Post-independence India Research Articles

A Survey of Consumers’ Perspicacity towards Goods and Services Tax in Odisha

Goods and Services Tax is one of the major tax reforms in indirect tax structure in post-independence India. The prime motive of introducing goods and services tax is to form an uniform tax structure applicable to whole India. The study focuses to explore level of understanding about common idea of goods and services tax and to evaluate the perspicacity of customers about impact of GST on prices of goods and services. A structured questionnaire has been used for data collection from different districts of Odisha and statistical methods including chi-square test, paired t test and descriptive statistics were used for empirical analysis. We find that opinion of customers’ regarding increase in cost of services after GST differ from customer to customer and tax as an important determinant for purchase decision is independent of demographic profile.

India's Muslims: The 'Other' Within?

Three assumptions have been crucial to the Hindu Right wing’s discourse in post independence India. Firstly, this discourse takes as a priori that Islam is a foreign import to India. Accordingly, the coming of the faith to the subcontinent during the Medieval period is seen as having ‘cataclysmic’ implications, disturbing its erstwhile tranquility in the form of forced conversions, temple desecrations and so on. Secondly, this discourse conceives Modern Indian Muslims as a discrete, homogenous community, whose loyalty is at worst questionable, on account of their affiliation with a foreign civilization. Lastly, in its self-perception, the Hindu Right partly derives legitimacy by presenting itself as successors and custodians of a Millennium-old Hindu subjectivity: a collective Hindu trauma precipitated by the cataclysmic coming of Islam in India, which enables a vision of the latter atrocities through ‘memory’. Critics often point to the violent implications of this discourse for Indian Muslims, especially since the rise of the BJP in the late 20th Century and the waves of communal violence that it has left in its wake. Less often do critics delve into the historical veracity of the Hindu Right’s claims. Far from being an ‘objective’ contact with memory, I will show how the Hindu Right’s discourse derives its genealogy from the British colonial discourse on Islam and the Muslim community in India. I shall do so by analyzing British colonial narratives, in relation to statements on Muslims issued by the two earliest RSS chiefs. Moreover, I will highlight how this discourse grossly oversimplifies the history of Islam in the subcontinent. This kind of a historical critique will be significant in unsettling the Hindu Right’s claims to memory and not just in condemning the violent manifestations of its politics.

K.C.S. Paniker's Words and Symbols: A Formalist Approach

Formalism developed from the 19th century aesthetic of “Art for art’s sake.” The Formalist exponents believed in the evaluation of a artwork solely based on its form rather than its content. They reacted to an artwork on its formal and aesthetic qualities. Understanding the depth of Formalism is crucial in appreciating modern abstract art both of the West as well Indian. K. C. S. Paniker, being one of the most important figures in the abstractions of post-independence India, and had many influences from western artists, although he always maintained his Indian identity in his works. His series of ‘Words and Symbols’ is one of his most important contribution to modern Indian art in which he was interested in the formal structure of the ancient Indian texts and symbols. Therefore, this paper aims at understanding the more complex nature of Formalism and how that can be used to reassess Paniker’s works.

Sustainable Agriculture Development through Organic Farming in India

The biggest challenge of post-independent India has been to produce enough food to sustain the increasing population. Hence, the Green Revolution began in the 1960s to increase food production. The Green revolution included increased farming area, double-cropping, planting two crops rather than once annually, adopting a high yield variety of seeds, improved irrigation facilities, increased use of inorganic fertilisers and pesticides, and improved farm implements and crop protection measures. Green revolution increases productivity in the short term, but the soil becomes infertile in long run increasing the risk of future food crises. The scientists are suggesting organic farming as an alternative to overcome the problem of future food risk. The main objective of this paper is to determine whether India will achieve the goal of sustainable development by using organic farming. It also discusses the obstacle in this process and possible solutions.

