Nomadic Narratives
A History of Mobility and Identity in the Great Indian Desert
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
The Thar Desert, which is today divided by an international boundary, has historically been a frontier region connecting Punjab, Multan, Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. This book looks at the Desert as an historical region shaped through the mobility of its inhabitants - warriors, pastoralists, traders, ascetics and bards, often in overlapping capacities. It challenges the frames of Mughal-Rajput relationships generally employed to explore the histories of the Thar, arguing that Rajputana remains an inadequate category to explore polities located in this frontier region, where along with Rajputs, a range of groups, such as Charans, Bhils, Meenas, Soomras and Pathans controlled circulation, and with whom the Rajput states had to constantly negotiate. Sifting through a wide range of Rajasthani written and oral narratives, travelogues of British administrators, and vernacular as well as English records, the book explores long-term relationships between mobility, martiality, memory and identity in the desert expanses of the Thar.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Nomadic Narratives
- Title
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Glossary
- Note on Transliteration, Translation and Dates
- Contemporary Place Names and their Nineteenth Century Spellings
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Geographical Imagination and Narratives of a Region
- Chapter 2: Mobility, Polity, Territory
- Chapter 3: Itinerants of the Thar: Mobility and Circulation
- Chapter 4: Expanding State Contracting Space: The Thar in the Nineteenth Century
- Chapter 5: Narratives of Mobility and Mobility of Narratives
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Appendix-I
- Appendix-II
- Appendix-III
- Index