Browsing by Subject "South Asian studies"

This dissertation explores the particular significance of South Asia to international literary and political spheres, beginning with the formative moments of modernist internationalism. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, W. E. B. Du Bois interrupted his work with the NAACP and the pan-African congresses to write Dark Princess: a Romance. Du Bois's turn to the romance and to India forms the point of departure for my dissertation, for India, both real and imagined, offered modernist intellectuals a space of creative possibility and representative impossibility. The fiction of Cornelia Sorabji, for instance, obfuscates and allegorizes practices of women's seclusion, both to refute imperial feminist solutions and to support her legal activism. From the imperial romance to the anti-racist one, the misrepresentation endemic to the romance genre enables the figuration of a discrepant globe. This modernist practice of transfiguring India, usually in the service of a global political vision, is undertaken both within India as well as outside of it. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, interrupted his leading role in the anti-colonial movement to write Gora, a novel of mistaken identity and inappropriate love, and to mistranslate his own poetry, particularly his Nobel-Prize-winning collection Gitanjali. If realism aims to translate cultural difference, to faithfully carry meaning across boundaries, the romances I consider in my dissertation work instead to mistranslate those differences, to produce a longed-for object beyond cultural specificity. In conversation with postcolonial theorists of Anglophone literary practice, as well as debates around translation in comparative literature, I suggest that we should think about intercultural texts in terms of transfiguration: not the carrying across of meaning from one sign system to another, but the reshaping of culturally specific materials, however instrumentally and inaccurately, in the service of internationalist goals.

With the revival of Imāmī or “Twelver” Shīʿa Islam in the Safavid Empire (1501- 1722) of Iran, histories of its clerical elite have emphasized the overt juridical mechanisms that they erected in support of their imperial project. Alternatively, many have also argued that gnostic counter-currents emerging in the same milieu reflected a wider disinterest in political activism. This dissertation provincializes the experience of the Safavid heartland to ask how Iranian émigré scholars working among the royal courts of the Deccan Sultanates (1490-1687) engineered an elite scholarly culture through alternative intellectual rubrics that were simultaneously gnostic in character and overtly political. Drawing on unstudied Arabic and Persian manuscripts trafficked within the Quṭbshāhī Sultanate of Golkonda-Hyderabad (1518-1687), I recover the intellectual career of one of these émigré scholars, Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad Gīlānī (b. 1585, d. after 1662), who forms the centerpiece of a nearly two-century story of evolving Shīʿī scholasticism in service of the state. Gīlānī’s intermittent sojourns between his homeland of Gilan, the academies of Safavid Iran, various courtly spaces in Mughal India, and his long-term home in the Deccan make him the perfect subject to refashion these territories into a contiguous intellectual terrain. In six chapters, I show how various medical, natural philosophical, and occult sciences practiced and theorized by Gīlānī and his colleagues as “Shīʿī naturalists” were not only legitimated by Muslim scripture, but were heavily patronized by Muslim rulers as a cornerstone of their political theologies. It demonstrates, furthermore, how Gīlānī’s mode of naturalist inquiry builds upon a speculative and

affective intimacy with non-human and non-Muslim others.