The Ecology of the Archive in Adil Jussawalla's ‘Date Book’ for a Missing Novel

The Cornell Bombay Poets’ Archive was initially started with Adil Jussawalla’s donation of his massive archive to the Special Collections at Cornell University. Jussawalla has been collecting and documenting the state of Indian letters, more precisely the state of Indian poetry, for over fifty years. This essay takes a representative archival document from this collection to show the abiding engagements of the poet with the world in which he lived. This text is a planner/diary (a ‘date book’), which contains a set of notes for an unwritten novel from the 1970s, when Adil Jussawalla’s career as poet and writer was in its early stages. The planner/diary shows us the multiple trajectories of the conflicted space of the English writer in post-Independence India that we must heed when studying Indian modernisms: the peculiar combinations of pasts and presents to create an Indian modern; the combination of the trans-regional with the translocal with the deeply personal; and the refusal to sentimentalise anything.

Postsecular Longings?

While the figure of the ‘Indian guru’ has established itself as a source of spiritual knowledge in the West, it played a unique role in the construction of the secular image of post-independence India. Historically, gurus, fakirs, or monks were considered neither a threat to the construction of secular India, nor were they given a privileged treatment on the basis of their religious denomination. Such secular ‘indifference’, however, has been challenged by competing narratives of religious modernities in popular culture, particularly in Hindi Cinema. Drawing from three recent productions – Oh My God (2012), PK (2014), and Dharam Sankat Mein (2015) – this article argues that the specific generic, cinematic, and narrative devices employed in these films gesture towards what Manav Ratti has identified as a ‘postsecular’ move in India, one that helps articulate the paradox of ‘nonsecular secularism, a non-religious religion’ wherein the figure of the guru serves as a tabula rasa of repressed secular anxieties.

There Will Be Trouble

It is perhaps more relevant now than ever before to prepare the ground for a pedagogical discussion on theater curation. Theater festivals have recently become prominent in India. It is true that India has cherished a ubiquitous tradition of festivals—utsavs and mahotsavs—for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the staging of Kudiyattam at ancient Sanskrit koothambalams, which would last several weeks in a festival atmosphere; the touring circuit of Assam mobile theater, which has created festival-like events since the 1950s; or the Marathi (political) theater, which has an active culture of more than a century of traveling and festival-like events. These are not the kind of festivals I am interested in for the purpose of this article—they have a “traditional” logic built into their purpose—but the kind that have emerged along secular lines in post-independent and urban India. These “new” theater festivals are primarily sponsored by the state, are supported by public funds at the regional and national level, and are therefore open to public participation and scrutiny. These festivals, wherever they are held, commonly include a multilingual and multicultural itinerary of plays. The intent behind the selection is largely driven by the post-colonial project, which is to “put together” an idea of modern India by including plays that have a critical outlook—these could be contemporary scripts, modern adaptations of classical plays, and works that explore contemporary vocabularies of performance (body-based, post-dramatic, experimental, etc.). Currently, India has over a dozen of these new theater festivals of varying scale; each running annually, each claiming to show the best of contemporary theater. In the absence of a touring circuit, these festivals provide artists with the opportunity to travel, to seek new audiences, to mingle with peers and masters, to be written about, and to woo award committees. Festivals are now doing for theater what exhibitions have done for visual art; they are highly visible events that offer immense resources and the promise of further influence. Festivals seem to bestow legitimacy on artistic work of a kind not seen before.

State, citizenship and gender-variant communities in India

ABSTRACT Though persons belonging to gender-variant communities (GVCs) were a part of the Indian culture for thousands of years, new modalities were introduced to outlaw them under colonial rule. Post-independence, GVCs were subjected to progressive laws in theory; yet the colonial legal framework was largely retained in practice. Despite their significant presence in the public sphere, GVCs struggled for decades to acquire cognitive visibility and citizenship rights. Even the civil society in India at large overlooked their entitlement to sexual identity until the late 1990s. This paper, based on field and documentary data, uncovers the struggles of GVCs to claim citizenship rights in India. Beginning with the tradition of ‘cultural family’ under Gharana, the trajectory relegated them first to ‘illegal’ citizens under colonial rule and subsequently to ‘captive’ citizens in post-Independent India. Their positioning as ‘stranded’ citizens even after passing the new law in 2019 also challenges their potential as ‘monitorial citizens’.

