RETHINKING ANAGARIKA DHARMAPALA IN SOUTH ASIA

On a chilly day in late January 1891, a young man from Ceylon who came to be known as Anagarika Dharmapala had an epiphany while on pilgrimage at the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya. It was at this spot that the Gautama Buddha is said to have attained Enlightenment while meditating under a peepul tree in the 6th century BCE. Since at least the 18th century, the Mahabodhi temple had been inhabited and maintained by a Saivite Giri matha (monastery) under the leadership of their mahant (chief monk) and became part of Gaya's Hindu ritual circuit. In early 1891, Dharmapala made the arduous trip to Gaya along with a Japanese Theravada monk, Kozen Gunaratna. Dharmapala described the moment in his diary,

The narrative that the Mahabodhi temple needed to be saved and cared for by Buddhists and that it was essentially if not exclusively a Buddhist site had been put into motion with the publication of Sir Edwin Arnold's essay on Bodh Gaya in 1885 in the Daily Telegraph and the many colonial archaeological investigations of Buddhist sites during the 19th century. Even Dharmapala's epiphany to this effect was not unique to him. Around the same time, Kripasaran Mahathera, the soon-to-be founder of the Bauddha Dharmankur Sabha (Bengal Buddhist Association), visited the site and came to the same realization—that both Buddhism and the site needed saving and that these tasks would require, at the very least, his complete dedication to the cause.

This is not to say that there was nothing original about Dharmapala's epiphany at the Mahabodhi temple and his subsequent Buddhist activism. Dharmapala's labours in the arena of equating a ‘revived’ and ‘reformed’ Buddhism with Sinhala identity had lasting effects in modern Sri Lanka. He is best remembered there as a Sinhala nationalist and a figurehead of the Sinhala exclusivist movement that took off in the 1950s.

Ambedkar and Marx expressed the aforementioned sentiments during the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, respectively. However, even centuries later, these words resonate in the contemporary context of the Indian industrial world. The advent of machines during the Industrial Revolution held the promise of a positive transformation of labour and life on earth. It was seen as a potential solution to the pressing issues faced by Dalit labourers in caste-based occupations and economy. These issues included working in polluted occupations, unsafe working conditions, unhealthy environments, limited opportunities for progress, and degrading work conditions. Nevertheless, the combination of caste-based discrimination and capitalist exploitation of labour and nature has led to a series of conflicting and contradictory situations. The relationship between industries and Dalit labourers, as well as their impact on the environment, has faced intense scrutiny over the past two decades. A comprehensive study conducted on a burgeoning industrial area within the National Capital Region highlights both the challenges and successes experienced by Dalit labourers in their interactions with the realms of industry, caste, and nature.

The Wazirpur industrial area (WIA) in Delhi, capital of India, is choked with small and medium enterprises, spread over a thousand plots.

Hudson () argues raising occurs in not only syntax but also semantics and general cognition and that this supports the hypothesis that language is part of general cognition. One might then expect phonological structures too to be of a sort found in general cognition, and Hudson wonders whether raising occurs also in phonology. As Tallerman () notes, many and unconvincing are the attempts to demonstrate that phenomena thought of as syntactic occur also in phonology, but a truly convincing demonstration would show that movement, normally thought quintessentially syntactic, also occurs in phonology. Raising is a kind of movement; I identify two instances of it in phonology. The first is where the genitive z ending is ‘suppressed’ when the base already has a z ending (child’s, children’s, kid’s, *kids’s, kids’). The second is a proposed phenomenon of ‘raising to onset’: I present a dependency syntagmatics for English phonology and argue that if it is to adequately account for positionally conditioned consonant allophony and if, as is plausible, weak-syllables contain no nucleus, then there must be raising to onset analogous to syntactic raising to subject.

