51茶馆

Abir Das: Body Matters in the Artha脜鈥好劼乻tra

Body Matters in the Artha脜鈥好劼乻tra reorients the study of the Artha脜鈥好劼乻tra by foregrounding the body as a critical category for understanding the text’s political imagination. While existing historiography has focused on political economy and administration, this thesis argues that the Artha脜鈥好劼乻tra constructs two distinct types of bodies: those endowed with 脛聛tmavatt脛聛, exemplified by the vijig脛芦谩鹿拢u (the ideal king), and those lacking these qualities. The first chapter analyses the king’s body as the locus of political authority, showing how governance is tied to the cultivation, discipline, and protection of the ruler’s body. It also challenges the conventional division between domestic (tantra) and foreign (脛聛v脛聛pa) spheres by demonstrating a shared logic of bodily vulnerability. The second chapter theorises female subjects as “bodies without selves,” whose reproductive capacities are appropriated through regimes of regulation governing menstruation, sexuality, and labour, thereby sustaining both patriarchal kinship and state extraction. By reading the text as an integrated whole, this thesis argues that the body is fundamental to understanding the Artha脜鈥好劼乻tra, reshaping how we interpret ancient Indian political thought.

Anusmita Bhattacharyya: A Terracotta Menagerie: Exploring the depiction of animals in the terracotta carvings on the temples of Bishnupur during the Malla Dynasty (694-1802 CE)

The thesis explores the themes around animals and birds through a range of terracotta carvings in three terracotta temples, namely the Shyam Rai temple, the Jor Bangla temple and the Madan Mohan temple in Bishnupur (located in present-day West Bengal), the capital of the Malla kingdom, in the seventeenth century. They highlight the complex, layered Vaishnava devotional landscape and syncretic religious ethos prevalent among the Malla rulers of the time. The temples are not only expressions of a revolutionary artistic tradition characteristic of Bengal, but they also capture the negotiation of human–animal boundaries, the use of animal imagery to articulate devotional and mythic landscapes, and the embedding of local devotional practices within wider global historical contexts. Besides this amalgamation of Vaishnava iconography, the temples carry animal iconography that embodies the spaces of diverse landscapes— tigers on the hunt, elephants caparisoned for war, parrots in a domestic household. These carvings became the visual language through which the Malla rulers and their artisans articulated Bishnupur’s place in the pre-modern world. Through the imagery of forest creatures such as boars and elephants, courtly hunting scenes with elephants, Mughal-style warriors on horseback, Persianate hybrids of simurgh and serpentine dragons, along with Vaishnava narratives, these seventeenth-century artisans brought together Bengal’s sacred geography through the artistic expressions in these temples in Bishnupur and the echoes of the Indo-Persianate cosmopolis in the seventeenth century.

Chinmayi Manoj: Return to a Native Land? Hierarchy and Belongingness Amongst the Jewish Community in Kerala

This thesis has attempted to examine the idea of a “homeland” that existed among the Jewish community of Kerala before the spread of Zionism as a popular ideology within the community. The main argument of the thesis is that feelings of longing for a homeland did exist among the community before Zionism, and this was expressed through a sense of ‘diaspora’ among the community. The strand that the thesis will focus on is the idea of origin. The idea of diaspora for Jewish people is based on a biblical notion. The thesis explores some of the culturally and socially specific ways through which this idea was expressed among the Jewish community in Kerala.

Nithika Bopanna: Interspecies and Ecological Interactions in the Seventeenth-Century Chronicle Tarikh-i Firishta

This thesis examines the nature of the interactions between humans and the environment in the seventeenth-century chronicle Tarikh-i Firishta. It is divided into two parts: first, the study of interactions with nonhuman organisms, including animals and disease; and second, the analysis of environmental conditions such as terrain, climate, and rivers, as represented in contexts of political and military activity. The argument derived from this is that the environment in Tarikh-i Firishta functions not just as a background setting but also an active force shaping political authority, warfare, and social processes. By analysing interspecies and ecological interactions within a primarily political and military narrative, it demonstrates how nonhumans and environmental conditions are embedded in the articulation of power and governance. Through a close reading of a translated historical text, this study reveals how human ideological understandings of the environment are implicitly constructed, while also reflecting on how the nature of the source material shapes these representations. It contributes to the human-environment interactions in the field of environmental history by showing how ecological perspectives can be derived from sources not explicitly concerned with the environment.