Project Nationalism and Theatre in Contemporary India

The nation as performed by the state has found either endorsement or criticism on the stage in postindependence India. The decolonization drive, undertaken during the 1950s, aimed at identifying performance forms that would define what ‘national theatre’ would be for a free India and thus help reclaim the ‘Indian’ cultural ethos. Nation in contemporary Indian theatre is as much a thematic trope as a question of form – but both critical of the previous postcolonial-nationalist tendency to institutionalize through theatre an Indian culture in sync with the state narrative of nationhood. Twenty-first century theatre in India is largely experimental, moving far beyond the thematization of issues to their presentation in forms that are ‘inter-artistic exchange’ (Lehmann) and partake of performance-making protocols from domestic as well as global theatre practice. The present study discusses two theatrical productions – The Antigone Project (2003-4), directed by Anuradha Kapur and Ein Lall, and Work in Progress: A Nationalism Project (2018), directed by scenographer Deepan Sivaraman. The former is the artist’s reaction to the 2002 post-Godhra riot (called ‘pogrom’ by many); the latter critiques the distortion of the idea of modern India, prompting readings from the country’s Constitution. Although centered on these two productions, the essay quickly meanders through a couple more contemporary performances in the second section to demonstrate through the diversity of forms the shift in the relationship between politics and theatre, especially when it comes to the performance of nationalism.

Classical, popular and media technologies: Staging music in new geographies in post-independence southern India

ABSTRACT The paper looks at the circulation of music in new spaces produced by technologies of recording, amplification, and transmission. It argues for the making of new categories that go beyond ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ especially in the context of southern India and the tradition that is identified as Carnatic music. It looks at Radio and televisual broadcasting to capture new listening communities and their acoustic aspirations. It argues for new radio geographies that reinforced identity of regions and their practices and gave them greater leverage in relation to the nation and national pool of resources. In contrast the television as a medium of spectacle and entertainment impacted listening experiences quite differently even as it expanded the viewership beyond the confines of the nation space.

SIGNIFICANCE OF RURAL CULTURE IN THE SHORT FICTION OF MANOJ DAS

A brief survey of Indian Short Fiction in English indicates that there is a wide scope for its study. Manoj Das has presented a serene and simple way of life of rural community in India in his fiction which is rapidly disappearing. He is one of the foremost short story writers in Post-Independent India and an outstanding bilingual writer both in English and Oriya at ease. He depicts very effectively and skillfully the way of life of people living in villages, their values, norms, beliefs, attitudes, traditions, customs, superstitions, religion, etc., in his stories. He is a keen observer of the changing socio-political and cultural scenario in the post independent India. The stories of Manoj Das are so subtle and suggestive that they have a concealed element of didacticism, a zeal for social reform as he is keenly interested in fostering and promoting the qualitative life of the rural people of India. Hence, in this paper I presented my views and opinions from Indian perspective keeping in mind the life of the rural people with all their day to day activities and problems as portrayed by Manoj Das. In spite of their penury, the cultural values and conventional ways are not given up. Thus, the author preserves the rich Indian cultural heritage in spite of his depicting the follies and foibles of human life.

Between Criticality and Conformism: Citizenship and Education in Post-independent India

This article attempts to investigate the three strands of citizenship, nationalism and education and their interconnectedness in India after independence. It seeks to address questions like how has the post-colonial state in India visualized its models of citizenship through its education policies and programmes and what has become of their fate? In what ways the changing nature of public versus private education has shaped contested models of citizenship? What challenges are thrown at the models of citizenship that the Indian state has tried to posit through education? It is argued that the journey of citizenship in post-independent India is that of contradictory pulls around key strands of ethno-cultural nationalism and civic nationalism and around an economically productive nation versus an economic consumer nation. The article will look at some of the key policy shifts and operational models and attempt to locate the dynamic behind those shifts.

Role of Indigenous Technical Knowledge (ITKs) in Growth and Production of Livestock Sector

Livestock sector contributes a major share to the GDP from the overall agricultural GDP. Indigenous knowledge is the precious knowledge of the local people who take benefits from it in various aspects of day to day living including the rearing of the livestock. But the shift from the traditional to modern medicine in the post-independence India has led to negligence towards this unexplored field of knowledge. The documentation of ITKs can provide us huge benefits in conserving and preserving bio-diversity, increase in national economy, patenting of the indigenous preparations etc. ITKs are having various benefits over the allopathic medicines like availability of the raw materials, cost effectiveness, no side effects etc. The constraints faced by the people while using ITKs include the seasonal availability, longer duration in healing, based on hit and trail method, less availability of documented literature etc. Recently the research on indigenous practices has got momentum all over the world including India but the efforts are still in its early stages and only a little portion is documented till now. There is an immediate need to recognize the importance of ITKs and take serious steps for their documentation, preservation and validation.

