Gurmukhi printing types: an historical analysis of British design, development, and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This thesis focuses on the role of British entities involved in the founding and development of printing in the Gurmukhi script, from the inception of printing in this writing system with movable type in 1800, until the beginnings of the digital era in the twentieth century. It traces the material production of Gurmukhi printing types under the changing technologies during this time frame and considers the impacts of various technological limitations on the appearance of the script when printed. Furthermore, it identifies the intent and objectives of those producing founts in a script foreign to them, and considers their approaches for overcoming various cultural, social, and economic obstacles, to determine how successful they were in realising their aims for printing in this writing system. Finally, it presents a comparative analysis of the founts developed during this period to highlight key typographic developments in the printing of Gurmukhi by the individuals and companies under consideration, and determines significant design decisions that influenced and informed subsequent developments. The research draws on largely unexplored primary resources housed in various archives across Britain, that provide a window into the practises and networks for the British type founders under consideration, shedding light on the establishment, organisation, and development of these actors’ operations, the modus operandi, and the networks that enabled and sustained it. This work aims to document a substantial gap in the history of Gurmukhi typographic development and printing, and serve as a contribution to the interrelated fields of typography, printing history, and culture alike

Zone Segmentation and Thinning based Algorithm for Segmentation of Devnagari Text

Character segmentation of handwritten documents is an challenging research topic due to its diverse application environment.OCR can be used for automated processing and handling of forms, old corrupted reports, bank cheques, postal codes and structures. Now Segmentation of a word into characters is one of the major challenge in optical character recognition. This is even more challenging when we segment characters in an offline handwritten document and the next hurdle is presence of broken ,touching and overlapped characters in devnagari script. So, in this paper we have introduced an algorithm that will segment both broken as well as touching characters in devnagari script. Now to segment these characters the algorithm uses both zone segmentation and thinning based techniques. We have used 85 words each for isolated, broken, touching and both broken as well as touching characters individually. Results achieved while segmentation of broken as well as touching are 96.2 % on an average

Language acquisition

This project investigates acquisition of a new language by example. Syntax induction has been studied widely and the more complex syntax associated with Natural Language is difficult to induce without restrictions. Chomsky conjectured that natural languages are restricted by a Universal Grammar. English could be used as a Universal Grammar and Punjabi derived from it in a similar way as the acquisition of a first language. However, if English has already been acquired then Punjabi would be induced from English as a second language. [Continues.

Sikh Patronage of Hindustani Music and Śabad Kīrtan in Colonial Punjab, 1857-1947

Despite cohabiting overlapping social spheres, north India’s music traditions are too often studied in isolation from one another, negating their inherent interrelatedness. Adopting a more inclusive approach with regard to two major traditions of north India, in this study I explore how both Hindustani music and śabad kīrtan, the sacred music of the Sikhs, enjoyed patronage under the prolific network of Sikh patrons that comprised an important aspect of colonial Punjab’s sociocultural landscape. The distinct influence of aspects of Punjabi society and culture, the unique circumstances surrounding the rise of Sikh patronage, combined with the prominent place of rāg music in Sikh religious tradition, gave rise to an unparalleled environment of music patronage that challenges many modern assumptions about the nature of Hindustani music and its social context during the colonial period. Attending to the Sikh courtly sphere, my study highlights how the developments of Hindustani music in colonial Punjab relate to the broader geopolitics surrounding the 1857 rebellion, harbouring critical insights in relation to the emergence of modern Punjabiyat. Exploring the circulation of Gurmukhi manuscripts on musicology in the Sikh religious sphere up until the late nineteenth century, I highlight a localised tradition of Hindustani musicology, its multivalent character, and links to local music practice. In response to the radical political and discursive shifts wrought by colonialism, I show how in the early twentieth century, through the novel medium of print, the musicological literary output of the Sikhs was co-opted under the new label of gurmat saṅgīt, functioning as a form of symbolic capital in process of Sikh identity formation. Finally, drawing on ethnographic as well as archival research on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, I highlight the multidimensional role of the rabābīs within Sikh religious tradition historically, thus challenging modern musicology-centric understandings of the śabad kīrtan tradition in the process. Attempting to transcend postcolonial discourse and boundaries, this thesis offers a lens through which we might better understand the significant intersection between music traditions in a region like Punjab whilst also offering an alternative perspective on prevailing conceptions of Punjabiyat

