Situated in the wider context of rapidly urbanizing India, this paper examines the changing conditions of local governance from the vantage point of villages located on the periphery of Chennai. Through the frame of contingency, the paper explores the challenges that urban growth and state rescaling strategies visit on peripheral villages, capturing core aspects of the peripheral condition, including the contingent agency of local governments and the risk of annexation. With its analytical focus on local sources of knowledge-budgets, village council decision-making as well as subjectivities expressed by residents-this study seeks to nuance dominant representations of urban peripheries that emphasize their role in strategies of capital accumulation. The comparative analysis of local finances in selected villages provides a window onto forms of knowledge that shape governance practices and reveals the profoundly uneven effects produced by urban development, notably concerning tax revenues. The findings converge to depict local governance as increasingly complex, multiscalar and contingent; villages continue to enjoy a degree of independence in the running of their everyday affairs, yet find their authority increasingly challenged by the territorial designs of more powerful state and non-state actors.
This essay offers a historical treatment of the Tashrīḥ al-Aqwām (‘ An Account of the Peoples ’, 1825). Commissioned and perhaps partly authored by the famous mercenary, patron of arts, and landlord Col. James Skinner (1778–1841), the text details the origins and customs of several communities of north-western India. The present essay identifies some possible contributors to the collaborative, multilingual project of the Tashrīḥ ’s production. Combining close readings of the text with art-historical evidence, information from Skinner’s papers and from the East India Company archives, it situates the work as a locally-grounded commentary on the social flux of its authors’ times.
This research advances our understanding of peri-urban dynamics in the Global South through an innovative comparative socio-spatial analytics approach combining geospatial and qualitative fieldwork-based methods. Drawing on three cases in China, Ghana and India, the comparison is operationalized through two pairs of conceptual lenses developed inductively. We argue that heterogeneous peri-urban morphologies in the Global South, which share several common features, notably fragmentation and bypass, albeit with differing degrees, are shaped by three key processes: (1) market- and speculation-driven property development; (2) state-led development strategies, often expressed through large-scale projects; and (3) fragmented planning and development practices.
Despite -- or perhaps because of -- their simplicity, n-grams, or contiguous sequences of tokens, have been used with great success in computational linguistics since their introduction in the late 20th century. Recast as k-mers, or contiguous sequences of monomers, they have also found applications in computational biology. When applied to the analysis of texts, n-grams usually take the form of sequences of words. But if we try to apply this model to the analysis of Sanskrit texts, we are faced with the arduous task of, firstly, resolving sandhi to split a phrase into words, and, secondly, splitting long compounds into their components. This paper presents a simpler method of tokenizing a Sanskrit text for n-grams, by using n-aksaras, or contiguous sequences of aksaras. This model reduces the need for sandhi resolution, making it much easier to use on raw text. It is also possible to use this model on Sanskrit-adjacent texts, e.g., a Tamil commentary on a Sanskrit text. As a test case, the commentaries on Amarakosa 1.0.1 have been modelled as n-aksaras, showing patterns of text reuse across ten centuries and nine languages. Some initial observations are made concerning Buddhist commentarial practices.