My dissertation, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City: Picturing Swadeshi Culture in Interwar Bombay, proposes that the history of economic nationalism in India and the spread of middle-class patriotic consumer culture is a gendered history. In 1930, an unprecedented number of middle-class Hindu women took to the streets of Bombay, now Mumbai, to participate in the Civil Disobedience movement under the leadership of M.K. Gandhi. Their task was to promote swadeshi: a form of political consumerism centered around the boycott of foreign goods and preference for homespun cloth and indigenous products. At the same time, urban women residing in this cosmopolitan city were deeply entrenched in the globally proliferating consumerism of the interwar years. In the face of a critical moral demand to alter their consumer habits to demonstrate their patriotism, women found themselves navigating the contested demands of a desire for a modern urban lifestyle and their commitment towards the nationalist cause, rooted in the homegrown and homespun.Urban and middle-class women’s recalcitrance in giving up their consumer lifestyle emboldened local businesses and merchants to offer indigenous alternatives to popular and global consumer goods. Ultimately, this enabled domestic capital and industries to gain significant market share in Bombay, the principal commercial center of the British Empire outside of London, and to transform it into a swadeshi bazaar. My dissertation thus demonstrates the centrality of women’s nationalist work in shaping market relations and the making of a consumer politics that defined both Indian nationalism and the wider anti-colonial movements of the interwar world. Recent studies point to (another) nationalist turn in contemporary India that inflects the forms of economic globalization embraced by the country’s middle classes today. The evidence from swadeshi Bombay reveals that contemporary consumer politics have much deeper historical roots, dating back to the interwar years, and sprouted in the city that was the commercial and financial hub of British India. Narrated across four thematically organized chapters, this dissertation follows a group of female volunteers known as desh sevikas, or “servants (sevikas) of the nation (desh).” While a substantial section of Indian historiography, including but not limited to the early Subaltern Studies collective, has centered the peasant in the vast Indian countryside as the protagonist of colonial history, this project “disobediently” turns to the “consuming” category of middle-class, upper-caste, urban (and Hindu) women as gendered citizens of British India’s urbs prima, “first city.” Sparsely mentioned in official record, the sevika more frequently appears in a range of image sources such as documentary photos, print advertisements, and political caricatures. The composite figure of the sevika thus lies at the intersection of the history of women and gender, consumerism, and anticolonial movements and invites methodological approaches from visual culture studies. My project deploys the sevika as a heuristic figure to tap into the multiple identities assumed by Bombay women—as city dwellers, as anticolonial workers, and as self-fashioned modern consumers. In doing so, Disobedient Women in a Consumer City locates urban women albeit those belonging to a specific class and caste as political-economic actors. It traces the many modes in which they practice their disobedience towards the British colonial state as well as traditional gendered norms, while remaining caught within the sobering limits of their caste and class.

This dissertation studies religion, sociality, and gender in contemporary India by exploring devotional intimacies and everyday life in the shadows of the regional pilgrimage temple of Rani Bhatiyani, a Hindu goddess, in rural Rajasthan. Informed by scholarship on lived religion, it examines aspects of rural life that have hitherto been unrecognized as important to religious sphere within Hindu studies. Through ethnographic research, this study brings into attention issues of self-decoration, gossip, and walking practices into attention. And in doing so, it moves away from the heavy focus Hindu studies has placed on religious institutions, narrative and worship practices, and rituals in understanding goddess veneration in particular and Hinduism in general.

Little is known about the general health concerns of three-wheel drivers, who provide an important transport service through many South Asian nations, including Sri Lanka. In order to fill this gap in the literature, a two-stage qualitative study was employed to determine the types of health concerns that three-wheel drivers in Galle, Sri Lanka experience. The first stage employed one-on-one semi-structured interviews relating to personal health with 20 three-wheel drivers. The second stage consisted of two semi-structured focus groups, one with five participants and the other with eight. The most common health concern among three-wheel drivers at this site was musculoskeletal pain in the back, shoulders, and knees. The most common health risk factors were alcohol consumption, tobacco use, lack of physical activity, and poor utilization of routine examinations. An unexpected finding was the relative lack of road traffic accidents and injuries. Based on these findings, government or private health initiatives aimed at three-wheel drivers might seek to intervene on modifiable risk factors such as substance use and failure to seek well care. Health officials might also encourage three-wheel manufacturers to re-think their design to reduce musculoskeletal stress. The information collected was used to design a survey instrument, which will be used in future research to quantify three-wheel driver health concerns on a larger scale in Sri Lanka.

