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Below is a list of the past winners of the AAS South Asia Council (SAC) Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize for English-language scholarly works on South Asian Studies:
2010: Pravina Shukla, The Grace of the Four Moons: Dress, Adornment and the Art of the Body in Modern India (Indiana University Press, 2008)
2009: Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500–1900 (Permanent Black and the University of Washington Press, 2007)
2008: Sheldon Pollock: The Languages of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2006)
2007: Susan Seizer: Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India (Duke University Press, 2005)
2006: Joseph S. Alter: Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2004).
2005: Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (University of California Press, 2003)
2004: Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar: In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (Duke University Press, 2002)
2003: Arvind Rajagopal: Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
2002: Claude Markovits: The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
2001: George Perkovich: India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (University of California Press, 1999)
2000: Gauri Viswanathan: Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998)
1999: Richard H. Davis: Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997)
1998: Emma Tarlo: Clothing Matters: Dress and Identify in India (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
1997: Shahid Amin: Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (University of California Press/Oxford University Press, 1995)
1996: Bina Agarwal: A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
1995: Richard Eaton: The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier: 1204–1760 (University of California Press, 1993)
1994: Kathryn Hansen: Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India (University of California Press, 1992)
1993: Philip Lutgendorf: Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (University of California Press, 1991)
1992: Margaret Trawick: Anpu
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2010
Pravina Shukla, The Grace of the Four Moons: Dress, Adornment and the Art of the Body in Modern India (Indiana University Press, 2008)
Setting out from the discipline of folklore studies, this rich and highly readable ethnographic exploration of the art of the body among the women of Benares ranges widely through the intricacies of that most everyday activity—getting dressed. Pravina Shukla deftly weaves together the threads of production, merchandising, consumption, assemblage, and personal display that together enable women to dress the way they do. In the modern complex culture of urban Benares, Shukla shows how social divisions of caste, class, ethnicity, regional origin, age, and marital status are all involved in the things artisans make, in the ways salesmen size up their customers, and in the choices of clothing, jewelry, and bangles that women purchase to adorn their bodies. Through sensitive portraits she introduces her readers to her various males who control what is available for purchase: artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and retail salesmen. She equally attends to individual female consumers of their products. All contribute their creativity and aesthetic judgments in what the author portrays as a collaborative enterprise.
As Shukla persuasively demonstrates, the female art of self-adornment does not begin with women getting dressed in the morning. Through her analysis we are able to follow all the paths leading up to this. In the end, though, the process ends with women who retain their agency in the skillful purchase and creative assembly of the elements that will cover their bodies and display their personal identities to others who observe them. In its focused attention to a fundamental activity and in its investigative breadth, Grace of the Four Moons is truly an exemplary study of material culture in a modern South Asian setting.
Selection Committee: Richard H. Davis (Chair); Isabel Clark-Deces; Barbara Ramusack
The selection committee also wishes to award honorable mention status to Kama Maclean for Pilgrimage and Power: The Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765–1954 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2009
Ramya Sreenivasan, The Many Lives of a Rajput Queen: Heroic Pasts in India c. 1500–1900 (Permanent Black and the University of Washington Press, 2007)
This wide-ranging monograph effortlessly traverses regions and genres to study the evolution of a historical memory. The Padmini story of a beautiful queen who is desired by a powerful enemy and who finally immolates herself rather than surrender has been current in South Asian folk and high literary traditions for over five centuries. In the colonial and post-colonial era it has been appropriated by Hindu nationalists as a narrative of purity and virtue. Rather than accept this recent retelling, Sreenivasan analyzes Padmini’s story through its entire narrative trajectory, deploying at once the skills of a historian who combines an understanding of religious thought and social history and those of a literary scholar deeply familiar with gendered tropes in narrative and discourse.
