Fractured identities: Comparing Muslim-ness and Shia-ness in 20th century India

The key question that this dissertation asks is: how did a prominent Shia collective identity form and was sustained in Lucknow over the twentieth century, while a similar phenomenon failed to take place in Hyderabad, a comparable city in India. The period that I covered starts in 1904 and ends in 1998, spanning almost the whole of the twentieth century. I divided this period into three chapters, each of which focused on a specific repertoire of contention that was used in collective identity formation. The first chapter shows how public rituals, particularly their redefinition, can contextualize the formation or reinvention of collective identities. Chapter two focuses on protest campaigns to show their role in consolidating collective identities, and chapter three analyzes riots as a strategy for sustaining collective identities. However, the common thread that runs across the three chapters is the role of community based elites; elites connected with the state; their interactions and partnerships; and the role of the state, which together emphasized specific collective identities as salient in either city. My project contributes to scholarship in two broad ways. The first is by bringing together the role of the state and the elites in shaping group identities. I show that claims about new collective identities or revisions of older ones were presented not simply by community based elites or the state acting by themselves, but by the joint efforts of both. The second broad contribution is towards the scholarship on violence and collective identities. My project makes three specific contributions to this particular scholarship. First, and foremost, my project does not take group identities to be preexisting like exiting scholarship does. My project, in contrast is oriented towards tracing the formation of collective identities- it shows how a general Muslim identity split into Shia and Sunni identities in Lucknow, and how various ethnic identities fused into a Muslim collectivity in Hyderabad. The second contribution is through grounding the analysis in historical explanation, an important approach used in historical sociology. Existing scholarship on inter-group violence focuses on contemporaneous processes—demographic and economic shifts in Olzak’s work, patterns of civic relations in Varshney’s study, and electoral contests in Wilkinson’s and Brass’s analyses—to explain patterns of intergroup violence. My project shows that historical processes are more salient, and that contemporaneous factors are often a continuation of historical patterns. The third contribution is about violence. While existing research sees riots as outcomes of competition, lack of collaboration, or perceptions of threat between already existing and established groups, my project takes an opposite view. My findings show that riots—communal in Hyderabad, and sectarian in Lucknow-- are strategic tools, instead, that are utilized in the larger projects of creating and sustaining distinct collective identities that are purported to be antagonistic to each other.Doctor of Philosoph

Resummed transverse momentum distribution of pseudo-scalar Higgs boson at NNLOA_A+NNLL

In this article we have studied the transverse momentum distribution of the pseudo-scalar Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The small \pt region which provides the bulk of the cross section is not accessible to fixed order perturbation theory due to the presence of large logarithms in the series. Using the universal infrared behaviour of the QCD we resum these large logarithms up to next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic (NNLL) accuracy. We observe a significant reduction in theoretical uncertainties due to the unphysical scales at NNLL level compared to the previous order. We present the $p_T$ distribution matched to NNLO$_A$+NNLL, valid for the whole $p_T$ region and provide a detailed phenomenological study in the context of both 14 TeV and 13 TeV LHC using different choices of masses, scales and parton distribution functions which will be useful for the search of such particle at the LHC in near future.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

India's Socially Regulated Economy

By far the larger part of the contemporary Indian economy - judged by measures as disparate as GDP and livelihoods - is not directly regulated by the state. It is regulated through social institutions. Social institutions express forms of power not confined to the economy. Macro-economic policy is implemented through their filters. In this paper some propositions derived from a large primary literature concerning the roles of gender, religious plurality, caste, space, class and the state are introduced. Liberalisation is argued to increase the tension between forces dissolving social forms of regulation and those intensifying them.

Indian Islamic Architecture

The British scholar John Burton-Page contributed numerous formative articles on Indian Islamic architecture for the Encyclopaedia of Islam over a period of 25 years. Assembled here for the first time, these offer an insightful overview of the subject, ranging from the earliest mosques and tombs erected by the Delhi sultans in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, to the great monuments of the Mughal emperors dating from the 16th and 17th centuries. The articles cover the principal forms of Indian Islamic architecture -- mosques, tombs, minarets, forts, gateways and water structures -- as well as the most important sites and their monuments. Unsurpassed for their compression of information, these succinct articles serve as the best possible introduction to the subject, indispensible for both students and travellers. The articles are supplemented by a portfolio of photographs especially selected for the volume, as well as a glossary and up to date bibliography

