The culture history of India

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  The history of India in general

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Popular culture in India

Recent sources on Indian cinema

From S. Jain, 7 nov 1995. Re the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema and other works useful to Indian film enthusiasts.

Beauty Contest Veils Ugliness of Indian Poverty

Christopher Thomas, in Bangalore, in The Times, 23 November 1996. Westernization has brought moral decline and poverty for most.

Response to earlier query on Malayalam cinema and 'non-European' discourses

By Birgit Kellner, 27 nov 1997. Interpretation of Malayalam (or Indian) film and its history outside a European/US-American context is most certainly related to the issue of post-colonialism. Bibliographic citaations are provided.

Witchcraft in pre-modern India, a Maharashtra case

Part of a dialog from the H-Asia list, 24 jan 1998. Witchcraft in pre-modern societies was a part of the range of effects that people could produce given appropriate techniques. Some sorts of persons - especially old women - had greater ability in this area than others. Liminal persons - such as members of forest tribes - who routinely transgressed the boundaries of agrarian society possessed much knowledge/power in this regard.

Widow Immolation Custom Prevails Over Law

By Ranjit Dev Raj, IPS, 8 dec 1999. Activist groups are demanding stricter implementation of Indian laws against glorifying 'sati' - - the practice of widows burning themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. The argument that sati committed voluntarily is a cultural tradition has been expressed by leading members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The history of political culture in India

Right-wing Eye Control of Culture and Education

Commentary by Praful Bidwai, IPS, 10 dec 1999. BJP campaign of a systematic takeover of institutions responsible for the design of school curricula and national agendas in social science and historical research. The damage greatest in primary and secondary education. VB textbooks are designed to promote bigotry and religious fanaticism, a defence of obnoxious practices such as 'sati,' the most extreme forms of male chauvinism, caste oppression, and Aryan supremacy. They resemble in no small way the kind of texts that were produced in Hitler's Germany.

In the protests of Mahatma Gandhi

By K. Kannan, in The Hindu, 16 January 2001. India, the birthplace of Gandhi, has strayed away from his ideals, probably because the Indian approach to Gandhi is personality-based and not rooted in an appreciation of his ideas.