Pushkar Sohoni
Biographic Data
| ID | 705967 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Pushkar Sohoni |
| GIVEN NAMES | Pushkar |
| FAMILY NAME | Sohoni |
| SIGNATURE | SOHONI P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2007-8561 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A Critical Analysis of an Architectural Heritage Site as a Filming Location Through Heritage Impact Assessments: The Case of Amber Palace, Rajasthan, India
The phenomenon of using architectural heritage sites as filming locations results in multi-faceted effects. Its overall study, particularly in the underexplored context of India, is the authors’ broader ongoing research. This article, as a part of this study, using heritage impact assessment methods, identifies and measures the phenomenon’s beneficial and detrimental impacts through the case study of Amber Palace, Rajasthan. Along with its known …
Paṭṭā: The Maratha sword
On 19th February 2024, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the coronation of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the government of the modern state of Maharashtra in India announced that the paṭṭā would be declared as the state weapon. The relationship between this regional ruler, the gauntlet sword, and the modern state are explored in this essay. The history of this weapon, and why it is so integral to the ethnic identity of the Marathas are examined
Llamas Beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World
Creating an Ecumene: Cultural, Economic, and Social Boundaries of the Deccan Sultanates
A notional region was fashioned by the rulers of the sixteenth-century Deccan; they used cultural, economic, social, and urban organisations to define the region. In the choices they made about minting currency, marital alliances, or the distribution and scale of mosques, they defined their region. The sixteenth-century Deccan was known for geographical and social mobility, with people from several places around the Indian Ocean littoral. But the…
A Story Without Architecture: The Mythical Origins of Mumbai
Stories that explain the origins of cities are often memorialised in architectural or natural monuments. Often, these man-made or natural formations are created or imagined respectively, to suit a particular narrative. In the case of Mumbai, the story of the city goddess Mumbadevi is central to the early imagined history of the city. Her canonical story is a relatively late creation, representing a literary and religious solution in the absence o…
Cultural Translation and Linguistic Equivalence: Persian–Marathi Bilingual Inscriptions
Bilingual inscriptions in Marathi and Persian are known through the period of the Deccan sultanates. This paper investigates whether the inscriptional programs, usually with Persian as the dominant language, can provide greater cultural context and meaning to processes such as translation and multilingualism in the period. Bi- and multi-lingual inscriptions are intended usually for public display and demonstrate the relative prestige and power of…
Memorials of Sovereignty: Funerary Architecture of the Siddis of Janjira at Khokri (Maharashtra)
Sohoni Pushkar. Memorials of Sovereignty: Funerary Architecture of the Siddis of Janjira at Khokri (Maharashtra). In: Arts asiatiques, tome 74, 2019. pp. 149-156
Notice. An Unpublished Inscription from the Fort of Ahmadnagar
The fort of Ahmadnagar is important in the Sultanate history of the Deccan. There is no published epigraphic evidence regarding its construction. This notice concerns an inscription that has hitherto gone unnoticed, and which mentions the rebuilding of the fort in stone
Colonial and postcolonial debates about polygraphia in Marathi
The Marathi language has historically had digraphia and certainly in the period of the eighteenth century when the Maratha confederacy was at its greatest. While the debate between the uses of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing in the nineteenth century, the fast changing social and political landscapes lent their own weight to the discourse. In just 150 years, the war was won by D…
Imbrication and Implication
The independent Maratha kingdom of Chhatrapati Shivaji was founded in the mid-seventeenth century, when the sultanates of the Deccan were defending against the expansionist Mughal empire. The Mughals slowly anchored themselves in the Deccan, and the kingdom of the Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagar was finally subdued in 1636, a decade after the death of Malik Ambar. Over the next half century, as the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahs of Golconda f…
Building history: Historiography of architectural history in South Asia
Architectural history informed the colonial government in their creation of an Indian empire, helped the self‐fashioning of the princely states, and eventually became the source of national narratives for the countries of India and Pakistan as they were carved from British India. The historiography of architecture in South Asia is therefore significant as a tool to understand political processes. Several studies on architecture in South Asia are …
Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration
The domestication and use of animals is an integral part of the history of technology, as beasts were used to improve the efficiency of agricultural, military, and transportation activities. Individuals and social groups often had to be introduced along with animal technologies, as the domestication, breeding, training, and handling of animals was a culture that could not be immediately learned. In the age of European empires, several ethnic grou…
The Non-issue of Coinage: The Monetary Policies of the Post-Bahmani Sultanates
In the medieval world of Islamic kingdoms, the Friday sermon in the name of the reigning sultan ( khutba ) and the striking of coins ( sikka ) have been thought of as universal declarations of sovereignty. Yet, the sultanates of the Deccan that succeeded the Bahmani kingdom did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status. Therefore, two important issues are present here. First, the axiom of sovereign s…
Script and identity – the politics of writing in South Asia: An introduction