“Mountain at a Center of the World” examines the pilgrimage site of Sri Pada, or Adam’s Peak, in Sri Lanka, explaining its worldwide significance across multiple religious traditions over the past millennium. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as many historical sources, including original translations of Sinhala and Tamil texts, I present a history of the Peak that argues its multi-religious fame is due to its physical landscape—including prominent relief, visibility from sea, verdant woods, watershed, and wildlife. As these natural elements recur in past and present storytelling about the Peak, I suggest that the mountain helped structure human history by making its own myth.

Using a methodology that refashions geological theories of stratigraphy and crystallization for reading sources in the humanities, the Peak’s polytemporal multi-religious accounts are presented in a layered comparative perspective. The natural environment is the common denominator for tracking similarities and divergences across traditions, showing the Peak translated into Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian stories, with rhetorical ends ranging from political rule to spiritual attainment. As both commonalities and conflict exist in this landed history, I propose that religious pluralism at the Peak is best understood like the mountain’s ecology, describing environments that are cooperative, if not always harmonious. In turn, pilgrimage practices and ecological concerns meet in conservation projects at the Peak, where religious messages may be productively used for environmental ends if they recognize full pluralities—including all multi-religious actors sharing the pilgrimage, as well as other assemblages of living and nonliving forces shaping the planet

Digital media prevail, determine, and shape contemporary lives and experiences, serving as an all-encompassing cultural system. Shaping modes of production and reception, digital media’s publics are networked to the media’s content and to each other in unique ways. Contemporary religions writ large, and Hinduism in specific, cannot escape the dominant digital culture and must negotiate their participation in it. Hindu devotion utilizes and permeates digital networks in various forms, and the number of websites and mobile applications offering Hindu content and services is constantly increasing. This study tells the story of a growing population of Hindu devotees who live and work as part of global digital and cultural networks, wishing to adjust their religious praxis to their larger lifestyle by incorporating digital technologies and networks into their devotion. Through the case studies discussed here, devotees can be in the presence of their chosen deity, visit temples digitally, order devotional items to be delivered globally, perform domestic rituals with priests they book online, and be in an intimate relationship with their guru. Vedic Vaani, Where’s My Pandit, and iBhakti are Hindu startups led by young entrepreneurs who wish to facilitate Hindu devotion for a networked public, of which they are part. Shree Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai and Sri Nage Sai Temple in Coimbatore showcase Hindu temples’ utilization of digitally networked media through two very different journeys. Lastly, Sadhguru and his Isha Foundation master various digital platforms, forming and maintaining an intimate guru-disciple relationship in digital means.

Focusing on the emerging landscape of digital Hinduism, the aim of this project is to explore how devotion is dispersed, re-situated, reinterpreted, and made public via digitally networked media, and to unveil the intricate web of disparate-but-interrelated actors, which promote the use and assimilation of digital media to Hindu devotion. In order to apprehend the various apparatuses, histories, and cultures that are entangled in this process, this project draws together interdisciplinary theoretical tools and online and offline ethnographic experiences. Tracing digital Hindu networks, and considering Hinduism in itself as a network of networks, this project highlights the ways in which digital Hinduism is integrated into a Hindu Wide Web, which connects Hindu authorities, publics, commercial entities, new technologies, and the divine. Reflecting on the specificities of the digital cultural system in which we operate, this study examines how core notions of Hindu devotion shift with and through digital media, suggesting that digital networks do not stand in the way of devotion. There is no attempt to replace traditional devotional practice, but, nonetheless, contemporary technoculture generates new ways to fulfill Hindu devotion, shifting the core notions on which it is based. In that, this study emphasizes the need to rethink—in the digital age—fundamental ideas such as intimacy, agency, presence, authority, and authenticity as critical to understanding our contemporary networked mode of being in the world.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is among the top ten public health threats, disproportionately threatening low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where microbiologic diagnostic capacity and antimicrobial susceptibility testing are limited. Antibiograms are practical, paper-based, or electronic tools that display summary data of local antibiotic susceptibility trends. Antibiograms can guide physicians in identifying appropriate empiric antimicrobial treatment when microbiologic culture data are not available. There is limited literature regarding the development and implementation of antibiograms in low-resource settings. The primary aim of this qualitative study was to explore physicians’ knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions (KAP) to determine factors that could impact the development and implementation of antibiograms in a tertiary care center in southern Sri Lanka. This qualitative study was conducted from June to August 2023 at the largest, public tertiary care hospital in the Southern Province. Our research team used convenience sampling to recruit physicians working in the pediatric and adult medical wards of the hospital. Participants were asked a total of 30 questions on four topics: Antibiotic Prescribing Practices, Knowledge of Antimicrobial Resistance, Attitudes towards Antimicrobial Resistance, and Knowledge of Antibiograms, as assessed in three stages. A sample antibiogram was utilized during the last section to understand how physicians interacted with and used the antibiogram. The study enrolled 31 critical informant physicians, including 20 adult physicians and 11 pediatricians. The majority (21, 68%) were male, had graduated medical school in the 2010s (16, 52%), and had practiced medicine for less than ten years (18, 58%). The results suggest that physicians are receptive to antibiograms, would find them a valuable tool in their practice, and are open to being trained on using them in their prescribing practice.