The attentive public widely believes a false proposition, namely, that the race Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) measures unconscious bias within individuals that causes discriminatory behavior. We document how prominent social psychologists created this misconception and the field helped perpetuate it for years, while skeptics were portrayed as a small group of non-experts with questionable motives. When a group highly values a goal and leaders of the group reward commitment to that goal while marginalizing dissent, the group will often go too far before it realizes that it has gone too far. To avoid the sort of groupthink that produced the mismatch between what science now knows about the race IAT and what the public believes, social psychologists need to self-consciously embrace skepticism when evaluating claims consistent with their beliefs and values, and governing bodies need to put in place mechanisms that ensure that official pronouncements on policy issues, such as white papers and amicus briefs, are the product of rigorous and balanced reviews of the scientific evidence and its limitations.

Chapter 7 explores how the logic of UN mediation as an art produces masculinities, particularly the subjects of ‘the mediator’, ‘conflict parties’, and ‘youths’. The first part examines the narrative representations of ‘the mediator’ as a political man who should show good judgement, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be spatially mobile. ‘The mediator’ has to be empathetic and good at listening – feminised traits that operate as capital for male mediators, but less so for women. In addition, the selection process for mediators draws from the masculinised professions of diplomacy and politics and the informal, male-dominated networks of diplomats at the UN. This chapter presents descriptive findings on the gender and career backgrounds of senior UN mediators. The second part of the chapter examines representations of local men. ‘Local men’ – often equivalent to the ‘conflict parties’ – function as the constitutive outside of ‘the mediator’. ‘Conflict parties’ are represented as emotional, traditional, and irrational, recalling colonial constructions of the ‘other’. Meanwhile, male ‘youths’ appear not as political agents, but as vectors of senseless violence. Thus, a colonial hierarchy of masculinities exists in which local men are subordinate to the mediator.

This chapter studies cotorsion pairs and abelian model structures on chain complexes over additive and exact categories. Fundamental properties of the chain homotopy relation and contractible chain complexes are developed before it is shown that the category of chain complexes over any additive category is a Frobenius category. This determines an abelian model structure whose homotopy category is the classical chain homotopy category of complexes. We then examine general properties of abelian model structures on chain complexes. Formal (Quillen) homotopy categories of complexes are identified with triangulated subcategories of the classical chain homotopy category. The homotopy categories are also identified with Verdier quotients of the classical chain homotopy category. The end of the chapter constructs abelian models for derived categories. The first construction is an abelian model structure for the derived category of any exact category with coproducts, kernels, and a set of (small) projective generators. Second, it is shown how any complete hereditary cotorsion pair on a Grothendieck category lifts to a hereditary abelian model structure on the associated category of chain complexes.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

The “Tuscon 11’s” federal lawsuit continued, but the teachers lost the first round as Judge Tashima ruled in favor of the state. He was assigned to the case because the original judge in the trial was killed in the event where Arizona State Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Judge Tashima’s ruling led to an appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS) demanded a formal investigation into the rape allegations against the Precious Knowledge director.

The trial begins and despite the community divisions, everyone showed up – not necessarily in support of the MAS teachers, but in opposition to the state banning. Two important witnesses were former MAS teacher Curtis Acosta who detailed his classroom approach, and the state tried to paint him as biased due to some spoken word lyrics he wrote (e.g., calling Horne and Huppenthal “Neanderthals in need of Geritol”). The second was Maya Arce, daughter of Sean Arce and prior student plaintiff in the case, testified about the critical importance of MAS for students like her.

• ◦ This case study illustrates the difficulties a cartel can face in getting out of a price war and identifies some of the obstacles to doing so related to market circumstances. It does so by closely examining a price war that upset collusion in Québec City in 2000.

• ◦ The episode started when an independent retailer chose to defect from the collusive agreement by lowering its price so as to increase sales volume and benefit from a price-support clause it had with an upstream supplier. This act triggered a price war that caused margins to go from five cents per liter to nearly zero and which lasted almost a full year.

• ◦ Using daily station-level price data, the case study shows the price war lasted so long because it was very costly for any firm to take the lead to return to collusive prices. The root of the problem was the high price elasticity of firm demand. Raising price by only two cents per liter above neighboring prices could result in a 36 percent loss of volume. Thus, a firm raising the price to get out of the price war would experience a significant drop in sales as it waited for other firms to match its increase. This deterrent to raising price was compounded by one of the leading firms having a low-price guarantee which tied its price to the lowest price in the market.