History of Ilmul Saidala (Unani Pharmacy) Through Ages: A Critical Appraisal and Current Scenario

Ilmul Saidala (Unani pharmacy) is an important pharmaceutical branch of Unani System of Medicine, also known as Greco-Arabic medicine. Its historical evolution is intricately related with that of human’s disease and sufferings. The earlier records about the Ilmul Saidala reveal that the Greco-Roman civilization is credited with its origin and development. Then, the Arabs preserved their medical legacy, and enriched it with their pharmaceutical experiments, innovations, and newer formulations. Most of the physicians rendered voluminous compendium known as “Al-Qarābādhīn” (pharmacopoeia) on the pharmacy including pharmaceutical as well as cosmeceutical preparations. After the fifth century, the development in Unani Pharmacy has been greatly contributed by Arab physicians and the world acclaimed piece of knowledge from this period is Avicenna’s ‘Canon of Medicine’. The medical influences of the Arabs helped in further development, regulation, and advancement of pharmaceutical sciences in the European soil and evolved it as a distinctive institution of respect and public welfare. The vastness of knowledge of Greco-Arabic period can be judged from the fact that the contemporary innovations and developments in the pharmaceutical industry is primarily owed to the original contributions of Greek, Egyptian, and Arab philosophers and physicians, such as Hippocrates, Pedanios Dioscorides, Galen of Pergamon, Avicenna, Rhazes, Geber etc. In India, Mughals, especially emperor Akbar was very instrumental in the propagation of Unani medicine and had appointed Unani physicians in different cities of his territory. Later on, Khandan Shareefi (Shareefi family) and Khandan Azizi (Azizi family) played important roles in the promotion of Unani Pharmacy. In post-independence India , Hạkīm ‘Abd al-Hạmeed established Unani pharmacies on the lines of the modern pharmaceutical industry for the mass production of Unani formulations in compliance with Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines. At present, Unani System of Medicine and its pharmacies enjoys the patronage of Government in India and other South-East Asian countries, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh along with post graduate education in Unani pharmacy. The present work is a sincere attempt of authors to critically appraise the Unani Pharmaceutical potentials from the past, the current waves of developments and issues, and their possible ways forward. Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol. Vol. 21(1) 2022 Page : 24-36

Portrayal of Indian History and Politics in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel

Shashi Tharoor’s award winning work The Great Indian Novel showcases an allegorical representation of recent history and politics modelled on the ancient epic Mahabharata. . He has taken the epic as a blueprint and filled it with a contemporary cast for his witty sent-up of pre and post-independence India. The history of India’s struggle against colonial rule and her postcolonial tryst with democracy is presented in an epic vein. Tharoor’s strategy, bases on both the modern problematization of history and politics; and Indian traditions is both culturally appropriate and subversive in terms of internal affairs as well as imperial history and its modern legacies.

IN-BETWEEN SOUND AND LANDSCAPE: INTERCOMMUNITY INNOVATIONS AND SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH DREE FESTIVAL AMONG THE APATANI PEOPLE OF ARUNACHAL PRADESH

This paper has developed over a span of four years since I first visited Ziro valley in 2017, guided by reflections and insights that I came upon while revisiting the field in recent years in the Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh. The dree ritual was historically an individual household ritual for Apatani people who owned cultivable land for better crops and good harvest before 1967. However, presently Dree is celebrated in a common ground and all villages come together to celebrate it. Through this ethnomusicological study with active fieldwork participation, archiving and tools borrowed from historical ethnomusicology, I have attempted at studying the gradual shift of ritual space within the Apatani community leading to an emerging performing space which is able to accommodate and nurture the diverse range of cultural practices of miji-migung (oral tradition) traditions, traditional dance forms, story-telling and other friendly sports for recreation within the celebration of an egalitarian Dree festival. Diary entries from C.V.F Haimendorf ’s field notes on “Drii”2 helped me to conceptualize further the drastic change in the structure and historical location of the Dree ritual and the specific role played by the Nyibu (ritual specialist and performer of miji) within the Apatani community. Dree festival among the patanis has projected a history where the feeling of nationalism and identity in post-independent India is being not only practised but also been creating a new emerging performance space and soundscapes among the Apatani people of Arunachal Pradesh, which could be better conceptualized as a process of glocalization and inter-community sustainability.