The Padmini story featured largely in Tod’s early colonial history. Sreenivasan goes beneath that colonial discourse to recover previous (and parallel) indigenous narratives, and she goes into the archive to show how James Tod and others actually worked. She tracks how nationalists—both religious and secular—have appropriated the same theme. Sreenivasan is never reductionist. She consistently locates and situates the texts she analyses in the conjunctures in and for which they were produced, whether by North Indian Sufis, Arakanese kings, Jain businessmen and literati, Rajput lords or Bengali bhadralok. She thereby undercuts the recent heroic narratives of the colonial and post-colonial era that have taken the Padmini story out of context in order to sustain the credibility of Hindu fundamentalism and the discourse of Islamic separatism.
Selection Committee: Sumit Guha (Chair); Richard H. Davis; Gloria Raheja.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2008
Sheldon Pollock: The Languages of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (University of California Press, 2006)
Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men formulates a novel relation of culture to power in a global and comparative setting. The locus of inquiry is the first millenium ce, from the literization of Sanskrit, as it moved from an oral/aural to a written literary tradition, to the emergence of regional vernaculars as competitors for power. The study implicates Sanskrit as a complicating factor ignored by many social theorists who have failed to acknowledge that language itself can have a documentable substantive political history.
This move necessarily interrogates literary and social theorists alike, figures as diverse as Habermas, Auerbach, Abu-Laghod, and Benjamin. Pollock proposes that the poetics of Sanskrit is not only the expression of courtly power, but intimate to the constitution of the cosmopolis. In a brave challenge to the assumptions of brahmanical ideology, Pollock demonstrates convincingly that languages other than Sanskrit were central to the dynamics of state formation and statecraft, but Sanskrit’s role assumed a new centrality when it became more public through the literary. Imperial politics did not simply use this language and cosmopolitan culture instrumentally, but constituted itself through it—power as aesthetic practice. The perfected grammar of language became the grammar of rule.
Pollock has invited scholars to complicate their understandings of the politics of this linguistic complexity and to imagine a more dynamic South Asia than the master narratives of Sanskritization and its derivatives have allowed. Pollock has emancipated the study of South Asian cultures for a new generation.
Selection Committee: Tony K. Stewart, Chair; K. Sivaramakrishnan; Sumit Guha.
Honorable Mention: Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Postcolonial Politics of Music in South India, Duke University Press, 2006.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2007
Susan Seizer: Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India (Duke University Press, 2005)
Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is an articulate, passionate, and erudite work with a breathtakingly wide compass. It is written in a style that is candidly introspective and unhesitating in appreciating the protagonists – Special Drama artists. Susan Seizer makes a highly original contribution to social and theatrical history, performance studies, literary criticism (in its analysis of comedy), discourse analysis (stigma), ethnography, and feminism. Her book provides valuable information and insightful commentary on Tamil popular culture, informs the anthropology of the body and sexuality in new ways, and illuminates social stratification in south India from one of the most unique perspectives yet seen in the literature on south Asia.
Susan Seizer’s dramatic opus draws upon ethnographic research conducted in Madurai, a historic south Indian city described by T.K. Shanmugam as the “mother and home to the acting profession,” archival research in collections in Madurai and Chennai, and the textual analysis of more than a hundred night-long performances in Madurai and its rural hinterland. By paying special attention to comedic sequences, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage makes a persuasive case for comedy as a site for the analysis of culture. As the ethnographic analysis of the life of Special Drama artists unfolds in Seizer’s powerful narrative, the reader is gifted a front and backstage view of the creation of tradition and how that tradition appropriates the mechanics of social positioning alongside other more time-honored traditions it encounters and with which it no doubt competes. It is an achievement that will be influential for a generation across a number of disciplines.
Selection Committee: Gail Minault, Chair; K. Sivaramakrishnan; Tony K. Stewart.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2006
Joseph S. Alter: Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2004).
