Prachi Deshpande
Biographic Data
| ID | 1249182 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Prachi Deshpande |
| GIVEN NAMES | Prachi |
| FAMILY NAME | Deshpande |
| SIGNATURE | DESHPANDE P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-8534-9067 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Crisis of the Professoriate
Remaking Marathi: Modern Histories of Language and V. L. Bhave’s Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat
This chapter critically examines Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat (1898), by Vinayak Lakshman (V. L.) Bhave, the first comprehensive history of Marathi literature. Several regional languages across the subcontinent—glossed as deshī languages or deshbhāṣhā—were located in history via literary histories or historical linguistics over the later 19th century. Such pioneering narratives were crucial for assembling the literary field within particular languages an…
The Marathi Kaulnāmā: Property, Sovereignty and Documentation in a Persianate Form
Kaulnāmā s were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste …
The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India
This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste grou…
The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India
The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857
The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian woma…
Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960
The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a variety of political projects including anticolonial/Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and …
Caste as Maratha: Social categories, colonial policy and identity in early twentieth-century Maharashtra
In the light of recent scholarship emphasising the historicity of caste, this article tracks the transformation of the category 'Maratha' from its precolonial register as a military ethos to that ofa caste in the early twentieth century. Surveying the category's genealogy in non-Brahman literature and colonial ethnographic writings and policy, it argues that this caste-based register of 'Maratha' was shaped through a complex, interactive process …
The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857
The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian woma…
Caste as Maratha: Social categories, colonial policy and identity in early twentieth-century Maharashtra
In the light of recent scholarship emphasising the historicity of caste, this article tracks the transformation of the category 'Maratha' from its precolonial register as a military ethos to that ofa caste in the early twentieth century. Surveying the category's genealogy in non-Brahman literature and colonial ethnographic writings and policy, it argues that this caste-based register of 'Maratha' was shaped through a complex, interactive process …
The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India
This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste grou…
The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India
The Marathi Kaulnāmā: Property, Sovereignty and Documentation in a Persianate Form
Kaulnāmā s were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste …
Caste as Maratha: Social categories, colonial policy and identity in early twentieth-century Maharashtra
In the light of recent scholarship emphasising the historicity of caste, this article tracks the transformation of the category 'Maratha' from its precolonial register as a military ethos to that ofa caste in the early twentieth century. Surveying the category's genealogy in non-Brahman literature and colonial ethnographic writings and policy, it argues that this caste-based register of 'Maratha' was shaped through a complex, interactive process …
Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960
The "Maratha period" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when an independent Maratha state successfully resisted the Mughals, is a defining era in the history of the region of Maharashtra in western India. In this book, Prachi Deshpande considers the importance of this period for a variety of political projects including anticolonial/Hindu nationalism and the non-Brahman movement, as well as popular debates throughout the nineteenth and …
The Making of an Indian Nationalist Archive: Lakshmibai, Jhansi, and 1857
The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian woma…
The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India
The writerly self: Literacy, discipline and codes of conduct in early modern western India
This article examines Marathi discourses of good writing from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Critical scholarship on literacy has highlighted reading and writing as historically situated practices, with complex interactions with orality. South Asian historiography on early modern scribal practices has also addressed the expansion of state power, regional historical imaginations, literary cultures and the sociology of scribal caste grou…
The Marathi Kaulnāmā: Property, Sovereignty and Documentation in a Persianate Form
Kaulnāmā s were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste …
Remaking Marathi: Modern Histories of Language and V. L. Bhave’s Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat
This chapter critically examines Mahārāṣhṭra Sāraswat (1898), by Vinayak Lakshman (V. L.) Bhave, the first comprehensive history of Marathi literature. Several regional languages across the subcontinent—glossed as deshī languages or deshbhāṣhā—were located in history via literary histories or historical linguistics over the later 19th century. Such pioneering narratives were crucial for assembling the literary field within particular languages an…
A Crisis of the Professoriate
History (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Linguistics (4 works) · Literature (4 works)