My dissertation examines the roles assumed by actors closely associated with the textile business community within developmental endeavors shaping urban, industrial and rural worlds of late colonial and postcolonial western India. My historical account begins with the early twentieth century and spans across the first three decades following independence in 1947. The mercantile predecessors of these business actors have been studied in South Asian and imperial historiography as “portfolio capitalists” who were immensely significant in brokering key political and economic transitions of the early-modern and early-colonial eras. In locating a different generation of such “merchants” in the critical decades of waning imperialism and ascendant nationalism, I bring to focus the specific ways in which such commercial actors—who had by then diversified into industrial activities—straddled the apparently disparate worlds of big business, national community-making and state-directed developmentalism. In doing so, my work reveals how such “men of capital” re-invented their relevance in a new postcolonial regime—that was sliding towards a characteristic dirigisme—by actively participating in emergent global discourses borne of decolonisation, an ongoing Cold War and a thriving international field of developmentalism marked by particular propositions of socio-economic reform and technological intervention.

My research thus opens up for scrutiny a new field of interventions initiated by business actors in western Indian places like Gujarat, that supplemented and at times even competed with the newly consolidating postcolonial state’s conception of “development” and “public good.” More specifically, this field of interventions encompassed forms of (legal) associational life, such as public charitable trusts, high-technological interventions in the form of communication satellites and broadcasting media experiments, and ideas and techniques of governing industrial as well as rural-agricultural production based on the emerging sciences of managerialism, human resources and efficiency. I show how much of this new field of operations was made possible by the intricate networking of western Indian business actors with globally mobile experts whose opinions were becoming increasingly important to the newly formed states. My research uncovers this triangulation of business, state, and global expertise by reading together existing state and institutional archival records with relatively unexplored sources like personal accounts of business entrepreneurs, labor union leaders, enterprising farmers, popular science fiction writers, filmmakers and televisual media producers.

As my research courses through these various projects, from broadcasting technologies to small scale industrial automation ambitions, I show how the simultaneous narratives of the triumphant business visionary and the actual failures of the projects on ground were co-constitutive, if not inherent to this very mode of intervention/expertise. Moreover, I reveal how these projects, despite their seeming intentions of democratic reform, participatory development and charity, more than often exacerbated the extant social antagonisms in their regions of operation, and institutionalized new structures of power and sites of regulation in the aftermath of their failures.

On a broader stroke, the dissertation offers to revise our received understanding of the postcolonial experience as partitioned between an earlier state-directed developmentalism and a more recent putatively “neo-liberal” private sector-dominated setup. It argues instead that the groundwork for claiming particular kinds of sovereignty by corporate actors within regimes of political and economic governance was laid quite early on in the late colonial and early postcolonial period through socio-economic imaginaries and practices of development which remained fundamentally marked by seepages between arenas of state and business.

