समुद्री जीवन के मौसम
Read “Religion and Urbanity Blog” in Hindi! A series of blogposts is available in Hindi. This post is a Hindi translation by Ahmad Ali of the blog post published by Sara Keller on “The Seasons of Maritime Life”.
Articles on contemporary and historical India as well as pre-modern Swat.
Read “Religion and Urbanity Blog” in Hindi! A series of blogposts is available in Hindi. This post is a Hindi translation by Ahmad Ali of the blog post published by Sara Keller on “The Seasons of Maritime Life”.
After the workshop organised in 2021 at the Augustinerkloster in Erfurt, Sara Keller edited a volume entitled Accessing Water in the South Asian City. The book published by Primus and released this August contains an introduction by Sara Keller and 9 chapters in a broad range of disciplines by Julia A.B. Hegewald, Julia Shaw, Jutta Jain-Neubauer, Nicolas Morelle, Padma Sunder Joshi, Prakhar Vidyarthi, Akil Amiraly, Heather O’Leary and Laura Verdelli…
जैसा कि इस ब्लॉग के पाठक पहले से जानते हैं, मैं अक्सर कालीकट आती रहती हूं। शहर का आधिकारिक नाम “कोष़िकोड” है (मलयालम में: കോഴിക്കോട്), लेकिन इस शब्द का यूरोप वालों के लिए उच्चारण करना कठिन है, इसलिए हम इसे कालीकट ही कहेंगे। कहा जाता है कि अरब व्यापारियों ने इसे यह नाम (क़ालिक़ूट) दिया था।
Our former fellow Supriya Chaudhuri has just published a new book entitled “Envisioning the Indian City: Spaces of Encounter in Goa, Calcutta, Pondicherry and Chandigarh”. The volume was published with Jadavpur University Press…
This interview marks the beginning of a series in which Ahmad Ali will be engaging with scholars working on India at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. He is a student of Religionswissenschaft at the University of Erfurt, currently working on the project “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations”.
You can now read a conference report on the KFG’s last annual conference on “Religion, Urbanity and Trade. Processes of Mercantilisation in Urban Spaces”, written by Adina Eckart. The conference took place in Ettersburg from 13 to 15 November 2024 and was organized and convened by Susanne Rau and Heinrich Lang.
Port towns host unique forms of urban life, and they are often seen as particularly vibrant and dynamic cities. Maritime metropolises on all continents, such as Shanghai, New York, Bombay, Hamburg or Marseille, have gained a reputation of being exceptionally busy, diverse and connected places. This is also true of maritime cities of the past, and archaeology and history tell us that historical port towns were already busy, diverse and connected places…
Critical studies of death (thanatology) have illuminated how human societies organize spaces of burial according to gender, race, class, sexual preference, and religion. Informed by these works “Necrogeographies of the Marginal Dead” introduces how studies of death, especially of persons within groups excluded from systems of power in the living world, illuminate how the structures of power exceed life extending into the afterlives of the dead…
Over the past months, members of the “Religion and Urbanity” group have published articles in the online history magazine “Epoch”. The articles as well as an introduction by Susanne Rau and Klara-Maeve O’Reilly can now be accessed via a dedicated page…
अप्रैल 2019 में, जब मैंने हमारे साझेदार विश्वविद्यालय, कन्नूर में एक भाषण देने के निमंत्रण को स्वीकार किया, तो मैंने अपने प्रवास को हमारे शोध परियोजना “धर्म और शहरीकरण: परस्पर संरचनाएं” पर प्रारंभिक ऑन-साइट अनुसंधान के साथ जोड़ा। मुझे पूर्वकालिक आभास था कि मैं पश्चिम भारतीय तटीय शहरों में क्या जांच करना चाहती हूं। किसी भी ऐतिहासिक अनुसंधान प्रश्न की तरह, मैं पहले यह जांचना चाहती थी कि क्या आवश्यक स्रोत मेरे प्रश्नों का उत्तर देने के लिए उपलब्ध हैं – खासकर जब यह एक पूरी तरह से नया क्षेत्र है जिसकी मैं वर्तमान में खोज कर रही हूँ। इसलिए मैंने अपने प्रवास का उपयोग केरल में संग्रहालयों, पुस्तकालयों और अभिलेखागारों का दौरा करने और मौजूदा वस्तुओं और ग्रंथों का अवलोकन प्राप्त करने के लिए किया। मेरे दौरों में से एक, मुझे कन्नूर से कालीकट (या, जैसा कि इसे राष्ट्रीय भाषा में कहा जाता है: कोड़िकोड) ले गए। चूंकि मैं तीन घंटे की बस यात्रा (क़ीमत लगभग 90 सेंट) के रोमांच को दोहराना नहीं चाहती थी, इसलिए मैंने 12 अप्रैल 2019 के लिए वातानुकूलित ट्रेन के डिब्बे में टिकट खरीदा (लगभग 7 यूरो में और केवल दो घंटे की सवारी)।
For a long time now, I’ve wanted to walk the streets of Calicut again. During my last visits (in March 2023 and January 2024), I didn’t really get around to it because I was in Feroke (on the southern bank of the Chaliyar river) for most of the time. Only once did I allow myself to drive into the city for a few hours to stock up on spices. I usually take an auto rickshaw (or tuk tuk), an incredulous choice for my fellow Indians. Couldn’t I, the European, afford a proper taxi?…
When visiting Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in the Panjabi city of Amritsar in India, it is virtually impossible to not notice bullet marks and other signs of destruction preserved in the gateways, walls and columns around the central sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the holy pool, sarovar.
The new book by Epsita Halder, former fellow of the ‘Religion and Urbanity’ group, is titled ‘Reclaiming Karbala: Nation, Islam and Literature of the Bengali Muslims’. It was published in 2023 and studies the emergence and formation of a viable Muslim identity in Bengal over the late-19th century through the 1940s. Beginning with an explanation of significance of the martyrdom of Hazrat Muhammad’s grandson Husayn in the battle of Karbala (680 CE) for the Muslims, this book explores how this particular historical episode was recurrently reclaimed and reinterpreted by the Bangla-speaking ulama and Muslim literati to define what it meant to be Muslim in colonial Bengal.
Our former fellow Shail Mayaram on the two colours blue: Having lived with indigo for some four decades in India, I delighted in Erfurt’s own blue colour, called woad. Woad is a very distinct blue, as in the napkin that graced my table of my IBZ (the University’s International Guest House) flat, a Christmas gift from my friend, the KFG Fellow, Raminder Kaur.
Hanafi law, one of the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence, which was widely practiced in the Ottoman Empire, was also the imperial legal system of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) in South Asia. Hanafi law governed property rights of Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the rural and the urban spheres of the Mughal Empire. Unfortunately, research on Hanafi law in Mughal India, in its theoretical and practical perspectives, remains virtually inexistant in current historiography. In this blogpost, I sketch the salient features of the relation between law and Mughal urban practices.