This essay gives an overview of the complex relationships between language, script, and identity in various speech communities across South Asia. South Asia hosts a great number of languages, whose written forms play an important role in the formation of their speakers’ identity. Apart from polygraphia, i.e. several scripts for one language, and the phenomenon of one script being shared by several languages, some scripts have been assigned or ass…
Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat
Previous articleNext article FreeOld fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combatPushkar SohoniPushkar SohoniPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor over a millennium in South Asia, the visual trope of a triumphant lion vanquishing one or several elephants has been common in architectural sculpture, both in the round and in r…
Marathi of a Single Type: The demise of the Modi script
While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion-the core of today…
Vernacular as a space: Writing in the Deccan
This is not an essay about mysticism in the Deccan. The aim is neither to track the movement of holy men and cults into the Deccan, nor the expansion of their networks and the creation of sacred geographies; this essay is also not about the comparative textual and spiritual discourses of saints from different sects. Instead, the attempt here is to suggest that every geographical region had a complex world of religious domains and of life-worlds i…
Elephants and kings: An environmental history, by Thomas R. Trautmann
At some level, it is intuitive to associate elephants and power together, particularly in the context of the history of South Asia, where elephants appear as literary tropes, religious symbols and
Paper documents and copper-plates: Localization of Hegemonic Practices
This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The …
From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds: Responses to Gunpowder in the Early Modern Deccan
Architectural responses to improved gunpowder technologies reached a conclusion in the sixteenth-century Deccan. Instead of constructing heavier defences, most urban settlements were disaggregated into military and administrative strongholds vis-à-vis civilian and mercantile cities by the seventeenth century. Changing economic and social conditions allowed for this separation of urban functions. The response to military revolutions was therefore …
Script and identity – the politics of writing in South Asia: An introduction
This essay gives an overview of the complex relationships between language, script, and identity in various speech communities across South Asia. South Asia hosts a great number of languages, whose written forms play an important role in the formation of their speakers’ identity. Apart from polygraphia, i.e. several scripts for one language, and the phenomenon of one script being shared by several languages, some scripts have been assigned or ass…
Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration
The domestication and use of animals is an integral part of the history of technology, as beasts were used to improve the efficiency of agricultural, military, and transportation activities. Individuals and social groups often had to be introduced along with animal technologies, as the domestication, breeding, training, and handling of animals was a culture that could not be immediately learned. In the age of European empires, several ethnic grou…
Marathi of a Single Type: The demise of the Modi script
While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion-the core of today…
Paper documents and copper-plates: Localization of Hegemonic Practices
This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The …
From Defended Settlements to Fortified Strongholds: Responses to Gunpowder in the Early Modern Deccan
Architectural responses to improved gunpowder technologies reached a conclusion in the sixteenth-century Deccan. Instead of constructing heavier defences, most urban settlements were disaggregated into military and administrative strongholds vis-à-vis civilian and mercantile cities by the seventeenth century. Changing economic and social conditions allowed for this separation of urban functions. The response to military revolutions was therefore …
Vernacular as a space: Writing in the Deccan
This is not an essay about mysticism in the Deccan. The aim is neither to track the movement of holy men and cults into the Deccan, nor the expansion of their networks and the creation of sacred geographies; this essay is also not about the comparative textual and spiritual discourses of saints from different sects. Instead, the attempt here is to suggest that every geographical region had a complex world of religious domains and of life-worlds i…
Elephants and kings: An environmental history, by Thomas R. Trautmann
At some level, it is intuitive to associate elephants and power together, particularly in the context of the history of South Asia, where elephants appear as literary tropes, religious symbols and
Paper documents and copper-plates: Localization of Hegemonic Practices
This paper examines the social currency of copper-plate charters on the basis of Persian copper-plates from the Deccan. Indic religious systems have a long tradition of conferring land grants using this medium, partially rooted in beliefs of metaphysical qualities attributed to metals. The objects from this region are highly unusual because there are no other recorded instances of a sultan issuing or authorizing land grants on copper-plates. The …
Script and identity – the politics of writing in South Asia: An introduction
This essay gives an overview of the complex relationships between language, script, and identity in various speech communities across South Asia. South Asia hosts a great number of languages, whose written forms play an important role in the formation of their speakers’ identity. Apart from polygraphia, i.e. several scripts for one language, and the phenomenon of one script being shared by several languages, some scripts have been assigned or ass…
Old fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combat
Previous articleNext article FreeOld fights, new meanings: Lions and elephants in combatPushkar SohoniPushkar SohoniPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFor over a millennium in South Asia, the visual trope of a triumphant lion vanquishing one or several elephants has been common in architectural sculpture, both in the round and in r…
Marathi of a Single Type: The demise of the Modi script