In Yoga in Modern India, Joseph S. Alter situates Yoga in history as a product of human imagination in order to countervail claims to its timelessness. Detailing Yoga’s complex and multilayered transformations from a system of spiritual philosophy to one of fitness and medicine, Alter questions some of the most fundamental assumptions about Yoga and, by extension, questions assumptions about civilization, modernity, and nationalism. Writing largely about the association of Yoga with science, Alter does not want to untangle the intersection of the two so much as to reflect on its implications, and to provide a better and more complex understanding of some aspects of Indian intellectual history, as well as a better understanding of the place of the body in contemporary Indian contexts. Taking on the likes of the RSS, Nietzsche, Mircea Eliade, and A. K. Coomaraswamy himself, Alter has written a book about the modern meanings of yoga in ways that trouble not just Yoga and its place in global modernity. Alter also troubles the “scientific method” and its implications for nationalist sentiment, identity, and discourses of power.
Alter has accomplished something very new and significant with this book, and it will surely inspire others like it. Yoga in Modern India forces readers to question basic assumptions about science, the realm of the empirical, and globalized practices that are marked as “Indian.” In doing so, Alter has established himself as one of our very best writers. This is a crucial book—a much-needed intervention—and very important on many levels to an understanding of our particular moment.
Selection Committee: Martha Ann Selby (Chair), Gail Minault, Thomas Blom Hansen.
Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize 2005
Cecilia Van Hollen, Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India (University of California Press, 2003)
In Birth on the Threshold, Cecilia Van Hollen delineates the dynamics of childbirth and fertility in South India. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, her study describes birthing practices from colonial-period Tamilnadu on into the late twentieth century. Beginning with a historical account of the professionalization of obstetrics in India, Van Hollen then continues with lyrically written ethnographic analyses of the impact of modernity on poor women’s experiences during childbirth. Van Hollen’s research details a “reproductive continuum” – the entire cycle of birth-related practices from puberty rituals, marriage, bangle ceremonies during the later stages of pregnancy, and on into birth, the post-partum period, and post-natal care for mother and child. She writes of birth pain as a positive thing – of pain as a cultural “value” – and explores the reasons why women in Tamilnadu almost always choose oxytocin-class drugs to induce their labors, while adamantly refusing analgesics. Insightful discussions of the troubling clashes between global “development models” and local notions of the body and reproductivity also enhance the book. Van Hollen displays her considerable skills as an incisive, innovative, and compassionate ethnographer throughout this standard-setting book. Birth on the Threshold is an example of medical anthropology at its very best, but is also crucial to a general understanding of the lives of Tamil women, and to the economics of birth in India in general.
Selection Committee:
Martha Selby, Chair; Margaret Mills; Gail Minault.
Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar: In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power, and Memory in Rajasthan (Duke University Press, 2002)
At once an oral history, and a sensitive ethnography, Gold and Gujar’s richly textured volume In the Time of Trees and Sorrows treats the reader to the memories, narratives, and reflections of the residents of a small princely state during the transition from colonial to independent India. The authors tell their story from the point of view, not of the elite, but of the ordinary subjects of the state. Nor do they presume that they are objective outside observers. Indeed, the very collaboration itself—of an American anthropologist with a local high school teacher—testifies to the masterful way the volume brings together many voices in a layered and multidimensional story.
The guiding theme of the book is the social history of nature, above all the story of how the region’s trees and pigs were preserved by the raja, not as a resource for the people, but for his own pleasure. Yet—and this is what gives the book its poignancy—trees and pigs alike disappeared with the end of princely rule, so that in the end the villagers exchanged the oppression of the raja for the sorrows of a desolated landscape. In the Time of Trees and Sorrows is a powerfully evocative account of the workings of community, power, and the environment in modern India.
Arvind Rajagopal: Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India by Arvind Rajagopal is a major contribution to our understanding of the rise of Hindu nationalism and the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party as a dominant force in Indian politics. Combining careful empirical research with insights from media and globalization studies, Rajagopal has written an eloquent account of the redefinition of Indian politics and culture by television.
