Böcker av Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya

The deeply entrenched image of the interaction between Hindus and Muslims in India's past--as indeed in the present-- has generally been that of two aggressively antagonistic religious communities, with the superior political power wielded by one community defining its dominance over the other. This original colonial notion has often been contested by positing the thesis of syncretism at the religious level; by citing evidence of patronage across religious establishments, and of participation of both communities in the country's administration. Neither approach, however, took up the critical task of examining the viability of the premise of homogeneity in the composition of the two communities, or how contemporary perceptions may be used as a touchstone for 'othering' in heterogeneous societies of the past. Chattopadhyaya's Representing the Other?, originally published almost two decades ago, makes an attempt to construct perceptions of new ethnic groups in India in an important phase of its history, from the eighth to the fourteenth century. The evidence though insufficient, reveals not homogenous religious communities, but ethnic groups of diverse origins, located in different socio-political contexts as traders, raiders and plunderers, as well as rulers and administrators. The contexts define the characterization of these different categories by either invoking terminologies from the past for others or by coining ethnic terms. Based mainly on contemporary Sanskrit epigraphic and textual sources, this book is expected to be a major corrective to the way students are generally taught to read the history of our country of this period and of what followed.

Aspects of Rural Settlements and Rural Society in Early Medieval India seeks to undertake two kinds of explorations, one methodological and the other thematic. Methodologically, it examines texts of inscriptions--historians' main source for references to ancient villages--from diverse angles to try and understand the morphologies of villages in relation to different terrains across the country. One important aspect of this exploration concerns understanding, to the extent possible, the relationship of village location/s and sources of water, both for fields and habitats. Thematic explorations, apart from looking for possible physical appearances of ancient villages, extend to the search for the re-examination of the concept of village community, the search for hierarchies among village residents and settlements, and the changing nature of relationship between apex political authorities and villages. The conclusion, deriving from these explorations, makes an argument for the need to depart from the image of India's villages as unchanging, inert, insulated and self-sufficient spatial units to viewing them as varied social spaces in interaction with other spaces, which also went through phases of historical change.