While the debates about the use of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing, the fast-changing social and political landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lent their own weight to the discourse. The debates about the writing system became the venue for various competing social forces and political movements. The issues of region, caste, class, and religion-the core of today…
Colonial and postcolonial debates about polygraphia in Marathi
The Marathi language has historically had digraphia and certainly in the period of the eighteenth century when the Maratha confederacy was at its greatest. While the debate between the uses of a single script for rendering the Marathi language became relevant only after the advent of printing in the nineteenth century, the fast changing social and political landscapes lent their own weight to the discourse. In just 150 years, the war was won by D…
Imbrication and Implication
The independent Maratha kingdom of Chhatrapati Shivaji was founded in the mid-seventeenth century, when the sultanates of the Deccan were defending against the expansionist Mughal empire. The Mughals slowly anchored themselves in the Deccan, and the kingdom of the Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagar was finally subdued in 1636, a decade after the death of Malik Ambar. Over the next half century, as the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahs of Golconda f…
Building history: Historiography of architectural history in South Asia
Architectural history informed the colonial government in their creation of an Indian empire, helped the self‐fashioning of the princely states, and eventually became the source of national narratives for the countries of India and Pakistan as they were carved from British India. The historiography of architecture in South Asia is therefore significant as a tool to understand political processes. Several studies on architecture in South Asia are …
Translocated Colonial Subjects in Collaboration
The domestication and use of animals is an integral part of the history of technology, as beasts were used to improve the efficiency of agricultural, military, and transportation activities. Individuals and social groups often had to be introduced along with animal technologies, as the domestication, breeding, training, and handling of animals was a culture that could not be immediately learned. In the age of European empires, several ethnic grou…
The Non-issue of Coinage: The Monetary Policies of the Post-Bahmani Sultanates
In the medieval world of Islamic kingdoms, the Friday sermon in the name of the reigning sultan ( khutba ) and the striking of coins ( sikka ) have been thought of as universal declarations of sovereignty. Yet, the sultanates of the Deccan that succeeded the Bahmani kingdom did not strike their own coins for almost a century after they had declared sovereign status. Therefore, two important issues are present here. First, the axiom of sovereign s…
Memorials of Sovereignty: Funerary Architecture of the Siddis of Janjira at Khokri (Maharashtra)
Sohoni Pushkar. Memorials of Sovereignty: Funerary Architecture of the Siddis of Janjira at Khokri (Maharashtra). In: Arts asiatiques, tome 74, 2019. pp. 149-156
Notice. An Unpublished Inscription from the Fort of Ahmadnagar
The fort of Ahmadnagar is important in the Sultanate history of the Deccan. There is no published epigraphic evidence regarding its construction. This notice concerns an inscription that has hitherto gone unnoticed, and which mentions the rebuilding of the fort in stone
Cultural Translation and Linguistic Equivalence: Persian–Marathi Bilingual Inscriptions
Bilingual inscriptions in Marathi and Persian are known through the period of the Deccan sultanates. This paper investigates whether the inscriptional programs, usually with Persian as the dominant language, can provide greater cultural context and meaning to processes such as translation and multilingualism in the period. Bi- and multi-lingual inscriptions are intended usually for public display and demonstrate the relative prestige and power of…
Creating an Ecumene: Cultural, Economic, and Social Boundaries of the Deccan Sultanates
A notional region was fashioned by the rulers of the sixteenth-century Deccan; they used cultural, economic, social, and urban organisations to define the region. In the choices they made about minting currency, marital alliances, or the distribution and scale of mosques, they defined their region. The sixteenth-century Deccan was known for geographical and social mobility, with people from several places around the Indian Ocean littoral. But the…
A Story Without Architecture: The Mythical Origins of Mumbai
Stories that explain the origins of cities are often memorialised in architectural or natural monuments. Often, these man-made or natural formations are created or imagined respectively, to suit a particular narrative. In the case of Mumbai, the story of the city goddess Mumbadevi is central to the early imagined history of the city. Her canonical story is a relatively late creation, representing a literary and religious solution in the absence o…
A Critical Analysis of an Architectural Heritage Site as a Filming Location Through Heritage Impact Assessments: The Case of Amber Palace, Rajasthan, India
The phenomenon of using architectural heritage sites as filming locations results in multi-faceted effects. Its overall study, particularly in the underexplored context of India, is the authors’ broader ongoing research. This article, as a part of this study, using heritage impact assessment methods, identifies and measures the phenomenon’s beneficial and detrimental impacts through the case study of Amber Palace, Rajasthan. Along with its known …
Paṭṭā: The Maratha sword
On 19th February 2024, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the coronation of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the government of the modern state of Maharashtra in India announced that the paṭṭā would be declared as the state weapon. The relationship between this regional ruler, the gauntlet sword, and the modern state are explored in this essay. The history of this weapon, and why it is so integral to the ethnic identity of the Marathas are examined
Llamas Beyond the Andes: Untold Histories of Camelids in the Modern World
History (16 works) · History (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Law (10 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (10 works) · Ancient history (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Law (8 works)