On temple architecture of Chamba District and religious life of Gaddis, Indic people; a study.

The Gaddi of North India are agro-pastoralists who rear sheep and goats following a seasonal migration around the first Himalayan range. While studies on pastoralists have focused either on the pastoralists’ adaptation to their physical environment or treated the environment from a symbolic perspective, this book offers a new, holistic perspective that analyzes the ways in which people “make” place. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book not only describes a contemporary understanding of the Gaddi’s engagement with the environment but also analyzes religious practices and performances of social relations, as well as media practices and notions of aesthetics. Thereby, the landscape in which the Gaddi live is understood as a network of places that is constantly being built and rebuilt through these local practices. The book contributes to the growing interest in approaches of practice within environmental anthropology.

The Preparation Of The Chamba Gazeteer Was Commenced In 1903 By H.A. Rose. Largely Aided By Dr. J. Hutchison, Of The Church Of Scotland Mission, Chamba, A Mass Of Material Of Text Was Collected. Dr. Hutchison Revised The Text And The Present Work Is The Result Of His Labours.

No Where Else In India The Costumes And Ornaments Of The Tribal Are So Exotic, Colourful And Divergent As In Chamba In Himachal Pradesh. 90 Coloured And Black & White Photographs Of Various Costumes And Ornaments Are Included In This Book.

This Gazetteer Consists Of The Settlement Reports, And A Draft Gazetteer Compiled Between The Years 1870 And 1874 By F. Cunningham. This Edition Has Been Revised By Colonels Jenkins And Harcourt And By Messrs. A. Anderson And L. Dane.

This volume explores the dialogic relationship between myths and places in the historically, geographically, and culturally diverse context of India. Given its ambiguous relationship with ‘facts’ and empirical reality, myth has suffered an uncertain status in the field of professional history, with the latter’s preference for scientifism over more creative orders of representation. Myths and Places rehabilitates myth, not as history’s primeval ‘Other’, nor as an instrument of socio-religious propagation, but as communitarian mechanisms by which societies made sense of themselves and their world. It argues that myths helped communities fashion their identities and their habitat/habitus, and were fashioned by these in turn. This book explores diverse forms of territorial becoming and belonging in a grassroots approach from across India, studying them in culturally sensitive ways to recover local life-worlds and their self-understanding. Further, challenging the stereotypical bracketing of the mythical with the sacred and the material with the historical, the multidisciplinary essays in the book examine myth in relation to not only religion but other historical phenomena such as ecology, ethnicity, urbanism, mercantilism, migration, politics, tourism, art, philosophy, performance, and the everyday. This book will be of interest to scholars and general readers of Indian history, regional studies, cultural geography, mythology, religious studies, and anthropology.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.