At a seminar on ‘Comparative Literature: Theory and Practice’ held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, in June 1987, the late Sisir Kumar Das initiated the deliberations with the following words:

Islamization in Malabar was influenced by various factors, the most predominant being trade and intermarriage in the early centuries. The patronage of rulers such as the Samuthiris in encouraging some of the Hindu castes to embrace Islam was also an important factor. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, conversion among the lower Hindu castes by voluntary choice was often prompted by their poor economic conditions and the prospects of work on the coast. Also, by 1921, there was a mass conversion of the Cherumar population which has been attributed to the rigid landlord-peasant relationship and the Mappilla uprisings. The economic conditions and occupations of the Mappillas were quite disparate for, those of the coastal towns were generally rich, prosperous traders and merchants, often with trade links across the Arabian Sea, and those in the interior regions, particularly later converts from low castes, were agriculturists.

Closely linked to the mode of Islamization, their economic status and occupations, and their Arab identity was the social stratification of the Mappillas into various groups. For example, the thangals claimed a superior status on account of their sayyid ancestry in Hadhramaut, while the keyis, the koyas and the baramis as landed aristocrats and merchants were economically dominant. The pusalars and the ossans, as converts from the mukkuvans, were occupationally inferior and socially distant. Again, the coastal Mappillas considered the inland agriculturist population as economically inferior.

The predominant factor of Islamization on the coast was trade while in the interior religious preachers were dominant.

INTRODUCTION

The concept of an audience that is distinct from a devotee watching a temple art form was virtually unknown in Kerala till the early decades of the twentieth century. Spectators could not be differentiated from idol-worshippers in the period prior to the institutionalization of performing arts. Worship of the mother-goddess and the folkritual entertainments linked to it had to inevitably allow entry to newer forms of religious entertainment in the public sphere. A case in point is the seventeenth century emergence of Ramanattam, which Kottarakkara Thampuran, a provincial ruler of South Kerala, had conceived and choreographed, assimilating make-up and costuming, verbal acting, angika and satwika abhinayas (acting through hand-gestures and body-movements, and emotive acting respectively) from the extant forms of ritual and folk traditions. Appreciation of poetry in such performances, soaked in devotion to gods and goddesses, was rather effortless for the masses because of their rootedness in a powerful oral tradition. Recitation/singing was central to the life of the god-fearing people who attended both rituals and forms of entertainments with equal responsibility and commitment. This could perhaps be the distant impact of the Bhakti Movement that catapulted the growth of high-density devotional music in the whole of South India, right from the twelfth century AD onwards, spearheaded by the saint Purandaradasa, although the devotional genre of music was prevalent perhaps in a crude form in the pre-Purandaradasa period.

When it comes to literature, the twelfth century poetic work, Jayadeva's Geetagovindam spontaneously found acceptance and admiration in the Hindu temples patronized by the Brahmins.

Nepal is the most densely populated country in the Himalayas, where the population has grown from 5.5 million in 1930 (Zurink and Karan 1999) to 23 million in 2001 (Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), 2002). Kathmandu Valley is located in a tectonic depression in the central Himalayas over flat lacustrine soils deposition. Geographically situated in the central part of Nepal, Kathmandu is the capital of the country. The Valley has a centripetal flow of rivers and streams originating in the surrounding hills and flowing out to the south from a narrow gorge. Kathmandu is located within the valley of the Bagmati river system, eight tributaries of which drain the city. The river system has always been the city's main source of water for drinking and irrigation and it holds religious, cultural and social value for the Nepalese (Asian Development Bank/International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, (ICIMOD), 2006). Three local administrative districts – Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur lie in the Katmandu Valley. According to the Local Self-Governance Act 1999 of the Government of Nepal, these districts are further divided into smaller local administrative and development units – one metropolitan city, one municipality and 57 Village Development Committees (VDCs) in Kathmandu district, one submetropolitan city and 41 VDCs in Lalitpur district, and, two municipalities and 16 VDCs in Bhaktapur district. The district boundary in most cases follows the water divide except for a small southern part of Lalitpur district (Fig. 13.1).

Introduction

The goal of this article is to document data of nominalizing velar prefixes found in Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages of different branches spoken in Northeast India (NEI).