Identification-method research for open-source software ecosystems

In recent years, open-source software (OSS) development has grown, with many developers around the world working on different OSS projects. A variety of open-source software ecosystems have emerged, for instance, GitHub, StackOverflow, and SourceForge. One of the most typical social-programming and code-hosting sites, GitHub, has amassed numerous open-source-software projects and developers in the same virtual collaboration platform. Since GitHub itself is a large open-source community, it hosts a collection of software projects that are developed together and coevolve. The great challenge here is how to identify the relationship between these projects, i.e., project relevance. Software-ecosystem identification is the basis of other studies in the ecosystem. Therefore, how to extract useful information in GitHub and identify software ecosystems is particularly important, and it is also a research area in symmetry. In this paper, a Topic-based Project Knowledge Metrics Framework (TPKMF) is proposed. By collecting the multisource dataset of an open-source ecosystem, project-relevance analysis of the open-source software is carried out on the basis of software-ecosystem identification. Then, we used our Spectral Clustering algorithm based on Core Project (CP-SC) to identify software-ecosystem projects and further identify software ecosystems. We verified that most software ecosystems usually contain a core software project, and most other projects are associated with it. Furthermore, we analyzed the characteristics of the ecosystem, and we also found that interactive information has greater impact on project relevance. Finally, we summarize the Topic-based Project Knowledge Metrics Framework

Recognizing Hindu orientalism

This essay proposes Hindu Orientalism as a central category of analysis across disciplines. It begins by demonstrating how the claim to decolonize India is in fact (re/neo)colonial in many ways as it recasts Western Orientalism in the catalogue of Hindu Orientalism to shape India as well as the world. To this end, it critically engages with Hallaq’s (2018) Restating Orientalism. The first part of the essay identifies three important theses in Hallaq’s text. In part two, it examines the third thesis to mark its comparative contraction, namely, the non-treatment of Sheldon Pollock’s contention about an indigenous form of Orientalism in the premodern Sanskrit culture. Contra Hallaq, the essay, then, proceeds to propose what it calls Hindu Orientalism–a practice analogous to Hallaq’s description of Israeli Orientalism. It takes the cases of Dalits, tribes and Muslims to illustrate the working of Hindu Orientalism. An important aim of the essay is to stress that contemporary Indian religious-cultural politics is predicated on a deep, long knowledge-power configuration the significance of which is not recognized yet. It concludes by highlighting the role of anthropology in de-colonizing knowledge–a concern important to Hallaq as well as to Said both of whom, however, often viewed anthropology unfavourably

Christian identity, Hindu nationalism and religious communal violence in India with special reference to Kandhamal, Odisha (1985–2010).

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.This thesis seeks to understand why Indian Christian identity became a problem in the secular Republic of India. Western Christianity arrived in India in the very beginning of the sixteenth century. The Hindu fundamentalists began to oppose Christianity vehemently from the beginning of the twentieth century, by establishing various Hindu organisations based on an ideology of Hindutva. After India’s independence in 1947, religious communal violence was on rising, and it divided the people in the name of religion which had a great impact on Indian politics. The communal riots in Kandhamal had a long history. The riots during the years 2007 and 2008 claimed more than 100 lives and displaced 56,000 Christians. It was one of the results of the communal divide on religious grounds in the country. In order to ascertain the factors that caused violence and the depth of the issue, the study engages four theories. There are two dominant ethnic groups living in Kandhamal. The tribal Konds are the aboriginals, and the Dalit Panas are those who migrated to the hills centuries ago and settled among the Konds. The Panas adopted the Konds’ culture, language and customs. The problem began soon after the Europeans entered the Kandhamal hills. In the name of civilisation, the Europeans imposed their values on the inhabitants which forced them to shun their traditional and customary practices. The Konds had opposed the Europeans, while the Panas accepted them and embraced Christianity. Meanwhile, the emergence of Hindu national political party with the ideology of Hindutva changed the political scenario of Indian politics from the 1990s. The Sangh Parivar’s political strategy of using religious sentiments to polarise the majority Hindus led to violence in many parts of the country. Swami Lakshmanananda, a Hindu missionary, became influential with the help of the Sangh Parivar’s political power. He worked for 40 years to convert the tribal Konds into Hindus and turned them against the Christian Panas by projecting all petty local issues as communal concerns. The Kandhamal violence was one of the well-planned attacks against Christians to gain a political mileage by the Sangh Parivar