 |
| |
|
Pinch, William R.
Chair, History
History Department
Professor of History
History Department
860.685.2399
Public Affairs Center 323
BA University of Virginia
MA University of Virginia
PHD University of Virginia
|
EMAIL:
|
wpinch@wesleyan.edu
|
WESLEYAN PO BOX:
|
History Department
|
COURSES TAUGHT THIS SEMESTER:
|
HIST285 - 01
|
RESEARCH INTERESTS:
|
My early work was on social, political, and religious change in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. More recently I have turned to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the life and death of the emperor Akbar. I'm especially interested in how changing religious understandings in India informed both Mughal and British imperialism. Another ongoing project is on the history of 1857, focusing in particular on figures who were crucial to the unfolding of the Mutiny at Meerut.
Previous books:
Speaking of Peasants: Essays in Indian History and Politics in Honor of Walter Hauser (New Delhi: Manohar, 2008). This is a festschrift volume that I edited, based mostly on papers delivered at a conference held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1997. Many of the original 'Hauserfest' papers that ended up in the volume may be read at this website at the University of Virginia: http://www.virginia.edu/soasia/symsem/kisan/zindabad.html (the website also includes some entertaining photos of the festivities; sadly, four of those pictured are no longer with us). Walter, who is now Professor Emeritus in History at the University of Virginia, mentored many students during his three-plus decades of teaching, and I was lucky to be one of them.
Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006; http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521851688 ). Though this book was centered for narrative purposes on the career of the 18th-century warlord, Anupgiri Gosain (a.k.a 'Himmat Bahadur'), it is really about religious transformation since about 1500 and how that shaped statecraft, military culture, and law under Mughal and British rule. One important strand of the argument is that north Indian bhakti 'devotionalist' reform from about the fifteenth century onward included a wide-ranging critique of the 'killing ascetic', and that that bhakti critique was harnessed to Company governance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Researching the book gave me the opportunity to visit out-of-the-way places in Bundelkhand, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh, including villages and towns like Moth, Banda, Rasdhan, Kulpahar, and Sivarajpur. These places don't mean much today but (I argue) mattered enormously in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the Mughal was morphing into the British Empire.
Peasants and Monks in British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996; http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6608.html ). This book was based on my Ph.D. thesis from the University of Virginia. I found (and still find) the lives of ascetics -- sadhus, yogis, fakirs, sanyasis, etc. -- intriguing, especially insofar as they inform broader social and political critiques. In this book I was especially interested in how controversies that erupted among ascetic orders related to changes in popular religious culture in the countryside, and how religious language and networks served to structure the unfolding of nationalist and anti-British politics in the first half of the twentieth century. One interesting element of the story is the official anxiety produced by the emerging figure of the 'political sadhu' (a term that comes right out of government intelligence briefings in Bihar Province) in the early twentieth century, and the ways in which religious ascetics used religion to their advantage in forwarding their own agrarian political and social agendas. Much of this religio-political behavior flew below the radar of national figures like Nehru and Jinnah but, I argue, informed Mohandas K. Gandhi's political style and the way 'the Mahatma' was perceived in turn by both Britons and Indians in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.
|
AREAS OF EXPERTISE:
|
South Asia;
British Empire;
Mughal Empire;
Religion and History
|
ACADEMIC ASSOCIATIONS:
|
Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient Editor, South Asia (with Jos Gommans)
http://www.brill.nl/jesh
|
OFFICE HOURS:
|
Fall 2009: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday 2-4.
|
GRANTS:
|
NEH, Fulbright-Hays, ACLS-SSRC, FLAS, AIIS, Meigs
|
| |
![[Wesleyan University]](http://www.wesleyan.edu/templates/utilities/navbar_2009/logo.gif "Wesleyan University front door"){kind=logo}
