Text, Orality, and Performance in Newar Devotional Music

Dāphā bhajan is a style of devotional song performance practised by Newar men in the towns of the Kathmandu Valley. Although it is now primarily the farming community who maintain it, it originated in the court culture of the Newar kings in the 17th and 18th centuries, and reflects the interests of aristocratic society at that time in devotional literature and music theory. Texts of dāphā songs include compositions attributed to the kings themselves, in old Newari and Maithili, and poetry by Indian authors including Vidyāpati, Nāmdev, Kabīr, Sūrdās and Jayadeva. Transmission to the farming community, among whom literacy and knowledge of the languages concerned were limited, has shifted the balance of attention away from the texts themselves towards the processes of musical performance. As in some other South Asian singing traditions, the generation of intensity through music overwhelms the text, which loses its centrality, its form and even its meaning. The manuscript songbook from which a group sings can no longer be regarded as the vehicle of a written tradition: it is but one element in an oral performance tradition

Proceedings of the International Conference on Genetic Improvement of Sorghum and Pearl Millet

In 1971, an international symposium, Sorghum in the Seventies , organized by the All India Coordinated Sorghum Improvement Project with support from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the Rockefeller Foundation was held in Hyderabad, India. The symposium reviewed the current knowledge base of the scientific, production and nutritional aspects of sorghum as a crop and as a human food. In 1981, ICRISAT, INTSORMIL, and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) sponsored Sorghum in the Eighties , an international symposium at ICRISAT Center in India, to review the achievements accomplished in sorghum research during the preceding 10 years. They reviewed sorghum\u27s role as an important cereal food, feed, construction material, and fuel in the developed and developing countries. In 1994, after discussion among INTSORMIL and ICRISAT scientists, it was recognized that an international meeting on the genetic improvement of grain sorghum and pearl millet was needed and would be strongly supported by the international sorghum and millet research community. Those discussions led to the September 1996 International Conference on Genetic Improvement of Sorghum and Pearl Millet. Grain sorghum and pearl millet are major food grains in the semiarid tropics of Africa, India, and South America. Sorghum ranks fifth among the world\u27s cereals, following wheat, maize, rice, and barley. F AO includes all millets together in its production estimates. Current estimates indicate that annual world sorghum production is approximately 61 million metric tons and world millet production is approximately 20 million metric tons. The inaugural speaker of this 1996 conference, Dr. Leland House, indicated global population is projected to increase to nine billion people by the year 2030 and is projected to increase most rapidly in the developing world. This will create a growing demand for food, as well as potential new market opportunities for food products developed from these basic grains

Jammu and Kashmir: A Select and Annotated Bibliography of Manuscripts, Books and Articles Together With a Survey of Its History, Languages and Literature From Rajatarangini to 1977/78.

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Phytochemical Omics in Medicinal Plants

Medicinal plants are used to treat diseases and provide health benefits, and their applications are increasing around the world. A huge array of phytochemicals have been identified from medicinal plants, belonging to carotenoids, flavonoids, lignans, and phenolic acids, and so on, with a wide range of biological activities. In order to explore our knowledge of phytochemicals with the assistance of modern molecular tools and high-throughput technologies, this book collects recent innovative original research and review articles on subtopics of mechanistic insights into bioactivities, treatment of diseases, profiling, extraction and identification, and biotechnology

Rāmṭek and its landscape: An archaeological approach to the study of the Eastern Vākāṭaka kingdom in central India.

This thesis investigates the development of the landscape surrounding the Eastern Vākāṭaka ritual centre of Rāmṭek in central India. The research aims to contextualise the site of Rāmṭek through the use of landscape archaeology, to explore its relationship to rural settlement and thus go beyond the existing preoccupation with the isolated study of its monumental remains. The results of the survey are used to construct a hypothetical case study for the development of the Early Historic landscape in this region. This narrative of landscape development is connected to the region’s socio-economic development under the Vākāṭakas, which will be related to the wider context of Early Historic to Early Medieval change in India. The survey develops existing methodologies to suit the environment encountered on fieldwork and subsequently a preliminary approach to data analysis is presented. Through landscape survey and ceramic seriation, broad phases of development can be determined. Based on a significant increase in material evidence from the Early Historic period, it is argued that this phase witnessed changes in religious, political and socio-economic spheres. Whilst these developments are only securely related to the over-arching Early Historic period, there is evidence to suggest that the Vākāṭakas influenced development following their establishment of the ritual site and occupation of the area as a dynastic centre. The survey results demonstrate a prosperous local economy as opposed to deurbanisation and economic decline, which is popularly associated with the period of Vākāṭaka rule. The Eastern Vākāṭaka data is then referred to the wider context of the nature of Early Historic to Early Medieval urbanism in the Indian subcontinent. It is argued that ‘urbanism’ may have been expressed differently in this period resulting in low-density networks of productive settlements or conurbations

The Hindi public sphere, 1920-1940.

The 1920s and 1930s were decades of momentous changes and expansion in the Hindi literary sphere In this period Hindi became an established public language in print, education and politics and struggled successfully to become the future national language of India. A market for Hindi literature was first created, journals provided venues for debate and literary expression as well as professional employment, genres and styles were explored in many new directions, and new voices emerged, importantly those of women writers. The nationalist movement, too, entered a new phase which emphasized popular publics and vernacular institutions. Through the concept of 'public sphere' as expounded by Jurgen Habermas and other political scientists, this thesis analyzes those changes at the levels of institutions, actors, discourses and, to a limited extent, of audiences in their proper context and in relation to each other. Chapter 2 explores changes in the literary sphere, both its expansion chiefly through the medium of journals, and its institutionalization through a linguistic and literary agenda in the education system. Chapter 3 analyzes historical debates and narratives in order to trace the consolidation and diffusion of a nationalist historical consciousness. Chapter 4 examines the development of women's journals and the space they provided for a critique of discrimination against women and their public access, and for the exploration of women's roles and emotionality. Chapter 5 focuses on the making of Hindi's claim to be the 'national language', the strategies employed and the exclusions operated in the process of its political affirmation. Chapter 6 explores the relationship between the literary and the political spheres focusing on the role of Hindi intellectuals and political leaders. The institutional authority gained in one sphere underwrote that gained in the other, it shall be argued, and gave credence to an official nationalism that does not reflect the complexity and variety of cultural imagination and literary practices in that period