Recent Trends in History- Essays in Honour of Prof. Rekha Pande

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The present volume on history and inter disciplinarily is conceived to be a volume that responds to the current demands and addresses, voices from many different disciplines and also the fields of history. Keeping in mind the diverse voices that have come up in the law few decades, one cannot remain complacent to these new concerns that have significantly altered the scope of history. Thus the traditional branches of history like political history, social history, economic history, history of religions have to deal with newer branches like environment history, history of medicine, history of gender, and also new off shoot to these traditional branches that straddle an inter-disciplinarity like history of the body, history and performativity etc. When the field is awash with these new domains of enquiry there is no option other than to open up the field to these new areas.

Initially trend as a medievalist who worked on 'Issues of succession in the Delhi Sultanate', Prof. Rekha Pande moved on to issues of Religion, specializing on the Bhakti Movement. This led her to an analysis of the Lives of the Women saint in the Medieval India. Her subsequent researches in these areas are informed by a bent towards the Gender issues. One of the problems facing the Historians of Medieval period who was interested in the areas of gender, that was a fledgling subject for medievalists in the 1980 and 1990's was the challenge of coming to terms with the contemporary issues and concerns in gender and how to address the same in medieval period. The first and foremost of these challenges was a question of dealing with modern categories and transporting them a few centuries back in time. Many issues like patriarchy etc. Were finding mentioned in the medieval sources regularly. However, the problem is that the patriarchy of today is very different from the patriarchy of the medieval world, where feudal world was dominant ideology not the capitalism. While modern days question of gender are address to the global audiences universally subsumed under capitalism, the medieval world was neither universalistic nor global. Many mainstreams historians therefore quickly rejected these modern trends as in applicable to the pre modern world and refused to entertain such approaches. In contrast to these traditional historians, many newer historians realized not only the challenges but also the opportunities and therefore embarked on this field. Prof. Rekha also followed this novel approach and tried to integrate these new areas with the study of history.

**Contents and Sample Pages**