This dissertation examines the shape, substance, and staging of Muslim orthodoxy in British India, concentrating on how orthodox theologians survived colonial modernity by deploying sociological, discursive, psychic, and hermeneutical strategies. This dissertation is organized around Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (1863-1943), a leading Muslim theologian, mystic, and jurist of colonial India. Thanvi authored hundreds of original treatises, compiled texts, and works of commentary on doctrine and ritual, mystical experience, communal identity, and political theology. His collected letters, recorded conversations, and sermons were published within his lifetime and continue to instruct many contemporary South Asian Muslims. I closely read Thanvi's texts and situate them within two frameworks: the history of Indo-Muslim thought and the socio-political history of colonial India. Thanvi's hundreds of published treatises and sermons, continued citation within South Asian Islam, and widespread sufi fellowship make him one of the most compelling case studies for analyzing some of the key thematic concerns of Muslim orthodoxy, such as religious knowledge, self-discipline, sublimation of desire, regulation of gender, and communalist politics. My analyses demonstrate how orthodox scholars proliferated their theological, legal, and mystical teachings in order to make tradition relevant and authoritative in the public and private lives of many South Asian Muslims. Orthodox Islam not only survived colonial modernity, but also thrived in its ideological and social contexts.

This dissertation is a critical exploration of certain authoritative discursive traditions on the limits of Islam in 19th century North India. It investigates specific moments when prominent Indian Muslim scholars articulated and contested the boundaries of what should and should not count as Islam. This study does not provide a chronological history of Islam in colonial India or that of Indian Muslim reform. Rather, it examines minute conjunctures of native debates and polemics in which the question of what knowledges, beliefs, and practices should constitute Islam was authoritatively contested. Taking 19th century Indian Muslim identity as its object of inquiry, it interrogates how the limits of identity and difference, the normative and the heretical, were battled out in centrally visible ways.

The set of illustrations that form the focus of this dissertation come from an ongoing polemic that erupted among some members of the Muslim intellectual elite in colonial India. At the heart of this polemic was the question of how one should understand the relationship between divine sovereignty, prophetic authority, and the limits of normative practice in everyday life. The rival protagonists of this polemic responded to this question in dramatically contrasting ways. One the one hand was a group of scholars whose conception of tradition pivoted on establishing the exceptionality of divine sovereignty. In order to achieve this task, they articulated an imaginary of Prophet Muhammad that emphasized his humanity and his subservience to the sovereign divine.

They also assailed ritual practices and everyday habits that in their view undermined divine sovereignty or that elevated the Prophet in a way that shed doubts on his humanity. One of the chief architects of this reform project was the early 19th century Indian Muslim thinker, Shâh Muhammad Ismâ`îl (d.1831). His reformist agenda was carried forward in the latter half of the century by the pioneers of the Deoband School, an Islamic seminary cum ideological formation established in the North Indian town of Deoband in 1867. Another group of influential North Indian Muslim scholars sharply challenged this movement of reform.

They argued that divine sovereignty was inseparable from the authority of the Prophet as the most charismatic and authorial being. In their view, divine and prophetic exceptionality mutually reinforced each other. Moreover, undermining the distinguished status of the Prophet by projecting him as a mere human who also happened to be a recipient of divine revelation represented anathema. As a corollary, these scholars vigorously defended rituals and everyday practices that served as a means to honor the Prophet's memory and charisma. This counter reformist movement was spearheaded by the influential Indian Muslim thinker Ahmad Razâ Khân (d.1921). He was the founder of the Barelvî School, another ideological group that flourished in late 19th century North India.

This dissertation describes these rival narratives of tradition and reform in South Asian Islam by focusing on three pivotal questions of doctrinal disagreement: 1) the limits of prophetic intercession (shafâ`at), 2) the limits of heretical innovation (bid`a), and 3) the limits of the Prophet's knowledge of the unknown (`ilm al-ghayb). It argues that these intra-Muslim contestations were animated by competing political theologies each of which generated discrete and competing imaginaries of law and boundaries of ritual practice.