This book comes out of my continuing research on the interrelationship between caste, Dalits, and the environment. The terminology of Dalit Ecologies is an open, collaborative space to collate insights from Dalit, backward, and anti-caste histories, socio-political thought, and movements and organizations, and to bring to light some aspects of contemporary Dalit environmental narratives. My deep interest in the subject inspired me to introduce an elective course on ‘Environment and Social Exclusion’ at Ashoka University in 2020, which proved to be very popular, and initiate an international webinar series on ‘Anti-Caste Politics and Environmental Justice’ and ‘Dalit Ecologies’ in 2020–21, organized by the Ambedkar Study Centre, Seshadripuram Evening Degree College, Bengaluru, in association with the Antiracist Research and Policy Centre, American University, Washington, DC.

My conception of Dalit Ecologies is also influenced by, and derives from, rich academic and political work in other parts of the world around ‘Black ecologies’, ‘Racial ecologies’, and ‘Feminist ecologies’, which analyse the interrelation between race, gender, and environmentalism through an interdisciplinary lens of race and gender studies, and socio-political ecology. Simultaneously, they sculpt distinct histories, stories, and approaches of racialized communities in expressing ecological relations. I draw insights from collective thinking and initiatives on ‘Global Black Ecologies’, which focus on ‘the critical insights, world-making, and world-sustaining practices of global Black communities’. While primarily Afro-diasporic in nature, they also express ‘connections to communities without recent African ancestry who have articulated political and social connections to Blackness with respect to their position within racialized national and global hierarchies, such as caste, exemplifying Achille Mbembe's conceptualization of “Becoming Black of the World”’.

The chapters are grounded in my fieldwork and visits, interviews, and conversations with Dalit, backward caste, and anti-caste people and activists, grassroots organizations and NGOs involved in Dalit issues, leaders of political parties, industrialists, and government officials – in the states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab. Dalit autobiographies, coming out from the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, have also been insinuated to comprehend the wide canvass of the subject. The chapters here include rural and urban environments; industrial, technological, and agricultural systems; developmental and anthropogenic activities; economic, political, and cultural spheres; and Dalit social and political organizations.

Once the totalitarian regime is established, various disasters are bound to recur. A totalitarian state is diagonally opposite to liberal democracy, which is characterized by prevalence of horizontal connections, the sum total of which constitute a social contract. An ideal totalitarian structure, to the contrary, is like a zero-impedance conductor: orders flow from the top to the lowest level all without any obstacle. It was this totalitarian system that enabled Mao, the charismatic leader, to use his overwhelming social support to overthrow his political rivals within the system when his authority was weakened. Like a courtly struggle, the Cultural Revolution was for the sake of Mao’s personal power, but the cost of social destruction was incomparably greater.

This chapter considers exact structures, cotorsion pairs, and ultimately exact model structures on accessible categories. It is shown that the homotopy category of a cofibrantly generated abelian model structure on an accessible exact category is well generated in the sense of Neeman.

This chapter begins with a discussion of Avishai Margalit’s misrecognition-based theory of political humiliation. For Margalit, humiliation is primarily understood as the culpable denial of self-respect. Margalit notes that political humiliation usually takes one of three forms – removing people from the human community (as when we liken them to animals), the negation of control (as in torture), and ignoring or looking through others. After providing an account of this theory, we argue that Margalit does not sufficiently consider the contagious nature of political humiliation nor the possibility that the feeling might be present even when recognition is offered or, conversely, that we might be humiliated even by those whose recognition we don’t want. We also look at the conceptual differences between humiliation, shame, and embarrassment. We note that despite these clear differences the way these emotions are experienced sometimes feels similar. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the effect of technology and, in particular, social media on the character of contemporary political humiliations.

With the Indus as a large urban Bronze Age culture, one of the key challenges driving the theory of Chapters 11 and 12 has been how to feed big cities? Intensification and centralization have underlain much of the Indus social modelling, and Chapter 13 dives into one of the big topics within this – irrigation as a system of intensification.