The story of how the airing of the Hindu epic Ramayana as a TV serial in the late 1980s had set the stage for political mobilization in support of building a Ram Temple in Ayodhya has been told before. But Rajagopal’s close analysis of the narrative strategies, dialogue, camera and editing techniques of the Ramayana on state-sponsored television, as well as interviews with many viewers, draws the connection even more persuasively. Rajagopal’s account of the differential response of India’s English language press and the Hindi press to the Ram Temple movement highlights the "split public" of the era of print capitalism. He shows how this "split public" represents the final marginalization of Nehruvian secular politics in the Indian polity. By contrast, electronic capitalism, he argues, has created a new visual regime that makes it possible to imagine a "Hindu" public. The political entrepreneurs of Hindu nationalism skillfully used this new visual regime to their electoral advantage.
For those interested in the impact of electronic media on an increasingly globalized and communalized Indian political scene Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics After Television breaks new and exciting ground.
Claude Markovits: The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
This book is a major contribution to Indian economic history that takes on the increasingly important topic of the Indian diaspora and comes to original conclusions. Disputing that there ever has been a unitary Indian diaspora, Markovits demonstrates that group movements outside India differ in their impulses and internal organization. His case studies focus on two networks of merchants, the Shikarpuris and the Hyderabadis, who originated in Sind and spread into Central Asia, East Asia, North Africa and the Americas. Drawing on archives in London, Hong Kong, and Cairo, Markovits examines the fluid sectarian, kinship, caste, gender, and financial arrangements that distinguish Shikarpuris and Hyderabadis abroad from the more sharply etched customs and identities of trading groups domiciled in India proper. Noting that Sindhi traders lack some of the hallmarks of a "community," and that most of them return to India after decades abroad, Markovits argues that "network," "circulation" and "sojourning" are more appropriate theoretical concepts than a one-size-fits-all "diaspora," which suggests exile and cultural loss.
Further, Markovits explicates the links between, on the one hand, the social and gender circumstances that characterize merchant-trading in far-flung markets, and, on the other hand, the shifting constructions of caste, community and nationality among traders at home and abroad under conditions of colonial modernity. This is a book of rich contextualization, broad comparative framing and bold theoretical questioning, and it should cause scholars of the Indian diaspora to reexamine the empirical basis for their theories.
George Perkovich: India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (University of California Press, 1999)
At a time when South Asia is described as the world’s most at risk region for all out war, George Perkovich’s India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation, is the most authoritative analytic history of India’s nuclear program yet written. In critiquing existing theories of nuclear behavior for their excessive reliance on the experience of the US, Russia, and Europe, it offers new and provocative arguments about proliferation and disarmament, and generates novel insights about India’s nuclear program.
Perkovich’s narrative is sweeping, yet remarkably comprehensive. His richly detailed account overcomes the secrecy and restrictions on official documents concerning India’s nuclear program by using extensive interviews with policy-makers and academic experts in conjunction with deft analysis of the contemporary press, declassified U.S. documents, and relevant secondary literature. With remarkable sensitivity to the Indian perspective, Perkovich recounts why India decided to develop its nuclear tests in 1974 and 1998, the factors that prevented India from reversing its nuclear program, and the impact of the United States on Indian intentions and capabilities.
Whereas most theorists and policy-makers attribute nuclear proliferation to international security concerns, Perkovich demonstrates that India’s institutional security concerns, Perkovich demonstrates that India’s institutions, cultural norms, and democratic politics played an important role. By balancing security considerations with domestic factors, Perkovich improves our understanding of why democracies like India develop nuclear weapons, and why equitable disarmament is essential for nonproliferation. India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation will be essential reading for anyone interested in India’s nuclear program for decades to come.