In the mid-eighteenth century the British Crown claimed a network of territories around the globe as its "Empire." Through a close study of law and legal instutions in Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, as well as London, this dissertation examines what it meant to be a part of that Empire. These three cities on the Indian subcontinent were administered by the English East India Company and as such have often seemed abberant or unique to scholars of eighteenth-century empire and law. This dissertation argues that these Indian cities fit squarely within an imperial legal and governmental framework common to the wider British world. Using a variety of legal records and documents, generated in both India and England, the dissertation explores the ways in which local elites and on-the-ground litigants of all national, religious, and cultural backgrounds shaped the colonial legal culture of EIC India. In the process, the dissertation shows the fitful process by which litigants from India, Company officials, and London legal elites struggled over how to define the limits of Empire. The dissertation argues that it was this process of legal wrangling which both defined the mid eighteenth-century Empire and planted the seeds for the more exclusionary colonial order in nineteenth century British India.

Background: Too little information is available on Sri Lanka’s current capacity to provide community genetic services—antenatal genetic services in particular—to understand whether building that capacity could further improve and reduce disparity in maternal and child health. This qualitative research project seeks to gather information on congenital disorders, routine antenatal care, and the current state of antenatal screening testing services within that routine antenatal to assess the feasibility of and the need for scaling up antenatal genetics services in Sri Lanka. Methods: Nineteen key informant (KI) interviews were conducted with stakeholders in antenatal care and genetic services. Seven focus group discussions were held with a total of 56 Public Health Midwives (PHMs), the health workers responsible for antenatal care at the field level. Transcripts for all interviews and FGDs were analyzed for key themes, and themes were categorized to address the specific aims of the project. Results: Antenatal genetic services play a minor role in antenatal care, with screening and diagnostic procedures available in the private sector and paid for out-of-pocket. KIs and PHMs expect that demand for antenatal genetic services will increase as patients’ purchasing power and knowledge grow but note that prohibitive abortion laws limit the ability of patients to act on test results. Genetic services compete for limited financial and human resources in the free public health system, and inadequate information on the prevalence of congenital disorders limits the ability to understand whether funding for services related to those disorders should be increased. A number of alternatives to scaling up antenatal genetic services within the free health system might be better suited to the Sri Lankan structural and social context. Conclusions: Scaling up antenatal genetic services within the public health system is not feasible in the current financial, legal, and human resource context. Yet current availability and utilization patterns contribute to regional and economic disparities, suggesting that stasis will not bring continued improvements in maternal and child health. More information on the burden of congenital disorders is necessary to fully understand if and how antenatal genetic service availability should be increased in Sri Lanka, but even before that information is gathered, examination of policies for patient referral, termination of pregnancy, and government support for individuals with genetic disease are steps that might bring extend improvements and reduce disparity in maternal and child health.

The use of codified sacred utterances, formulas or hymns called “mantras” is widespread in India. By and large, scholarship over the last few decades studies and explains mantras by resorting to Indian sources from over a millennium ago, and by applying such frameworks especially related to language as speech-act theory, semiotics, structuralism, etc. This research aims to understand mantra, and the visionary experience of mantra, from the perspectives of practitioners engaged in “mantra-sadhana (personal mantra practice).”

The main fieldwork for this project was conducted at three communities established around “gurus (spiritual teachers)” regarded by their followers as seers, i.e., authoritative sources with visionary experience, especially of deities. The Goddess, in the forms of Kali and Lalita Tripurasundari, is the primary deity at all three locations, and these practitioners may be called tantric or Hindu. Vedic sources (practitioners and texts) have also informed this research as they are a part of the history and context of the informants. Adopting an immersive anthropology and becoming a co-practitioner helped erase boundaries to get under the skin of mantra-practice. Fieldwork shows how the experience of mantras unravels around phenomena, seers, deities, intentionality and results. Practitioners find themselves seers mediating new mantras and practices, shaping tradition. Thus, practitioners are the primary sources of this research.

