their immediate vicinity. While such theories have been discussed by scholars of South-East Asia and Africa, this study examines the South Asian case. Sumit Guha's penetrating and controversial critique will make a significant contribution to that literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51003178451217,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51003181826321,"sku":"NIN9780521640787","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52618844242193,"sku":"NLS9780521640787","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0521640784.jpg?v=1750976434"},{"product_id":"environment-and-ethnicity-in-india-1200-1991-book-sumit-guha-9780521028707","title":"Environment and Ethnicity in India, 1200-1991","description":"Drawing on a rich collection of sources, Sumit Guha's 1999 book reconstructs the history of the forest communities in western India to explore questions of tribal identity and the environment. In so doing, he demonstrates how the ideology of indigenous cultures, developed out of the notion of a pure and untouched ethnicity, is in fact rooted in nineteenth-century racial and colonial anthropology. As a challenge to this view, the author traces the processes by which the apparently immutable identities of South Asian populations took shape, and how these populations interacted politically, economically and socially with civilizations outside their immediate vicinity. While such theories have been discussed by scholars of South-East Asia and Africa, this study examines the South Asian case. Sumit Guha's penetrating and controversial critique will make a significant contribution to that literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52423710703889,"sku":"NLS9780521028707","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521028707.jpg?v=1759149556"},{"product_id":"beyond-caste-book-sumit-guha-9789004249189","title":"Beyond Caste","description":"'Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted  and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53563572191505,"sku":"NLS9789004249189","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9789004249189.jpg?v=1779530618"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-sumit-guha.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}