Vernacularization analysis towards Cakepan Suci Al-Qur’an Salinan Ring Basa Bali

The development of interpretation in Indonesia generally used the elements of the locality to make the community easier in understanding messages of Quran. there are many aspects of life like social structure, law, and government systems that are formed by the influence of Islam, as well as several Arabic vocabularies introduced into local languages. The commentator interpreted the Qur'an using the common language is known as localization or vernacularization. Many languages are used in the interpretation of Quran. For example, Malay, Javanese, and Sundanese. Al-Qur’an with the Balinese translation seems rare to be done than other local languages. Cakepan Suci Al-Qur'an Salinan Ring Basa Bali by H. Ahmad Iwan Darmawan (I Wayan Rupa Mengwi) is a translation of the Qur'an in Balinese. He is the member of Indonesian Ahmadiyya Community. Some dictions used local languages that are different from translations in general, like translating the word "Allah" with "Ida Hiyang Widi", the word "believers" alladzina amanu which means "anake sane matutang" and many more. This research is intended to reveal the reason why the author vernacularize some terms of the Qur’an in Cakepan Suci Al-Qur’an Salinan Ring Basa Bali and explain how does the Vernacularization within it. This research is Qualitative research by doing library research. So that in the discussion described and analyzed the vernacularization contained in the translation of the Qur'an that uses local languages, Cakepan Suci Al-Qur’an Salinan Ring Basa Bali. Data collection technique uses the documentation and interview to the related informants. The method used in this research is descriptive analysis, namely by collecting and selecting data from all sources, then delivering the result of this reseacrh by describing every kind things relates with the Cakepan Suci Al-Qur’an Salinan Ring Basa Bali. The result showed that (1) This book was written to commemorate one century of Ahmadiyyah in 1989, which aimed to introduce Islamic teachings to the Balinese as the majority of Hinduism. The use of translation in the verses used terminology that is easily understood by the Balinese people so they will not feel strange by rejecting the teachings of Islam. (2) Vernacularization theory contained in the book Cakepan Suci Al-Qur'an Salinan Ring Basa Bali by using two approaches: retention from loanword (divided into two, conscious and unconscious), and terminologization. This aims Balinese people, who are still unfamiliar, able to understand the meaning of Qur’an. (3) This translation has a great influence on the Balinese. It could be said as the first Balinese translation of the Qur'an by a native Balinese, I Wayan Rupa Mengwi

Learning to Read Bushman: Automatic Handwriting Recognition for Bushman Languages

The Bleek and Lloyd Collection contains notebooks that document the tradition, language and culture of the Bushman people who lived in South Africa in the late 19th century. Transcriptions of these notebooks would allow for the provision of services such as text-based search and text-to-speech. However, these notebooks are currently only available in the form of digital scans and the manual creation of transcriptions is a costly and time-consuming process. Thus, automatic methods could serve as an alternative approach to creating transcriptions of the text in the notebooks. In order to evaluate the use of automatic methods, a corpus of Bushman texts and their associated transcriptions was created. The creation of this corpus involved: the development of a custom method for encoding the Bushman script, which contains complex diacritics; the creation of a tool for creating and transcribing the texts in the notebooks; and the running of a series of workshops in which the tool was used to create the corpus. The corpus was used to evaluate the use of various techniques for automatically transcribing the texts in the corpus in order to determine which approaches were best suited to the complex Bushman script. These techniques included the use of Support Vector Machines, Artificial Neural Networks and Hidden Markov Models as machine learning algorithms, which were coupled with different descriptive features. The effect of the texts used for training the machine learning algorithms was also investigated as well as the use of a statistical language model. It was found that, for Bushman word recognition, the use of a Support Vector Machine with Histograms of Oriented Gradient features resulted in the best performance and, for Bushman text line recognition, Marti & Bunke features resulted in the best performance when used with Hidden Markov Models. The automatic transcription of the Bushman texts proved to be difficult and the performance of the different recognition systems was largely affected by the complexities of the Bushman script. It was also found that, besides having an influence on determining which techniques may be the most appropriate for automatic handwriting recognition, the texts used in a automatic handwriting recognition system also play a large role in determining whether or not automatic recognition should be attempted at all

The Broken Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal India

This study is concerned with the Indian "romance" (qissah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and "occult" sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as "romances," via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the "fantastic" romance and "factual" historiography (tarikh), to romances' function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madh), and to romances' restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (akhlaq)