Gauri Viswanathan: Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton University Press, 1998)
Outside the Fold analyzes the processes and meanings of conversion to Christianity, Islam, and Buddhisn in India. The book begins with an examination of the lifting of religious discrimination against non-Anglicans (primarily Jews and Catholics) in Brittain, as well as the cultural crisis sparked by the writings of renowned Anglican intellectual John Henry Newman, after his conversion to Catholicism. Viswanathan turns, in the rest of her book, to examples from India. The texts analyzed are impressive in their range of genre and plot: Indian census data, key novels of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, court records of Christians in south India seeking to retrieve property forfeited at conversion, Pandita Ramabai’s letters to Anglican sisters in Britain rejecting attempts to silence her critique of Christian theology, Annie Besant’s later pamphlets and tracts, the justifications for conversion written by B.R. Ambedkar, and various works of fiction by post-Independence Dalit writers.
In the course of considering this wide range of conversions Viswanathan makes a persuasive case for conceptualizing conversion as always more than a private act: In her view, it is an act of cultural criticism that generates new knowledge, challenges the majority community’s cehesion, and inevitably upsets the previous demographic patterns of a nation. Outside the Fold is a masterfully plotted text in its own right. It raises illuminating issues, helps the reader understand the challenges that conversions pose in societies composed of majority and minority religious traditions, shows previously ignored or marginalized texts as revealing cultural documents, and sets the agenda for new discussions about relationships between religious dissent and the modern state. By considering the cultural work that selected texts perform in relation to racial theory, constructions of homogenous nationality, and representations of subjectivity and moral systems, Viswanathan makes an enduring contribution to our understanding of religious traditions, the politics of conversion, and the multiple projects of modernity. Outside the Fold will be read by scholars from a variety of disciplines—and by scholars whose usual concerns lie outside of Asia—because of its thorough and provocative investigation of religious dissent in the modern state.
Richard H. Davis: Lives of Indian Images (Princeton University Press, 1997)
Every student of Indian religion knows that Hindu images are considered living beings, since deities are invoked into images and then venerated there. Taking the living image as the organizing trope for his book, Richard Davis has explored this notion in innovative ways, challenging us to rethink the relationship between images and South Asian societies.
Davis departs from conventional art history methods by applying to art history the literary hermeneutic that a text’s meaning is largely governed by the context in which it is received. Rather than reconstructing what meanings the original creators and users invested in Indian images, Davis assumes the role of biographer, tracing the highly varied careers of Indian images subsequent to their creation, as radically varying meanings are invested in them by all manner of patrons, worshipers, thieves, iconoclasts, collectors, or museum curators. The result is a provocative and imaginative reconceptualization of a broad range of religious, cultural, and political history.
The book opens by narrating the career of a third century B.C. female statue that, washed ashore from under the Ganges River, was placed by British colonial authorities in a museum as an "art object," even though local villagers had already built a make-shift shrine for its worship as a form of the Goddess. Using deftly selected examples, the book proceeds through a series of similar juxtapositions, spanning India’s medieval, colonial, and post-colonial periods. It closes by analyzing the theft of a Shiva image and its sale to Euro-American dealers, and the intricate ways in which the identity, and even the persona, of Indian images can get caught up in modern-day litigation.
Rather than falling between the two disciplines of religious history and art history, or dwelling primarily in one discipline and merely poaching on the other, this book offers insights for both the history of religions and art history. We are convinced that, just as Davis has illuminated the continuing lives of Indian images long after their creation, so, too, his outstanding book will continue to inspire subsequent generations of historians of politics, religion, and art far into the future.
Emma Tarlo: Clothing Matters: Dress and Identify in India (University of Chicago Press, 1996)
In her insightful and thought-provoking book, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identify in India, Emma Tarlo takes up an issue that all of us confront nearly daily—that of what clothes to wear—and transforms it into a historical and cultural problematic of wide-ranging significance. With the publication of this work, South Asian scholarship has been offered a new and fascinating area of research and critical thinking, and we honor this effort in awarding Emma Tarlo the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize.