Development of women’s movement in India: A historical perspective

The purpose of this paper is to look at the antecedents of the Indian women?s movement and the achievements before and after independence. The status of women has been a central concern of many reform movements in India. Prior to India?s independence, the organizations and groups that addressed social issues and sought change for women were closely associated with the independence movement. The women?s movement during the 19th century in India emanated from the broader social reforms movement. Consequently, the 20th century freedom movement and women?s rights movement in the post-1970s has brought to the fore a wide range of women?s concerns. The subsequent events like the constitutional promise of gender equality, Towards Equality Report prepared by the Committee on the Status of Women in 1974 have surely promoted women?s concern to some extent. All these achievements were the result of women?s movement groups that worked for the promotion of women?s rights and equality. In the above-stated context, this paper also analysis the issues of women?s justice and equality taken up by women?s groups in pre and post-independent India.

Viswanathan Mohan: a dynasty of diabetology

Diabetes runs in some families but it's the study and treatment of diabetes that runs in Viswanathan Mohan's. His father, Moopil Viswanathan, earned himself the title of India's ‘father of diabetology.’ In 1948, he established the country's first diabetes clinic in post-independence India at the Stanley Medical College, a government-run institute in Chennai (then known as Madras). “It's a mystery to me why he chose to do that,” says Mohan. “There were only a few people with diabetes in the whole city.”

The Muslim Minority and Communal Harmony in India: A Study of the Views of Wahiduddin Khan

The partition of the Indian subcontinent placed her religious harmony at stake. In postindependence India, one of the most crucial issues was to maintain communal harmony between the Muslim minority and non-Muslim majority. Renowned Muslim Scholars and organisations came forward and expressed their concerns on the issue. However, Wahiduddin Khan (1925-2021) suggested a different methodology, contrary to his contemporaries. Through the application of descriptive and content analytical methods, this study investigates Khan’s ideas of communal harmony in post-independence India. The study found that Khan emphasised da’wah and peace activism. Contrary to his preceding views, he blamed the Muslim populace for communal disharmony in the country. Further, based on his reading of the Treaty of Ḥudaibiyyah, he recommended Muslims take a unilateral and passive step to establish communal harmony in the country and assumed it to be the only possible way for the Muslim minority. This study observes that Khan’s understanding of Ḥudaibiyyah is questionable as he ignored all other significant incidents of the sīrah. Nevertheless, his views on the unity of religion remains significant.

India @ 75: Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Development

India was perhaps the only country among the developing world with a colonial past to have organised and established national science community much before it attained its independence. Nehruvian science and technology (S&T) policy in India’s formative years left a distinct imprint in the post-colonial and post-independent India. With a huge population of nearly 1.35 billion people, India is not dependent on food on outside countries since the 1960s. Green and White Revolutions have made immense contribution to develop scientific and technical capacities in agriculture. India’s innovation system, including higher education, has given her some comparative advantage through ‘human capital’ in information technology, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, space research and so on. In export promotion and economic competitiveness in technology-based industries, we lag compared with East Asian ‘Dragons’. India’s informal sector poses a formidable challenge with more than 95% of the total labour force, about 550 million, 90% of which is 8th class dropouts. When we begin to assess our national innovation system, one feature that stands out to research observers is few islands of excellence and vast ‘hinterlands’ of underdeveloped research potential. There is clearly a gap between theory and practice of science policy in India. Our gross expenditure on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product remained relatively stagnant and, in fact, receded from 0.8% in the 1990s to 0.7% in 2020. In this period, our neighbour, China, left us far behind in S&T for development.