L’épopée médiévale comme référence dans les mouvements militants de l’Inde du Nord : la mobilisation de la geste d’Alha-Udal

Jusqu’à présent, l’épopée indienne d’Alha-Udal a été abordée sous l’angle de la performance et de la circulation des répertoires. Or lorsqu’on s’interroge sur le patronage dont cette épopée a bénéficié, l’identité de ses interprètes et les circonstances de sa récitation, on remarque qu’entre la période médiévale dont ce texte émane et nos jours, l’usage qu’il en est fait a considérablement évolué. Loin de conforter les valeurs de la société rajput qui l’a produite, elle garde ses distances avec le modèle féodal de prestige, pour constamment éprouver la validité du culte de l’honneur guerrier. À travers l’exemple de quatre épisodes significatifs, cet article tente de mesurer la nature du « travail épique » qui permet de faire de cette épopée médiévale une référence mobilisée à chacune des étapes charnières de l’histoire du Bihar.Until now, the Indian epic of Alha-Udal was analyzed through its performance dimension and in relation to the question of the circulation of texts. But when one considers the patronage this epic has benefited from, the identity of its singers and the circumstances of its interpretation, one realizes that the use made of this text has often changed. Instead of legitimating the values of the Rajput society which produced it, the epic remains at a distance from the feudal mode of prestige, and prefers to constantly test the validity of the Rajput code of chivalry. This article endeavours to evaluate the nature of the “epic works” which enables us to understand how this medieval epic became a text of reference mobilized through each transition-period in the history of Bihar

Anne Castaing, Lise Guilhamon & Laetitia Zecchini (eds.), La modernité littéraire indienne : Perspectives postcoloniales

On the occasion of the launching of the French translation of Homi Bhabha’s essay, The Location of Culture (1994) (Les lieux de la culture), the journalist Jean Birnbaum sharply criticized postcolonial studies in France for their late and ‘muddled’ start and the more narrow approach compared to the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ school (Le Monde, 23 March 2007). Birnbaum’s criticism appears doubly unfounded: not only he fails to recognize the originality of French studies in this field of scholarship, he comp..

Constrained Pseudorandom Functions for Inner-Product Predicates from Weaker Assumptions

In this paper, we build a framework for constructing Constrained Pseudorandom Functions (CPRFs) with inner-product constraint predicates, using ideas from subtractive secret sharing and related-key-attack security. Our framework can be instantiated using a random oracle or any suitable Related-Key-Attack (RKA) secure pseudorandom function. We provide three instantiations of our framework: 1. an adaptively-secure construction in the random oracle model; 2. a selectively-secure construction under the DDH assumption; and 3. a selectively-secure construction under the assumption that one-way functions exist. All three instantiations are constraint-hiding and support inner-product predicates, leading to the first constructions of such expressive CPRFs under each corresponding assumption. Moreover, while the OWF-based construction is primarily of theoretical interest, the random oracle and DDH-based constructions are concretely efficient, which we show via an implementation

Indian Folk Music and ‘Tropical Body Language’: The Case of Mauritian Chutney

In Mauritius, the meeting between Indian worlds and Creole worlds, through the migration of the indentured labour which followed the abolition of slavery in 1834, gave birth to a style of music called ‘chutney’. As a result of the African influence on an Indian folk genre, chutney music embodies the transformation of a music for listening into a music for dancing. In this article, the innovations brought into the choreographical dimension of the chutney groups will be taken as a key to understanding the adaptation of Indian rural migrants to a new ‘Indian-oceanic’ way of life through the experience of diaspora