000			03040nam a22002297a 4500
005			20240605115945.0
008			240605b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9781421438740
028			_a: Brijwasi Book Distributors _b: H-87, Lalita Park, Laxmi Nagar, Delhi _c: BW/00018 _d; 26/05/2024
082			_a934.3 CHA
100			_aChakrabarti, Pratik.
245			_aInscriptions of nature _b: geology and the naturalization of antiquity. _c/ Pratik Chakrabarti.
260			_a, Baltimore _b: John Hopkins University Press _c, 2020.
300			_axii,263p. _c: 24cm.
365			_b4098
520			_aWinner of the BSHS Pickstone Prize by the British Society for the History of Science, Shortlisted for the Pfizer Award for an Outstanding Book in the History of Science by the History of Science Society In the nineteenth century, teams of men began digging the earth like never before. Sometimes this digging―often for sewage, transport, or minerals―revealed human remains. Other times, archaeological excavation of ancient cities unearthed prehistoric fossils, while excavations for irrigation canals revealed buried cities. Concurrently, geologists, ethnologists, archaeologists, and missionaries were also digging into ancient texts and genealogies and delving into the lives and bodies of indigenous populations, their myths, legends, and pasts. One pursuit was intertwined with another in this encounter with the earth and its inhabitants―past, present, and future. In Inscriptions of Nature, Pratik Chakrabarti argues that, in both the real and the metaphorical digging of the earth, the deep history of nature, landscape, and people became indelibly inscribed in the study and imagination of antiquity. The first book to situate deep history as an expression of political, economic, and cultural power, this volume shows that it is complicit in the European and colonial appropriation of global nature, commodities, temporalities, and myths. The book also provides a new interpretation of the relationship between nature and history. Arguing that the deep history of the earth became pervasive within historical imaginations of monuments, communities, and territories in the nineteenth century, Chakrabarti studies these processes in the Indian subcontinent, from the banks of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers to the Himalayas to the deep ravines and forests of central India. He also examines associated themes of Hindu antiquarianism, sacred geographies, and tribal aboriginality. Based on extensive archival research, the book provides insights into state formation, mining of natural resources, and the creation of national topographies. Driven by the geological imagination of India as well as its landscape, people, past, and destiny, Inscriptions of Nature reveals how human evolution, myths, aboriginality, and colonial state formation fundamentally defined Indian antiquity.
650			_aGeology
650			_aNaturalization
650			_aAntiquity Nature
700			_aPratik Chakrabarti.
942			_cBOOK
999			_c61809 _d61809