The Mertiyo Rathors of Merto, Rajasthan

The Meṛtīyo Rāṭhoṛs of Meṛto, Rājasthān is a treasure for scholars of Rajpūt history. Richard D. Saran and Norman P. Ziegler, whose contributions to Rajpūt studies are well known to specialists in the field, have given us a work of deep and exacting scholarship. It is the culmination of decades devoted to the study of Middle Marwari chronicles from Rājasthān. The sources translated here provide access to the fortunes of a branch of the Jodhpur royal family, and in doing so they illuminate the larger world of Rajpūts in the middle period. The Meṛtīyo Rāṭhoṛs are significant for several reasons. Their story traces the emergence of a Rajpūt brotherhood into local prominence and follows the establishment of their kingdom on the eastern edge of Mārvāṛ as a defined territorial unit. The evolution of the Meṛtīyos as a brotherhood passed through several clearly defined stages, including a relationship with the house of Jodhpur that ranged from mutual support among brothers to hostility and clear separation. A study of the Meṛtīyos in this context provides a unique view of the formation of a strong and indpenedent Rajpūt cadet line, of the establishment and defense of a local territory, and of the internal relations among Rajpūt brotherhoods regarding issues of precedence, honor, patronage, and service. The translations are accompanied by an extensive explanatory apparatus taking various forms, which includes a valuable essay on Rajput social organization, complete genealogies, and biographies of all the major personages of the chronicles

Juristic Techniques in the Supreme Court of India (1950-1971) in Some Selected Areas of Public and Personal Law.

This thesis is about the decision-making habits of the Indian Judge and in particular the judges who served in the Supreme Court of India from 1950 to 1971. The approach adopted has been to consider the predicament of the lawyer and the judge in India in the last two decades, sketch the background of the Indian Supreme Court judges (Chapter I) and briefly survey the manner in which Indian judges have interpreted and adapted the juristic techniques inherited from the British to suit Indian needs (Chapter II). The question posed in these earlier chapters is : "Do Indian judges - the Supreme Court being used as a model - deciding complicated issues of law and fact, rely solely on their western training or do they also receive theoretical inspiration, instinctive or otherwise, from indigenous sources ?" The technique followed has been not to try to analyse each one of the five thousand odd reported cases decided by the Supreme Court since 1950, but to select certain branches of Public and Personal law, attempt to show the techniques used as well as the sources relied on by the judges and contrast their actual performance against the options and possibilities open to the Court. The areas concentrated on are : the constitutional rights to property (Chapter III); preventive detention and public order (Chapter IV); the Hindu joint family (Chapter V); the pious obligation of a Hindu son to pay his father's debts, the legal incidences attendant to the adoption of a Hindu son, and the property rights of Hindu Women (Chapter VI); "Obscenity", Contempt of Court, Official Secrecy, cow slaughter and religious rights and certain aspects of labour law (Chapter VII). The last Chapter attempts to answer the problem posed at the beginning of the thesis

The Mitaksara Birthright: A Comparative Study in the Light of Anticipated Legislation in India.

This thesis is primarily about the relevancy of the Mitaksara birthright, the pivot of the juridical Hindu joint family, in the context of codification of a uniform Civil Code or Code of Family Law in India. It also represents an enquiry into the origination of the concept and a study of it in its historical and comparative perspective. The comparative framework of the thesis shows that a Hindu legal institution, which governs about one-sixth of the human race, may stand comparison with the institutions of any system with which it is likely to be compared. In compliance with the progress of social science, the study of law is heading towards an Interdisciplinary approach, and in the present study attention is also focussed on the operation and veritable social role of the juridical concept of joint family. Contemporary attempts at creating a uniform world law have come into the foreground, prompted basically by socio-economic changes throughout the world. In the context of this global unification movement, the present study indicates that any viable attempt to reform, modernise and unify the personal laws (e.g. Hindu law) In India deserves a comparative awareness of other legal systems of the world, past and present. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.)

History, practice, identity: an institutional ethnography of elephant handlers in Chitwan, Nepal

This thesis comprises an ethnographic documentation of the Nepali elephant stable or hattisar, an institution that has not previously been subject to anthropological scrutiny. In Nepal, as in other countries in South and Southeast Asia, elephants have been kept in captivity and deployed in various work duties under state sponsorship for millennia. These practices have produced a body of expert knowledge that has been transmitted both from master to apprentice, as well as through codified treatises on captive elephant management. In recent decades this set of traditional practices and its accompanying expert knowledge has had to adapt to the circumstances of a modernising world. As previous uses have fallen into abeyance, new uses have emerged, but which still rely on the same set of skilled practices. This thesis then is concerned with tracing the way in which the Nepali hattisar, specifically those of the Chitwan National Park, has changed from being a royal institution maintained primarily for the purpose of facilitating hunting expeditions, to one maintained to meet the new imperatives of tourism, conservation and natural resource management. Through a mixture of archival research and participant observation, involving my own apprenticeship as an elephant handler, I trace the relationships between history, practice and identity, arguing that the hattisar as a state institution is becoming increasingly subject to regulatory control, that enskilment as a handler is dependent upon participation in a community of practice, and that practice within the enclaved domain of the hattisar engenders a distinctive professional identity. More generally, by exploring the enc1aved world of the hattisar, the social position of handlers, their internal hierarchy, the intimate relation between man and elephant, and the process of skills acquisition, this thesis demonstrates and explains the formation of a specific professional sub-culture or occupational community, whose emergent sociality focussed on animal handling is uniquely described here