These data include and expand data sets on a Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB) “adjectival velar prefix” presented by Wolfenden (1929), Shafer (1966), Benedict (1972), and Matisoff (2003). This long-known velar prefix has been shown to occur on adjectival and stative verbs in different branches of Tibeto-Burman, and therefore was reconstructed with this function for PTB.

The additional evidence presented here reveals other functions of the “adjectival prefix” in most of the languages. Based on a growing body of literature on nominalization in TB, we know that these other functions are typically associated with nominalization, as is derivation of adjectives.

Specifically, the literature on nominalization in TB documents derivational functions on the one hand, i.e. deriving action/event and agent/patient nouns from verbs, and the derivation of adnominal modifiers as well as the marking of (verbal) citation forms. On the other hand, we find clausal nominalization typically associated with subordinate clauses (relative, complement, and, less commonly, adverbial clauses) as well as with particular main clause constructions (focus and emphatic constructions, questions, aspect marking, etc.) which sometimes get reanalyzed as new default constructions (see Bickel 1999, DeLancey 1989; 1994; in press, Genetti et al 2008, Noonan 1997, inter alia).

The phenomenon of Bodo-Garo

Bodo-Garo is a compact, low-level branch of Tibeto-Burman. That is to say, it includes a relatively small number of languages – perhaps a dozen, depending on how we define “language” – which are very similar to one another in their lexicon and grammatical structure. For a small, compact branch, it is spread over quite a large geographical area – and, before the expansion of Assamese and Bengali, certainly over an even larger one. Bodo-Garo languages are spread over a wider area than, say, Naga or Kiranti, each of which is considerably more linguistically diverse than Bodo-Garo. My purpose in this paper is to outline a proposal for the history of the Bodo-Garo branch of Tibeto-Burman which accounts for these facts, as a contribution to our understanding of Bodo-Garo as part of Tibeto-Burman and as a participant in the long-running story of intense language contact in the Brahmaputra Valley.

Briefly, I propose, following a suggestion of Burling (2007), that Proto-Bodo-Garo first emerged as a lingua franca used for communication across the various linguistic communities of the region, and that its striking simplicity and transparency reflect a period when it was widely spoken by communities for whom it was not a native language. In this paper I will first describe the relevant phenomena of Bodo-Garo and its Tibeto-Burman relatives. In §2 I will discuss how the facts of Bodo-Garo fit into various models of language change and differentiation. §3 will briefly review what can be said or imagined about the ethnolinguistic history of Assam and the Brahmaputra Valley. Finally, §4 will summarize my specific proposal for the origin of the Bodo-Garo branch.

In the social environment of rigid hierarchy, the performing arts of India served to bridge the gap between the intellectual Sanskritic tradition and the popular folk tradition. Ancient Brahminic tradition forbade Sanskrit learning to the non-initiates, that is all those who were not ‘twiceborn’. This restriction applied to all women generally, including those from the brahmin caste. Although the so-called ‘high tradition’ kept its doors closed against intellectual pursuits by common people, the latter enjoyed some measure of spiritual experience through theatre, dance, folklore, oral literature and other aesthetic media.

The most respected scripture of dance and drama, the Natyasastra, written by the Sanskritic scholar, Bharata, is so fundamental that it has become known as the fifth Veda. Dancing, like other arts, became recognized as a spiritual experience. In fact, the performing arts provide a source of religious education to the common people, as well as serve as channels for mass communication of moral and ethical values, gained through commonly shared aesthetic experience.

The dance theatre of India represents a blending of ‘high’ and ‘folk’ traditions. All classical schools of Indian dance rely on the textual foundation of the scriptures, either of Bharata or of Sanskritic scholars. Dance gurus often refer to these texts in order to defend and protect their art. In fact, the very word ‘classical’ has some prestige attached to it, inasmuch as it signifies closeness to the ‘high’ tradition.

Introduction

The North East of India is home to four language families: Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic and Tai. Barbora (2010), Konnerth (2011), Huziwara (2011) and Post (2011) have looked into the nominalization process in some Tibeto-Burman languages of the region, namely Mising and Karbi, spoken in Assam, Marma, spoken in Tripura and Bangladesh, and Galo, spoken in Arunachal Pradesh. Notable descriptions of nominalization in Tibeto-Burman languages of North East India are also found in grammars by Coupe (2007) and by van Breugel (2008). Accordingly, a study of nominalization in Assamese, an Indo-Aryan language of North East India, should provide information that would be of value to linguists with interest in the areal typology of the North East Indian region. The goal of this paper is to present such a study.