The book ranges over a very wide terrain: from British uses of dress to constitute themselves in colonial India to efforts by Indians to redress themselves in light of the colonial intervention; from Mohandas Gandhi’s twentieth century sartorial experiments to the uses of embroidery by contemporary rural Gujaratis and the emergence of "ethnic chic" in cosmopolitan circles of Delhi. Throughout, Tarlo persuasively demonstrates how and in what manner dress has been both a problem and a dilemma in modern India. Dress, she also shows, can be a means for creating community, for asserting national unity, and for reproducing cultural diversity.
Beautifully illustrated with colonial photographs, satirical drawing, and cartoons, as well as with contemporary clothing styles and designs, the work combines the very best in historical inquiry with the richness of anthropological fieldwork. Written with thought and nuanced with acute personal observations, Tarlo’s study reminds us that everytime we put on an article of clothing, we are making not only an intimate personal choice, but also a major cultural, even political, statement about ourselves and our relationship to the world(s) in which we live.
Selection Committee: Richard Eaton (Chair), Sumathi Ramaswamy, Paula Richman.
Shahid Amin: Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (University of California Press/Oxford University Press, 1995)
How many histories of the non-elites have been written without subordinating their voices to the histories of colonialism? Shahid Amin has produced an innovative and beautifully crafted book, a work which provokes us to think about how historical memory is generated, how it is appropriated, what gets lost in the processes, and what can be recovered.
Reflecting remarkable sensitivity to the issues at hand, Amin addresses a familiar story, one now deeply etched in the modern Indian psyche, and proceeds to familiarize it. He shows us how peasants participating in a peaceful anti-government march that tragically turned violent were subsequently incarnated in historical memories as volunteers in Ghandi’s Non-Cooperation Movement, then as criminals, then as victims, and finally as martyrs. Through painstaking archival research, through vigorous interviewing of witnesses still living and of descendants of those directly involved, Amin allows his sources to speak in their own voices, with their own memories, so that a tapestry of interpretation emerges reflecting the multivalence of meaning attached to Chauri Chaura. Event, Metaphor, Memory is a masterful study of local history, national history, and subaltern history.
Bina Agarwal: A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Why do most women in South Asia not control their social and economic lives? This important question has been the subject of decades of academic research, government planning, and social activism, with answers ranging from lack of employment to lack of education to restrained sexuality. Now Bina Agarwal provides a clear alternative explanation: women’s inferior position in South Asia is due to their lack of control over arable land. Gender, she argues, is not an additive factor in social development; it is the controlling factor. Marshaling an impressive army of data from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, she extracts two principal conclusions: first, there is a gap between owning land (which some women do) and controlling land (which very few women do); and second, although some laws grant women rights over land, local practice often thwarts the exercise of those rights.
A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia is a powerful combination of scholarship and social commitment; its magisterial compilation and analysis of available studies on women and property rights is matched by its impassioned argument for change. Bina Agarwal’s imaginative approach to issues of gender and social power encompasses both everyday reality and large-scale social patterns. She argues for the household as the key economic "bargaining unit" at the same time that she provides a sharp critique of government policy. She evaluates current forms of women’s resistance to make control of land, and she lists constructive suggestions for social change.
This is a book of exceptional clarity and depth, which will both inform and move its readers. The Council is proud to award this year’s Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize to Bina Agarwal.
Selection Committee: Stuart Blackburn (Chair), John C. Holt, Sumathi Ramaswamy.
Richard Eaton: The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier: 1204–1760 (University of California Press, 1993)
Richard Eaton’s extensively researched and theoretically sophisticated study chronicles the lengthy process by which, over the course of more than five and a half centuries, Islamic civilization rose to prominence in Bengal, on the eastern border of the Indian subcontinent. Here, by the middle of the 18th century, had developed one of the largest Muslim population provocative thesis—sure to stimulate much further debate—links the developing Islamization of this region with the spread of wet rice agriculture, often through the efforts of charismatic Sufi mystics and adventurers, into formerly heavily forested and sparsely populated terrains. What emerges from his analysis of the historical record is a narrative of a faith spread not—as some are inclines to assume—by the sword, but rather by the plow.
