The Administration of Guntur District With Special Reference to Local Influences on Revenue Policy: 1837-1848.

Between 1837 and 1845, a silent combination of local forces benefited at the expense of the State. For lack of accurate information from the villages and lack of support from Madras, British officers lost control of their subordinates and their authority was weakened. Indian district officers, notably Maratha Brahmans under the leadership of the Sheristadar, supplanted the Zamindars. Acting in the name of Government, these officers became free from supervision and acquired the perquisites and dignities of power. The aura of divinity, the borrowed glow of the huzur, so clung to them that they could walk like giants. A daughter's marriage or the erection of a shrine by one of these officers would bring special contributions from the villages. But the villages often gained the better part of bargains with district officers. As village money spread a corrupting influence into ever higher levels of the hierarchy, the administration became caught in the webs of village influence. As in the story of Gulliver, the strength of the district was pegged to the earth by countless tiny threads, a captive of Lilliputian villages. Executive control over Guntur would not have faltered nor would policies have suffered paralysis had not local influences utilized remarkable sources of strength and had not central authority been weak and ineffectual. In short, local influences undermined central authority and thwarted State policy

Indian Christian Historiography from Below, from Above, and in Between.

The article reviews the books India and the Indianness of Christianity: Essays on Understanding--Historical, Theological, and Bibliographical--in Honor of Eric Frykenberg, edited by Richard Fox Young, part of the Studies in the History of Christian Missions series, and A Social History of Christianity: North-west India Since 1800, by John C.B. Webster

Creating a More Equitable Introductory Physics Classroom Through Invitational Phrasing in Question Solicitation

Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student learning. To encourage students to ask questions, many instructors initiate open question periods in their lectures with verbal solicitations (i.e., "Questions?"). Although several university centers for teaching and learning, such as at UC Berkeley, and instructor reflections suggest that the scripts of question solicitations impact the frequency of questions returned by students, no literature exists to support this claim. This quasi-experimental scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study conducted with the Students-as-Partners model, observes the effect of a new solicitation script integrated into an introductory physics lectures to improve question participation from students. While the new solicitation script did not change the total number of questions asked by students in comparison to previous scripts, the number of questions asked by people who likely have gender identities traditionally underrepresented in physics (i.e. all but cis-men) increased significantly

Hindu-Christian Conflict in India: Globalization, Conversion, and the Coterminal Castes and Tribes

While Hindu-Muslim violence in India has received a great deal of scholarly attention, Hindu-Christian violence has not. This article seeks to contribute to the analysis of Hindu-Christian violence, and to elucidate the curious alliance, in that violence, of largely upper-caste, anti-minority Hindu nationalists with lower-status groups, by analyzing both with reference to the varied processes of globalization. The article begins with a short review of the history of anti-Christian rhetoric in India, and then discusses and critiques a number of inadequately unicausal explanations of communal violence before arguing, with reference to the work of Mark Taylor, that only theories linking local and even individual social behaviors to larger, global processes like globalization can adequately honor the truly “webby” nature of the social world

Christians and missionaries in India. : Cross-cultural communication since 1500.

Londonxii, 419 p.; 24 cm

Remarks on the ‘Celtic Wild-Man Legend’

Frykenberg Brian R. Remarks on the ‘Celtic Wild-Man Legend’. In: Etudes Celtiques, vol. 29, 1992. Actes du IXe congrès international d'études celtiques. Paris, 7-12 juillet 1991. Deuxième partie : Linguistique, littératures. p. 458