A brief overview of Assamese grammar

Assamese is a head-final language with a subject-object-verb word order. An agglutinative language, Assamese nominals are inflected for number, classifiers and case. The feminine gender marker -i suffixes to the classifier -zɔn. In finite clause constructions, a nominal argument in A function takes overt case marking. In S function, a nominal argument normally does not take an overt case marker. Pronominals, whether in S or in A function, do not take overt case marking. In the O position only, animate nominals optionally take an overt case marker. Arguments in peripheral positions take overt case markers. Finite verbs are inflected for tense, aspect and mood (TAM).

Taafe (1974) identified three major traditions in geography: ‘spatial organization’, ‘man–land relations’ and ‘area study’. The first tradition, spatial organization, is defined as the arrangement of objects in geographical space. The second tradition, man–land relations, investigates the relationships between humankind and nature or biophysical environment. The third tradition refers to the study of places and regions and identifies the unique characteristics of those regions. These three views can be considered as separate but overlapping, leading to an integration of the three traditions. Geography as a discipline has two systematic components – human and physical. Physical geography studies the geographic aspects of the natural environment on the surface of the earth, and human geography studies the social, economic, urban and rural settlement systems of human populations. The focus of both these systematic components is: (i) to study the distribution and spatial structure of objects, (ii) to understand the processes explaining the spatial structure, and (iii) to use spatial policies to correct the maldistribution of these resources. Also important are the local and global forces influencing the spatial processes.

Geographers and non-geographers often ask whether there is unity in the approaches of the different components of geography. Imagine a volcanic eruption in Mount Etna and the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre – though one is a physical phenomenon and the other is a social geographic phenomenon, both were outcomes of a long-drawn process of disequilibrium and unrest.

The rise of China is the greatest geopolitical event of our times. It is being debated and analysed at various levels. In India too, it is generating a lot of excitement. At times, it is seen as an opportunity while at other times, as a challenge. Yet, there is more opinion than comprehension about the rise of China in India. To understand more clearly the implications of China's rise, we need to understand China more deeply.

This book is an attempt at exploring the multi-dimensional nature of the rise of China and its implications for India at this critical juncture when the rise of China and India is being talked about in the same breath. Not surprisingly, this project was very ambitious in scale, given the desire to examine the implications of China's rise for India along the three axes: domestic developments in China, Chinese foreign policy and India-specific issues. It was only with the help, support and encouragement of a number of people that this project could come to fruition.

First, I would like to express my deep sense of gratitude to all the contributors who, despite their busy schedules, took time of to be a part of this volume. Most of them are senior scholars of China and I have learnt a lot from their work. Therefore, it was a privilege for me when they agreed to be a part of this project.

Introduction

This study is a descriptive account of the classifier system in Asamiya (Assamese), used as one of the most productive noun-encoding devices in the language. Asamiya shares many linguistic features with genetically related Indic languages, particularly with the Magadhan languages of Eastern India, but makes the most extensive and elaborate use of classifiers in terms of their scope and function. This phenomenon is generally ascribed to the influences and counter influences of the non-Aryan languages, particularly the neighbouring Tibeto-Burman languages spoken in and around Assam from the very early periods of its history (Kakati 2007: 278, 381–382; Goswami 1968; Emeneau 1956).

The study is concerned with various aspects of classifiers in Asamiya, as organised into different sections. §2 discusses the distribution of classifiers in the NP structure. §3 deals with the pragmatic, semantic and grammatical functions of classifiers. §4 attempts to subcategorize classifiers on the basis of their semantic considerations, followed by concluding remarks.

The classifiers in the examples are printed in bold and glossed as conglomerations of inherent semantic features without their grammatical or pragmatic information which are interspersed among the relevant texts, tables and/or free translations of examples. However, due to constraints of space, glossing in the Tables has been eschewed.