An historical study whose scope, in the Braudelian tradition, encompasses over 550 years of longue duree, Eaton’s masterful work brings insights from his study of the local geography, architecture and material culture, stone inscriptions, and folk literature to bear upon his interpretation of the more conventional documentary sources, among them rich local Persian and Bengali records and chronicles. Theoretically and methodologically as well, his arguments are informed by interdisciplinary approaches and conceptual frameworks. The result is a nuanced understanding of the variegated processes of encounter, interaction, and mutual transformation between Indic and Islamic civilizations that over this lengthy period gave rise to the unique cultural and social landscape of Muslim Bengal. This substantively rich and intellectually stimulating work will surely be of wide ranging interest to scholars of Asia and of Islam for many years to come.
Selection Committee: Sylvia Vatuk (Chair), Stuart Blackburn, John C. Holt
Kathryn Hansen: Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India (University of California Press, 1992)
Based on an extensive archival research, enlivened by fieldwork and attention to music, visual images, film adaptations, and commercialization, this work offers a closely observed portrait of a genre of folk theater popular in north India from at least the middle of the nineteenth century. By viewing Nautanki theater in its multiple fields of reference, Hansen’s careful and skillful historical study makes a convincing case for this popular theater, with its repertoire of stories from Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic , as a rich repository of the popular imagination in North India.
A popular, urban theater form, Nautanki presents the ambiguous images of power and righteousness, of pure love and social duty, of powerful yet auspicious women. Along with her exploration of the content and subtextual messages of the plays is a finely nuanced account of the dramatic troupes and their conventions and styles of performance, female performers as well as of the uncertain moral landscape of Nautanki audiences.
Kathryn Hansen’s Grounds for Play demonstrates how theory drawn from women’s studies, folklore, and cultural studies can be employed to recreate and evoke the depth and variety of popular theater and to illuminate the larger social and cultural settings in which it was staged and developed.
Philip Lutgendorf: Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas (University of California Press, 1991)
Meticulously researched and compellingly written, Lutgendorf’s Life of a Text recounts the significant north Indian career of the Ramcaritmanas, Tulsidas’ version of the great epic Ramayana. The author skillfully weaves together a literary and historical study of the text itself with an elegant ethnographic analysis of its wideranging public for whom the story comes to life through oral and dramatic performances, folksinging, and oral exegesis. The comprehensive scope of the book is matched by its eminently readable style and evocation of atmosphere. Without putting himself at the center, Lutgendorf brings the reader into the heart of the field experience. He describes the personalities, environments, and public events he encountered with unselfconscious intimacy, showing his immersion in his topic of study. While the book holds much interest for the non-specialist, it represents a high standard of scholarship that is both participatory and rigorous. Additionally it serves as a valuable resource for those who would understand the broader cultural background to the current disputes involving religious communities, symbols, and political mobilization in the sub-continent.
Margaret Trawick: Anpu
Margaret Trawick’s study of anpu or love offers extraordinary insight into how familial relationships in South India are expressed and experienced. Her highly original study of an extended family establishes the ideology of love as central to interpreting the tensions and shifting balances between generations and genders. Demonstrating remarkable ease with a range of topics in South Indian scholarship, she shows how anpu illuminates patterns in Tamil poetics, theology, ritual life, cross-cousin marriage, and the raising of children. The book’s engaging style intertwines vivid description, self-disclosure and questioning, and critical analysis of earlier theory. Trawick presents an understanding of culture as performed or constructed in the interaction between informant and anthropologist, a refreshing addition to the current critiques on ethnography. She skillfully weaves many strands into a poetic text. Scholars familiar with South Asia will perhaps respond differently to the multiple levels of this book, but all will admire its courage and intelligence. Margaret Trawick treats the most powerful of all emotions, love, with humanity.
Selection Committee: Kathryn Hansen (Chair), Catherine Asher, Anand A. Yang.