Eugenia Yurevna Vanina | |
---|---|
Евгения Юрьевна Ванина | |
Born | December 24, 1957 |
Citizenship | Soviet Union Russia |
Occupation(s) | Historian Indologist |
Known for | Historical processes, analysis of Indian texts |
Academic background | |
Education | Doctor of Historical Sciences |
Alma mater | Institute of Asian and African Countries, Moscow State University |
Thesis | Medieval Indian Mindscapes: Space, Time, Society, Man (2006) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Ethnography History Indology |
Institutions | Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences |
Notable works | Ideas and Society in India from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (1996) |
Eugenia Yurevna Vanina (born 24 December 1957) is a Russian Indologist,head of the History and Culture section and a researcher in the Centre for Indian Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. [1] She is known for her analyses of textual material from north and central India,and her studies of historical processes.
Eugenia Vanina studied at the University of Delhi between 1979–80,training in Hindi and Sanskrit. [1] She defended her Candidate of Sciences thesis,titled Urban handicraft production in North India,16th-18th centuries in 1984 at the Institute of Asian and African Countries,Moscow State University. She obtained her higher doctoral degree of Doktor nauk in 2006 with her dissertation titled Medieval Indian Mindscapes:Space,Time,Society,Man.
Vanina's 1996 publication of Ideas and Society in India from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (an English language translation of her Russian volume from 1993) restricted the notion of 'medieval India' to the period between Akbar and the end of the Mughal Empire,and was a comparative analysis of trends in Western Europe and India. She introduced her idea of social processes and noted that these drove society from feudalism to capitalism via new forms of authoritarianism. She compared the bhakti and sufi tradition in India with the European reformation. The latter,she claimed,led to the abolition of feudalism,while the former,among other processes,led to the same in India only in the 19th century. These processes were,for example,the centralising worldly power of the Mughal emperor versus religious law. [2] Critics called her concept of social processes as 'nebulous',while the lack of attention to Timurid forms of governance and the concentration on Hindu traditions of rulership was also criticised. [3]
In her work titled Medieval Indian Mindscapes:Space,Time,Society,Man,Vanina stated that Marxist analyses concentrated on the socio-economic,ignoring the material and spiritual. To remedy the lacuna,Vanina applied social and cultural categories that implied that India between the 1st to the 18th centuries was feudal. Her comparison of the Indian worldview with that of the European suggested that both sets of societies underwent the same 'mental programme'. Her synthesis of the entire cultural development of medieval India as equivalent to 'feudal',however,was questioned by some critics,and her application of the Marxist notion of base and superstructure was criticised. [1] Meanwhile,other critics claimed that her proposed model of studying spaces as sacred places,cyclical time,hierarchical social estates,and the opposition of the individual versus society,is not coherent enough to establish her claimed similarity with Western feudalism. Vanina analysed the notion of 'feudalism' as applied to India,on the one hand rejecting it as insufficient from a historiographical perspective,while on the other,inferring from her overarching definition of 'man' and 'society' as essentially on par with feudalism. Critics nevertheless appreciated the insights drawn from her close readings from medieval texts,albeit with the caveat of their restriction to north and central India,and the lack of female voices. [4]
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
Year 1151 (MCLI) was a common year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar.
Hindūstān is a name for India, broadly referring to the Indian subcontinent. Being the Iranic cognate of the Indic word Sindhu, it originally referred to the land of lower Indus basin. Later, the term referred to the Indo-Gangetic plain, and became the classical name of the region in Hindi-Urdu. It finally referred to the entire subcontinent since the early modern period. Since the Partition of India in 1947, Hindustan continues to be used to the present day as a historic name for the Republic of India.
Rajput is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating from the Indian subcontinent. The term Rajput covers various patrilineal clans historically associated with warriorhood: several clans claim Rajput status, although not all claims are universally accepted. According to modern scholars, almost all Rajputs clans originated from peasant or pastoral communities.
The Bundela is a Rajput clan. Over several generations, the cadet lineages of Bundela Rajputs founded several states in area what came to be known as Bundelkhand anciently known as Chedi Kingdom from the 16th century.
A Passage to Infinity: Medieval Indian Mathematics from Kerala and Its Impact is a 2009 book by George Gheverghese Joseph chronicling the social and mathematical origins of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. The book discusses the highlights of the achievements of Kerala school and also analyses the hypotheses and conjectures on the possible transmission of Kerala mathematics to Europe.
Kulasekhara is a South Asian male name, used as both given and last name, prevalent in south India and Sri Lanka.
Baidya or Vaidya is a Bengali Hindu community located in the Bengal region of Indian subcontinent. A caste (jāti) of Ayurvedic physicians, the Baidyas have long had pre-eminence in society alongside Brahmins and Kayasthas. In the colonial era, the Bhadraloks were drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from these three upper castes, who continue to maintain a collective hegemony in West Bengal.
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.
Parasnis or Parasnavis is a title and surname native to the Indian state of Maharashtra and North Karnataka.
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Historiography is defined as "the study of the way history has been and is written – the history of historical writing", which means that, "When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."
Kesavan Veluthat is an Indian historian and academic from Kerala specializing in medieval south Indian history. He is also an epigraphist and knows languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
Koka Aleksandrovna Antonova was a Soviet Indologist specializing in medieval and modern Indian history. A researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, she was a co-author of a comprehensive four-volume History of India in the Russian language.
Klara Zarmairovna Ashrafyan was a Soviet Indologist of Armenian origin. She was known for her researches into the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire.
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Lakshmibai Rajwade (1887–1984) was an Indian medical doctor, feminist, and family planning advocate. She was also a suffragist and advocate for the right of women to vote in India, and presided over the All India Women's Conference as well as acting as its secretary. She was the author of an influential report on the role of women in the Indian economy in 1938, as well as a driving force in the adoption of family planning measures as part of the agenda of the Indian independence movement. Rajwade also represented India internationally, at the United Nations and helped establish links between Indian women's organizations and international women's organizations.
André Wink is an emeritus professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is known for his studies on India and the Indian Ocean area, particularly over the medieval and early modern age. He is the author of a series of books published by Brill Academic, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press on al-Hind – a term used in Arab history to refer to the Islamized regions in the Indian subcontinent and nearby regions.
Seema Alavi is an Indian historian. She is a professor of history at Ashoka University, India and specializes in medieval and early modern South Asia.
Kalyani Sen, was Second Officer of the Women’s Royal Indian Naval Service (WRINS), a section of the Women's Auxiliary Corps (India) WAC(I). In 1945, she became the first Indian service woman to visit the UK.