This dissertation is structured in three phases: preparation (Chapters One and Two), fieldwork (Chapters Three, Four and Five) and conclusions (Chapter Six). Chapter One discusses the groundwork including a literature review and methodological plan— a step as crucial as the research itself. Chapter Two reviews two seers in recent times who have become role-models for contemporary mantra practitioners in Andhra-Telangana. Ethnographic chapters Three, Four and Five delve into the visionary experience and poetics of mantra-practice at three locations. Chapter Six analyses the fieldwork findings across all three locations to arrive at a number of conclusions.

Chapter Three takes place in Devipuram, Anakapalle, where a temple in the shape of a three-dimensional “Sriyantra (aniconic Goddess form)” was established by the seer AmritanandaNatha Sarasvati. Chapter Four connects with the community surrounding the seer Swami Siddheswarananda Bharati whose primary location is the Svayam Siddha Kali Pitham in Guntur where the (image of the) deity manifested in front of a group of people. Chapter Five enters the experience of mantras at Nachiketa Tapovan ashram near Kodgal with Paramahamsa Swami Sivananda Puri and her guru, Swami Nachiketananda.

Across these three locations, which I find akin to “mandalas (groups, circles of influence, chapters),” practitioners describe their experiences including visions of deities and mantras, and how mantras transformed them and brought desired and unexpected results. More significantly, practitioners share their processes of practice, doubts, interpretations and insights into the nature of mantras and deities. Practitioners who begin “mantra-sadhana (mantra-practice)” motivated by some goal are encouraged by phenomena and results, but they develop attachment to deities, and continue absorbed in sadhana. Practitioners care to discriminate between what is imagined and what actually occurred, but they also consider imagination crucial to progress. Deities are sound-forms and powerful other-worldly friends existing both outside and within the practitioner’s (not only material) body. We learn about mantras received from deities, seen and heard mantras, hidden mantras, lost mantras, dormant mantras, mantras given silently, mantras done unconsciously, and even the “no”-mantra.

Chapter 6, Understanding Mantras Again is an exploration of the fundamental themes of this research and a conceptual analysis of the fieldwork, keeping the mantra-methodologies and insights of practitioners in mind—what are mantras and how do they work in practice, what is visionary experience in mantra-practice, what are deities and how do they relate to mantras, and other questions. I conclude with a list of the primary sources of this research— practitioners.

This thesis examines popular Indian and South Korean film and television media which depicts the nation in the context of postcolonial division. Specifically, it looks closely at portrayals of anti-colonial struggle and partition, cross-border encounters, and revisionist nationalist narratives. This analysis illustrates the potential of such media to simultaneously gesture towards reconciliation between populations that have emerged as enemies despite their origins as one nation, and fail to exceed the limits of post-colonial, post-partition ideas of the nation-state and its formation of citizenship. The possibilities of these portrayals lie in their ability to both predict and produce public sentiment, as they provide an outlet for national discourse negotiating exclusion and belonging.

My dissertation seeks to explain the variations in decentralization we observe among states. Why, for example, are some states more decentralized than others? More importantly, why do central leaders in some states devolve power to local politicians, who may defect to pose challenges to the leader?

In answering these questions, I develop a theory of decentralization with two main components: First, information asymmetries that exist between central leaders and local politicians about voters - local politicians know more about the voters than central leaders do, and second, the fear central leaders have about local defection. I argue that central leaders undertake decentralization when information asymmetries that exist between the central leaders and local politicians become politically salient and the chances of local defection are fewer.

This information theory is tested systematically on quantitative and qualitative evidence from Indian cases. In the concluding chapter, I examine how the theory could explain decentralization in cases outside India.