Abstract

Computational History, Trade in Mountain Societies, NLP – NER, Relation Extraction, Application of LLMs.

Abstract

One important reason that the British were attracted to the western Himalayas was the prospect of trade. From the eighteenth century onwards, there were regular attempts to find out the extent of the trade that was carried out through the mountains, the countries it was carried out with and the value of this trade. Whether it was the ‘missions’ of Moorcroft and Trebeck, or of the various other explorers and merchants who were either financed by the East India Company or were helped and encouraged in their personal voyages, the question of trade dominated the agenda. Until well into the nineteenth century, the British in India assumed that the control of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains would open trade routes to them into China and Russia, respectively. It was only in the mid-nineteenth century that it started becoming clear to the officials of the East India Company and the British government in London that the volume and value of trade, particularly through the Himalayan passes, was not worth the amount of military and financial commitment that was required to sustain it. It was only from this time that it is possible to discern a new discourse emerging in British accounts—both official as well as personal: that the Himalayas were a natural border of their Indian Empire. Once the British realised that the scope for trade was limited over the Himalayas, much of their efforts in the nineteenth century were spent to find the ‘natural’ land borders of their Indian Empire which they could defend, most notably from the Russian Empire. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these borders have been accepted as the geo-civilisational borders of India in much of popular imagination. Scholarly work too has implicitly accepted these ‘natural’ borders of British India, even if there is a recognition that the post-Partition, post-independence borders are clearly manmade; particularly in the last two decades or so with the emergence of focussed scholarship on this theme.

Abstract

The ontological study of Sports and our approach of using graphical representations to analyse, classify and attempt to define sports was preceded by our discovery of a rather little known fact. It is that art competitions were a part of the modern day Olympics for more than three decades, spanning from 1912 to 1948. The inclusion and the eventual exclusion of art competitions in what is today considered the citadel of sporting events caught our attention. The reason for discontinuing art competitions can be traced to the institution's emphasis on ‘amateurship’ on the part of the participants. Artists were considered established professionals whereas sports persons were considered ‘amateur gentlemen’. Although the reason to exclude did not stem from the debate if sport is an artform, the question seemed worthy of our perusal.

Abstract

The paper looks into the ideological shifts in the Major political parties in India over the first two decades of this century. This is done by analysing the election manifestos published by Political parties for the general elections held in this period. The paper places Political parties in the left-right spectrum on social, economic and political dimensions. Also, it analyses the focus given by political parties on various topics to understand the priority focusing on Labour Vs Capital, Centre Vs Periphery, Rich Vs Poor and Urban Vs Rural debates. The political parties broadly maintain their ideological stand over different subjects. We observe a reduction in the space manifestos left for Labourers and their welfare while capital is given more importance over time. Similarly, Focus is slowly shifting to Urban areas from rural areas. We argue that the shift in demographics with the burgeoning middle class and increasing Urban population has led to this ideological shift in Indian political parties. We observe that the position on federalism has become a major dividing issue among major political parties, with a stark contrast between the views of ruling and opposition parties. The focus on Social welfare schemes remains the focus for all political parties, and a significant policy shift to the Middle class at the expense of the poor is not observed.

Abstract

We, the people’ is the most popular phrase from the constitutions. In spite of the fact that the number of countries including preamble as part of their constitution has been on the rise, preambles have received scant attention in academia. The importance of preambles has been established in multiple studies yet preambles have been looked at in isolation from socio-economic-environmental contexts. Our article attempts to present a unique insight by correlating preambles with the socio-economicenvironmental and infrastructural context within which they exist. It explores whether these correlations exist and if they do with which features and to what extent and the possibility of a causal link. We pursue a statistical study between various indicators that reflect the growth of a country and the presence or absence of various elements in preambles across the world. Our study finds that correlations exist between the economic-social-environmental and infrastructural context of a nation-state and different elements in their preambles. Our study rigorously engages with patterns in development indicators across years to provide correlational insights into the role of preambles not just as a dormant reference but as active fragments of the socio-political-economic reality of a nation-state. We hope our article establishes grounds for a further study of the manner in which preambles and the nonpolitical aspects of a nation-state can engage with each other.

Abstract

The HITL paradigm has been extended as SITL (SocietyIn-The-Loop) to account for the broader role of AI in the society and vice versa. To open up these otherwise opaque systems and their nexus of interactions with humans, there is a need to make tools to program and debug the algorithmic social contract, a pact between various human stakeholders, mediated by machines. In this paper, we propose one such tool, the ESO-5W1H framework to adjudge the role of humans and machines in their respective interactions and to structure the underlying decision making process such that accountability and liability for each system action-interactions can be brought to the fore. We discuss the working of this conceptual framework in the context of three use cases: the Self-driving car, an AI-based jury, and Neural Networks

Abstract

This article attempts to look at the manner in which the leftwing in Indian politics has dealt with the globalisation of India's economy and the consequent changes in foreign policy over the two decades since 1991. The left in India opposed the new economic policies, of which globalisation was a central aspect, and worked to build a wide consensus against it within the polity. The left's opposition to globalisation was premised on the fact that it would lead to a watering-down of India's sovereignty and will lead to the imposition of economic and foreign policies that would be detrimental to the nation. Despite deep internal differences on a range of issues within the left in India, this was a shared understanding of what globalisation meant and what its consequences would be. This article looks at how the left built up its opposition to globalisation of the Indian economy and how has it steered this opposition over the two decades since. It argues that the left's analysis of both the major characteristics of globalisation as well as its consequences for India's economy and foreign policy have proved to be grossly inadequate, if not entirely erroneous. However, despite mounting evidence that globalisation was not a disaster for the Indian economy, nor did it whittle down the State's sovereignty, there was no revision in the left's analysis or political stand. The article argues that the Indian radical has been unable to come to terms with or define globalisation, and remains unsure of how to engage with it. This has led to theoretical confusions, which have opened the door to the left's hegemonisation by the idea of nationalism, to the extent where its positions often become indistinguishable from the radical right. The article concludes by suggesting that this failure to analyse and engage with globalisation has been both a symptom as well as the cause of the weakening of the leftwing in Indian politics

Abstract

News reporting is increasingly becoming an exercise in attention catching headlines1, and raising expectations which trigger sharing on social media. The proposed paper examines how conventional journalism can stay viable despite the transformations brought by rapidly changing media forms. We examine the role of human curiosity as a major contributing factor in online content navigating mechanisms such as clickbaits, listicles, and sharing behaviour on social media. As news reporting shifts online, the navigation on the internet resembles the exploration of primitive humans beyond their immediate needs. The clickbaity headlines are becoming popular with editors and readers putting pressure on news reports to ’dumbdown’. This paper will explore how evolutionary anthropology, psychology, neuroscience and sociology provide insights into the working of clickbaits: ‘how exactly do they attract viewers and why?’ It is based on a study of news reports in three mainstream Indian newspapers over one year (2014) during which an important general election was held. It studies the headlines that garner attention and analyse their morphology. We hope to use our learnings on clickbaits to see how journalism which stays true to its mandate of informing citizens and providing news can attract views and readership and thus remain viable.