Aims and scope
The journal publishes research on India — its society, politics, economy, environment, education, culture, history, texts, thought and heritage — in any period, from the earliest evidence to the present day.
What we mean by India
The map belongs to the period under study. Before the partitions of the twentieth century the modern borders did not exist, so for any period before 1947 India means the subcontinent as it then was: Gandhāra, Sindh, Punjab, Bengal and the rest are within scope wherever that ground falls today. A paper is placed by the territory its evidence comes from and the period it works in, never by the passport that territory now carries.
From 1947 the journal's subject is the Republic of India. Work on Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal or Sri Lanka after that date belongs here when it bears on India — a partitioned district, a shared river, a migration, a comparison that settles something on the Indian side — and not when it does not.
What we are particularly interested in
Work that begins with a question about India today and looks for its answer in the historical record. The questions worth asking are the ones whose answers are not already settled: why vegetarian diet spread as widely as it did and what in the evidence accounts for it; why a district's water is governed the way it is; why one community sends its daughters to school and its neighbour does not.
Papers of that kind are read first and lead each issue.
Write it your way
The journal's subject is how Indian society changes and what keeps it from changing. You may study it in any design: a survey, fieldwork, an archive, a set of texts or inscriptions, a policy, a court's rulings, a site. A paper may follow one community at one moment or trace a change across centuries. What we ask is that every paper can answer five questions, and that you answer them yourself, in a few sentences, in the Transformation Notes that go after your abstract and are published with your article.
Transformation Notes
- Who and where? Which people (a community, a group, an institution), and where in India.
- When? The years or the period your evidence comes from.
- What moved, or what held? What changed, or what stayed the same despite pressure to change: a law, a programme, migration, the market, a reform movement, a new technology.
- Why? The reasons, or the mechanism, that your evidence shows.
- So what? What follows for the people you studied, for policy or practice, or for the next study.
Most good papers on Indian society already answer the first four; few say plainly what follows. The fifth question is the one we add, because it is how research reaches the society it studies. How to write them, with an example.
Two lengths
Three common kinds of paper. You may write in any design; most papers we expect are one of these.
- A study of change — what moved: the same people or place at two or more moments, and why they differ. A research article.
- A study of a mechanism — what held: how something is kept in place, or brought about, by what people do; for example, how marriage, schooling, land or the vote keep caste. A research article.
- A research note — a careful description of a state at a stated time and place, so that others can measure change against it.
Each kind, with three published examples to read and Transformation Notes worked for a study of change and for a study of a mechanism, is in Writing for the journal.
Research article: 6,000–10,000 words. Research note: 4,000–5,000 words — a careful description that establishes the state of something at a stated time and place, so that others can measure change against it. Its notes answer the third question by saying what change or persistence it lets someone study.
Texts, manuscripts, ideas and excavated sites belong here for what they tell us about the people behind them.
What we do not publish
- Work with no Indian material in it.
- Description that asks no question and gives nothing another scholar can use: a summary of a text, an opinion survey with no stated method, a list of a scheme's achievements.
- Work that stays inside a text, a doctrine or a site and never reaches the people behind it — a critical edition with no account of who used the text, a theory of inference that nobody is shown to have held or used, a pottery sequence with no reading of the society that made it.
- Reports, literature reviews, and thesis chapters not rewritten as articles.
- Anything already published elsewhere, including in conference proceedings.
The test
- Is it about India? In the sense set out above.
- Does it ask a question about Indian society and answer it with evidence, and do its Transformation Notes answer all five questions in ways the paper supports?
- Is it about society? In how people live, work, believe, learn, heal, are ranked or are governed. Ideas, texts, objects and sites are evidence; the journal's subject is what they tell us about people.
Notes that are missing or incomplete are not a reason to decline: the office returns the paper to you to complete them. Not sure? Read Is my paper in scope? and the guide Writing for the journal (PDF), or send a proposal through the submission page: the editorial office replies within seven days.
Periods
All of them. Ancient, early medieval, Sultanate, Mughal, colonial, post-independence and contemporary. The century a paper works in is not a criterion; whether it explains something is.
What each subject area covers
The nine areas are wide on purpose. The examples below are not a complete list; they are there so that nobody has to guess whether their field belongs. In every area the question is the same: what does the work tell us about society, and how it changed?
| Education and learning | Schools and curriculum, teachers and teacher training, universities, vocational and skill training, adult literacy, girls' education, first-generation learners, madrasa and religious education, language of instruction. |
|---|---|
| Society, community and welfare | Caste, Dalit studies and Ambedkarite thought, Adivasi communities, gender, family and kinship, religion and society, migration, labour and informal work, poverty and welfare schemes, urban life, Northeast India, Kashmir and the Himalaya. |
| Health and wellbeing | Public and community health, maternal and child health, mental health, nutrition, water and sanitation, health systems, Ayurveda and other healing traditions. |
| Governance, economy and livelihoods | Panchayats and local government, public policy and administration, agrarian change, land rights, cooperatives and credit, employment and informal work, public finance, courts and legal institutions, economic data and the census. |
| Politics, law and the state | Elections and parties, the Constitution, federalism, citizenship, nationalism, Partition and its afterlives, social movements, human rights, secularism, borders and foreign policy, Indian political thought and political theory. |
| Culture, media and the arts | Cinema, television and popular culture, music, dance and theatre, crafts and textiles, visual arts, festivals and public ritual, pilgrimage and sacred geography, print culture and the book, sport, digital media. |
| Environment and natural resources | Rivers, groundwater and irrigation, forests, wildlife, coasts and fisheries, climate, energy, mining, pastoralism, pollution, disasters, and environmental history. |
| Languages and textual traditions | Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and Gandhari; Vedic, Buddhist, Jain and Puranic literature; Persian, Arabic and Indo-Persian sources; Tamil, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and the other literatures of India. Indian philosophy of every school — Buddhist, Jain, Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā, Cārvāka and modern thinkers — and religious studies, read for what these ideas did in society. Manuscripts and who copied, read and used them; scripts and palaeography, language and linguistics, and translation, where they show how communities spoke, wrote and were connected. |
| History, archaeology and heritage | Every period, from prehistory and the Indus civilisation to post-independence India. Archaeology — excavation and survey, Buddhist sites, Gandhāra, epigraphy and inscriptions, numismatics — read for how people lived, worked, traded, worshipped and were ruled, and how that changed. Art history and iconography, architecture, museums and archives, heritage conservation and the communities around sites, oral history, the history of science and medicine, maritime and Indian Ocean history. |
Subject areas
Education and learning · Society, community and welfare · Health and wellbeing · Governance, economy and livelihoods · Politics, law and the state · Culture, media and the arts · Environment and natural resources · Languages and textual traditions · History, archaeology and heritage.
What each one covers is set out in the table on this page.
Language
English. All articles, reviews and correspondence are in English.
Frequency
At least two issues a year and at most twelve. An issue is published when five or more accepted articles are ready and the volume is of a sensible length — not on a calendar date with whatever happens to be in hand.