Introduction

The present chapter dicusses the grammar and meaning of classifiers in Assamese. In §2, we discuss classifier grammar, showing that the basic grammatical function of classifiers in Assamese is to unitize or individuate the noun to facilitate numerical quantification. They are thus numeral classifiers. In §3, we first identify the classifiers in Assamese, together with the semantic parameters they employ to categorize noun referents. The remainder of §3 then focuses on the meaning chains classifiers exhibit, showing how they extend their basic meaning in numerous ways so that they can categorize an open-ended class of noun referents which are apparently rather diverse and unrelated. The discussions in §2 and §3 are followed by our concluding remarks.

The grammatical functions of classifiers in Assamese

This section discusses the grammatical functions that classifiers in Assamese perform.

Classifiers and the object-mass distinction

A noun designates a kind of things, rather than an instance of the kind. Thus, for instance, the English word dog does not intrinsically refer to any particular dog; rather, it refers to a particular kind of animal. Now, in terms of ordinary human perception, kinds are of at least two types: a kind may refer either to a set of similar discrete objects, as with dog; or, it may refer to an unsegmented mass, as with water. In a language like English, the grammar is immediately sensitive to the distinction between these two types of kinds: the object-mass distinction.

Two perceptions about Comparative Literature are built into the title of this volume:

1. Comparative Literature is viewed as a discipline.

2. This discipline is in quest of its own identity and directions.

At the moment, it seems, with little risk of sounding presumptuous or naive, one could compare Comparative Literature to God. There are many who practice faith in God, without entering into any critical rumination on the concept, reality or existence of God. Similarly, thousands of academicians practice Comparative Literature as a critical tool and pedagogy without any profession of commitment to it as a vision or methodology. They are in it, part of it, and yet do not deem it significant to examine its relevance and viability. There are millions of devotees who worship God daily or even hourly, and yet go through the crisis of faith, a kind of ‘dark night of the soul’ experience, question the foundations of their own belief in the very existence of God, and reach an abysmal level of commitment. Some of the authors in this volume and those referred to by them, including Gayatri Spivak, are in such a crisis of faith regarding Comparative Literature. Just like most of those who trust in God, the Comparatists who denounce their own vision and mission, also come back only to rededicate themselves to their task.

I consider this anthology as the voices of such returnees, who have been wise enough to review their positions vis-avis Comparative Literature.

According to sociologist Len Barton (1996, p. 3), one charge of his field is to relate social structures to the ‘lived reality of people in particular social settings’. If ‘particular social settings’ includes a person's spatial setting, then the same charge is true for social geography. These relationships between social structures and lived realities are particularly meaningful in disability geography – one of the more recent streams of social and human geography. This chapter seeks to introduce the reader to this field, giving a brief glimpse of the evolution and development of disability studies in the larger realm of the social sciences, particularly in geography.

As with any other introductory work, it runs the risk of giving the subject superficial treatment by trying to present too much in too short a space. However, since disability geography still does not find adequate representation in mainstream social geography books or curricula, it would be appropriate to provide an overview of the field to the reader. While breadth is prioritized over depth, the latter is not eschewed altogether. Using a phenomenological approach, I have tried to highlight the prominent role of social environments in the creation of disability through a comparative examination of shifting meanings of disability across space. Thus, the two-fold aim of this chapter is to highlight disability and persons with disabilities as important components of society and social geography studies, and to underline the importance of social contexts in the creation of disability.

We are very pleased to present the fourth volume of papers in the North East Indian Linguistics series. The papers in this volume were presented at the fourth NEILS conference, held at the North Eastern Hill University in Shillong, Meghalaya, from January 16–18, 2009, and organized by the Department of Linguistics, Gauhati University, in collaboration with scholars from the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University (Melbourne AU). All the papers in this volume have been peer-reviewed and then revised in close consultation with the editors. Final approval for the papers in this volume comes from the editorial staff of Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. As in previous volumes our aim is to produce a volume reflective of both the linguistic diversity of the North East as well as the high quality of the current research.

The current volume is particularly representative of the diversity of the languages of the North East, the scholars working there, and the various research projects underway. Contributions range from renowned scholars of Tibeto-Burman linguistics to students from the North East making their first impact in the field of Linguistics. The articles in this volume cover four of the language families represented in North East India: Tai-Kadai, Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, and Austroasiatic and come from scholars based in the U.S., France, Germany, Japan, Norway, and Australia, but with the majority of contributions being from Indian scholars themselves.